Music Monday: You Crack Me Up, Little Buddy

If you’ve been around the site for a while, you’ve likely run into Jon and Pete’s Good Cop/Bad Cop reviews of the recent season of Telltale Games’ Sam and Max series. However, that’s not the series we’re talking about today, not really. Originally a comic conceived by Steve Purcell, Sam and Max: Freelance Police was published in 1987, with a graphic adventure game, Sam & Max Hit the Road published by LucasArts in 1993 (Purcell had since been hired by LucasArts; he now works with the good folks at Pixar). While LucasArts’ flagship adventure game is certainly the Monkey Island series, Sam and Max is arguably their second best-known.

And why wouldn’t it be? The exploits of an anthropomorphic private investigator duo? Sam the straight dog to Max’s insane lagomorph? An unlikely pair investigating the local carnival – and later spanning North America – in search of a missing bigfoot and giraffe-necked girl? This is the stuff hit games are made of. Or, at least, was. In the early 90s. In any event, Sam & Max Hit the Road was popular enough for Telltale Games to snatch up the license at their first chance and create acclaimed episodic seasons.

Oh. And the jazzy soundtrack’s pretty fun, too, and was composed by LucasArts composers Clint Bajakian, Michael Land, and Peter McConnell, the trio behind most of the company’s graphic adventure scores.

Pleasantly Understated Credit Sequence

Another Idiotic and Baffling Assignment

The World’s Largest Ball of Twine

Virtual Reality or the Tale of Brave Sir Sam