Sam & Max Hit the Road
A deadpan dog detective in a suit and his "hyperkinetic rabbity thing" partner road-trip across America's tackiest tourist traps chasing an escaped carnival bigfoot. LucasArts' 1993 point-and-click classic was sharp, absurd, and voiced by the actual voice of Disney's Goofy.
Sam & Max Hit the Road arrived in November 1993 for MS-DOS, built on LucasArts' SCUMM engine with the studio's iMUSE music system — but its soul came from somewhere scrappier. Sam and Max were Steve Purcell's indie comic creations, born in 1987: the Freelance Police, a laconic canine shamus and his manic lagomorph sidekick. The game drew on Purcell's 1989 comic "On the Road" and was designed by Sean Clark, Michael Stemmle, Purcell himself, and Collette Michaud.
The plot was pure Americana fever dream: Bruno, a frozen bigfoot, escapes from a carnival along with Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl, sending the duo careening through the country's most gloriously tacky roadside attractions. The CD-ROM "talkie" version gave the pair voices — Bill Farmer, the longtime voice of Disney's Goofy, deadpanning as Sam, with Nick Jameson as the gleefully unhinged Max — and the writing never once talked down to the player: dense, weird, quotable, and funnier than most things on television at the time.
It became a cult classic of exactly the sort people defend with their lives. After LucasArts' license lapsed in 2005, Telltale Games revived the Freelance Police with episodic adventures starting in October 2006 — but the 1993 original remains the purest hit of Purcell's anarchic duo, and one of the high-water marks of the golden age of point-and-click adventures.
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