SAM & MAX'S DEBUT HIT!

"Solving this case is up to you! You direct the actions of Sam & Max, tearing down the road with mayhem on their minds and Corn Duds™ on their breath, on a peril-fraught mission to make the world safe for Sasquatches and sentient mammals everywhere!"- Publicity blurb for Hit The Road.

Sam & Max's snappy pixelart walk cycles

Sam & Max: Hit The Road! was developed and released in 1993 for MS-DOS by Lucasarts, and was Sam & Max's first delve into the video games medium. In the game, the player directs Sam around, interacting with the world around him and using Max as a tool for their gain. The game uses pixel art for it's graphics, and features the vocal talents of Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson.

Max retrieves the instructions

The game had been created using the new SCUMM engine engineered by Lucasarts, following many works between Steve Purcell and them, such as artwork, and a few Sam & Max comics for their quarterly newsletter. The original dark humor of the early comics was maintained in the game, which was a suprise to Steve Purcell, who expected it to be more stripped back, so the game could be a bit more tame and marketable.

Box for the game, notice the warnings

The game was a hit with many audiences, but unfortunately, soon after Lucasarts stopped their adventure games department. Of course, before this there was one other cancelled Sam & Max game, but that's detailed in the Cancelled games section, as well as the game cancelled by this department's shutdown. Lucasarts would later be purchased by Disney, and run into the ground for that sweet, sweet Star Wars money

theyre just chillin

In the original On The Road comic there was a small board game printed into the magazine, image is linked here, it seems simple enough, but my colored images are very poor quality, not good enough to print. If you want, you can print it out yourself! It was re-released as a part of the HTR Limited Run collector's edition much much later on.

Disk art for Hit The Road

The game was based on a comic Steve Purcell made called, get this, "Sam & Max: On The Road.". The comic was baased on many places Steve Purcell visited as a kid and found dissapointing or misleading. An example would be Frog Rock, which Steve remembers thinking didn't even look like a frog. The Snuckey's chain is played in reference to the "Stuckey's" chain of gas stations Steve would commonly visit on family road trips as a child. You can read it here.