Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 366: Sam & Max Save the World

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

It's finally happened: a game once covered as a new release by this very podcast is now officially retro! And that game is Sam & Max Save the World, the 2006-2007 episodic release that brought about the grand return of Sam and Max 13 years after their original video game outing. Now, 15 more years have passed, and while Telltale has since dissolved, former members of the company scooped up the rights and released a spiffy new remastered version. On this episode of Retronauts, join host Bob Mackey as he grills Skunkape Games' Jake Rodkin and Dan Connors about the rabbit and dog duo's newly refurbished adventures. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and today's topic is Sam and Max Save the World. The first season of the Sal-N-Mack's Telltale series has recently been re-released, and we're going to talk to two very special people on this podcast. Jake Rodkin and Dan Connors of, is it Skunkap games or Skuncape games? I choose Schooncape, but yes, they are the publishers and developers of this new remaster of Sam and Max,

and I am proud to announce that officially retronauts this podcast, we have lapped ourselves because almost 15 years ago in October of 2006, our fourth episode of this podcast, which I was not on yet, but the fourth episode of the podcast was a Sam and Max episode in anticipation of this new Sam and Max telltale series. Well, now 15 years later, it's officially retro, so I'm happy to announce that we have lapped ourselves. So yes, before I go on any further, today joining us are Dan Connors and Jake Rockies. Rodkin, formerly of Telltale Games.

Please say hello to our audience, everybody. Hello, everybody. And, yeah, I recently played through the Sam and Max remastered edition. It's great. It's out on PC and Switch. I fully recommend it. I'm not being paid by these gentlemen, but I did really enjoy my time with these games. The second time I played through them, I played through the original release is way back in the day.

But, yeah, before we talk about this remaster, I do want to talk a bit about the early days that you guys experienced, both at Lucas Arts and at Telltale. And I want to know from each of you how you came to work or perhaps co-create Telltale games. And I'll start with Dan. Dan, and what is your story of how you came to be at Telltale? Well, it all started at LucasArts. I got a job working on Day of the Tenicle in the test pit, the famous, the legendary LucasArts test pit with the captain trips and the whole. adventure games team there. So I met Dave Grossman and Tim and immediately started working on

on Dot. And yeah, just kind of got the fever there for working in the video game industry and learning about adventure games and storytelling and games. And, you know, it was a magical time at Lucas. It was super creative. I don't think there was anything more creative than those early adventure games like Monkey and Dot. And then, of course, Sam and Mass. I was the lead tester on Sam and Max and work with Mike Stembley and Sean Clark. And then I kind of moved over to running the QA department and eventually went into production and start doing Star Wars stuff like Dark Forces, X winning tie fighter, which was awesome. And then did and then moved back to doing adventure games with with Sam and Maxx. freelance police, which was the one that eventually didn't make it, when they canceled

Sam and Max freelance police and said, hey, everybody, it's time to work on Star Wars, because we're not going to be doing original titles anymore for a while. We, me and Kevin Bruner left and founded Telltale and started working on that. And there was a lot of good momentum there with Steve, because we've been working with him on the freelance police project. But so he was pretty quick to sign the, um, the license over to us. And, uh, we, we started working with the tool on bone with Jeff Smith. And, uh, and that was an amazing experience. And, and I think Jake joined us somewhere at

the very, very beginning phases. Um, and when we told him and we were starting to work on Sam and Max, I, Jake seemed to have to fill in whether he was on the bone stuff. Um, but yeah, we met Jake came on board soon as we started. and started forming a lot of what we were able to do with the Sam and Max franchise. Yeah, and Jake, you were, you started as a fan in some of the earliest LucasArts fan communities. Can you talk about that? Things like International House of Mojo and Adventure gamers. Yeah, sure. When Dan was working on Dave the Tenicle and Sam and Max and all those Star Wars games, I was in junior high and high school. And especially in high school in the late 90s,

I think I've probably talked about it in these terms before, but I feel like in the early days of the World Wide Web, often the community that you would get stuck in or that you would find yourself in was very related to. The first thing you would ever type into a search engine, and I think that the first thing I typed into a search engine when I got on the web was the secret of Monkey Island, and then I ended up finding websites like the Monkey Island Scum Bar and Mix and Mojo.

