Sam & Max: Save The World (Season 1) is remastered and available on modern Windows machines and the Nintendo Switch.
If you had the game via Steam from the original release, the remaster is 50% off automatically. If you bought directly from Telltale’s store all these years ago, there’s special instructions to do before Dec 31st, but you’ll be able to convert the old version to Steam and get the deal.
How the Remaster Came to Be
When my former employer imploded, where the IP will landed was an open question. All the games Telltale made are various degrees of licensed IP. The games themselves are an IP commodity, but you need to renegotiate rights with the original IP holders to go beyond the original agreement. The fate of some games were known (Walking Dead went back to SkyBound), but others were an open question for a while.
In the case of Sam & Max, some of my former coworkers and Steve Purcell pooled resources together to obtain the IP rights to all three seasons of Sam & Max. Their holding company, Skunkape, is the LLC entity that they do business as in regards to the games.
Skunkape is purpose built to be the stewardship for the three seasons of the Telltale series. It’s not involved with the new VR game, nor is it going to make new Sam & Max or any other game under the Skunkape label. And honestly, that’s refreshing. An employee owned company focused only about preservation of a series of games; spinning up and down as needed. Perfect!
Missing an Old Friend
I fell in love with Sam & Max: Hit the Road around 1993-4. The LucasArts title became one of the three games that convinced me to work in video games (the others are Myst and the Tex Murphy Series). I hold these characters very close to my heart and have the privilege to work with this IP in my video game career.
My start at Telltale was a week after the last season one episode released. While I missed working on principal development, I would go on to work on every release after the initial episodic releases. This includes the DVD mastering, the Wii and Xbox 360 port, and localizations in Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Russian. The retail DVD of Season 1 was my first professional video game release in my career.
Parts of me wish I was involved in the remaster. Not for a path to reenter the game industry, but to work with the old code and assets. Revisit the happier memories working on this game. To put my hand in as I have done for every other release and platform of this game. Maybe even remaster the Xbox 360 theme into a macOS dynamic background.
But I do not hold ill will or other foolish notions towards my former coworkers about it. The number of people needed to do a remaster is very small, and the bulk of the required work is not my expertise to begin with. If I was included, what about my other coworkers? That gets way too crowded, and fast.
I’m very happy to have the game available and positioned to live beyond the business entity that created it. My name is still in the credits will continue, despite all that’s happened through the years. That’s the happy thought for me.
Streaming the Game
I’m considering streaming a playthrough of the game on my Twitch channel. If curious, follow me and hopefully you’ll be notified.
Don’t know if I have too much to offer on behind the scenes stuff, but maybe I’ll remember a few things playing though the episodes. The real question is if I remember the walkthrough after all these years…