Sam & Max license gets a new loving home
Posted by inpheaux on September 15th, 2005 at 9:59 am
Brace yourselves. This story is proof that here in the amazing dystopic world of 2005, where nothing truly wonderful and good and just never seems to occur, sometimes if you hope just enough everything turns out right.
It's been over a year since Sam & Max's expectedly-triumphant return was cancelled by Lucasarts. Everyone was horribly disappointed by this. Steve Purcell - creator of Sam & Max - was disappointed, fans were disappointed, non-fans were disappointed, Lucasarts employees were disappointed. Everyone. A large portion of the dev team working on the game at the time left Lucasarts because of this to form Telltale Games, which effectively cemented the fact that the adventure game genre is officially dead at Lucasarts, because now there is NO ONE left to make them.
And then, the license went into limbo. There were rumors that it was being picked up, but . . nothing really solid.
Now things are solid. Rights to the Sam & Max license have officially been secured by Telltale Games, and what's best is that Steve Purcell is going to actually be involved with the project.
An important thing to note is that they will NOT be releasing Sam & Max Freelance Police, the game that was cancelled. Telltale don't have rights to that. They plan on using the license to develop an all-new episodic series of adventure games much like what they're doing with the Bone games. So if you want a bit of a sneak peak at what we'll probably be getting with new Sam & Max games, check out Bone Episode 1 when it's released. It'll be like that, but with Sam & Max.
So there's our first amazingly unbelievably good news of the day. A sorely underused and abused license gets picked up by a group that deserves it. Now lets hope the theoretical Nintendo news later tonight is just as good.
Update: looks like the first episode of Bone was just released, and Telltale's website was completely overhauled. I swear it didn't look like this when I wrote the article a few hours ago, but that's good, because it looks great now. A demo for Bone is also available, so if you just care about seeing what Telltale can churn out without coughing up cash, now you can!
Source: Adventure Gamers
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