Telltale talks Sam & Max Season 3

Ben Hardwidge
28 May 2009

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SAM & MAX was the flagship franchise for Telltale games when it formed from the ashes of LucasArts’ abandoned adventure game division, but it’s now been a year since the straight-talking, dog and razor-toothed rabbit embarked on a crime-busting adventure. However, fans of the inventory-wielding duo will be pleased to know that Sam & Max Season 3 is very much in production, and Telltale also has some changes in store for the game’s control system.

We caught up with Telltale’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Kevin Bruner, yesterday, who revealed that the game is “in the design phases right now.” According to Bruner, the team has already “got the season pretty much sketched out at this point,” and has also planned “some of the new gameplay shtick.”

“We’re very excited to get back to Sam & Max,” said Bruner. “We did some other things for a while, but we absolutely love Sam & Max.” Despite Sam & Max’s recent silence, the guys at Telltale have kept themselves very busy over the last year. Not only has Telltale released five episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People on both the PC and Wii, but it’s also developed Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures for both the PC and the Xbox 360.

The latter required the development of a slightly new control system that would work well on a gamepad as well as a keyboard. As such, there’s no cursor, and Bruner says that Season 3 of Sam & Max is also going to feature similar changes. “We’re definitely trying to evolve Sam & Max,” says Bruner. “We’re not reinventing it or anything, but some of the ideas for the way the game works are really exciting.”

Don’t despair if you’re a fan of old-fashioned point-and-click adventures, though, as the team is still very much committed to retaining the feel of the original adventures. “It’s still point and click in the most abstract sense,” said Bruner, “So it’ll still feel very much like a point-and-click adventure game with puzzles and all of that. You might drive the character around as you do in Wallace & Gromit, but it’s also arguable whether Wallace & Gromit is a point and click game.”

However, Bruner is very conscious of the delicate balance needed to stop controls becoming clunky when it comes to adventure games. “I was the systems engineer on Grim Fandango,” he said, “so I made those hated controls.”

Explaining the need for a new control system, Bruner said, “We’ve made a lot of point-and-click games, and we’re trying to evolve that. That was a big challenge for Wallace & Gromit on the Xbox, because the Wii functionally has a cursor, so that was the first game where we didn’t have a pointer at all. We wanted a game that felt like a point-and-click game, that people would identify as a point and click game, but didn’t have a cursor."

Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures went live on the Xbox Live! Arcade yesterday, and Bruner says that there’s going to be more adventure gaming fun coming to Xbox 360 owners too. “Sam & Max Season 1 and 2 are coming to Xbox,” says Bruner, although no release dates have been decided yet.

It also looks as though Telltale has another series in the works. Bruner alluded to an “awful big announcement” that’s set to be revealed on 1 June at E3. Bruner simply said: “It’s a new series that I think everyone will enjoy.” µ