And I really just, I don't know, I found people who liked the same stuff that I did in games, And as a result, I ended up getting pulled into the game fan site community, which turned into kind of amateur journalism, which turned very briefly into being paid to write about video games. But it was all sort of covering adventure games and narrative games and especially LucasArts stuff. I ran a Sam and Max fan site as well called the unofficial Sam and Max website, which was, I think it's the original URL was something like Seren Max. DIRF dot to Sam and Max back when that sort of thing was cool. And through working on that, I ended up learning that Steve Purcell, the creator of Sam and Max actually lived in my hometown.

I grew up in just north of San Francisco and that he frequented our local comic book shop, which I found out because they had a bunch of Sam and Max convention detritus there for sale that Steve had clearly showed up and just dumped. And as a result of that, I ended up meeting Steve. I think that I first met Dan and Kevin and the early, early telltale folks at an E3 sometime around then in the sort of early 2000s. I remember going there to meet them to talk to them for adventure gamers, I think, and they were sitting in the lobby with a laptop that had a sign next to it that said, we'll make adventure games for food, which was a really good, a really good intro to those guys. and we hit it off pretty well but they were a very, very new startup

running super, super lean and then eventually I think right when they were ramping up to start pre-production on Sam and Max which coincided with the end of the second Bone episode it seemed like they were they were starting to look for people to do community work and website work PR type of things

and I remember both me and Emily Morganti who was another writer at adventure gamers both had been talking to Telltale a lot, and we both actually applied for the same job as we found out by, like, talking to each other in the middle of the night on some forum. And then fortunately, Teltale ended up hiring both of us, and then we, along with another guy named Doug Tobacco, who was a web programmer in the fan community, ended up becoming Teltails, I guess, sort of version 1.0 community and PR team. So, yeah, that's how I got my foot in

the door at Telltale. And then over the years there, I moved from doing web design to some user interface design to some game design. And then finally, by Salmon Max season three in, what is it, 2010, 2011, they let me direct a couple episodes. And then I ended up actually being able to do game design and direction at Telltale. And we talked about International House of Mojo. That was one of the sites you were affiliated with. And unlike a lot of the fan sites from that era, that site is still around shockingly. Yes. I recently, as of a few days ago, they recently published this amazing history of SammX to the unreleased game that really did an amazing job of going over just the different phases of the company LucasArts went through. And Dan, I know you were there from the early

90s. What was your experience seeing the focus change from adventure games to just becoming a Star Wars factory? That's definitely what was going on at the time. Well, you know, Star Wars was always kind of the thing that was floating out there, you know, there was a bunch of people that started the game, the game division as kind of autores and programmers and people who wanted to create interesting computer games for people that loved, that loved computers in PC. So they were difficult, they were hard to figure out, they were kind of obtuse, but they were also, you know, had that, that wild spirit of just you can create anything, anything you want it to be. can be.

That kind of changed a little bit when we did Rebel Assault CD-ROM. CD-ROM is kind of a dated term, but I remember when we did Rebel Assault, we kind of hit that video level where it was like playing the movie. And I remember it was on 90210, which was a TV series at the time. And they mentioned it. So that was kind of the point where not only did, that video games kind of made it to the mainstream in a real way from from the PC to the mainstream and uh you know star was was always sitting there as a temptation but george wasn't really didn't really want the games

division to go that way um but at some point it was like the the the money was just too attractive and of course um larry was doing x-wing and tie fighter which which were the best games of the time really they were like game of the year they were like the um you know they were like the best games of that error along with the adventure games. So, you know, it was looming there. And as long as it was PC, we were in pretty good shape because we were the best PC developer in the world at that time, I think. But once it became console, then there were all these new challenges.

And once it came, the team started getting bigger and the amount of assets that needed to be created to, to compete and to you know to go up against the other the other games that were out there that it was you know it became harder and harder for us to produce so a lot of the creative spark that we had in the early going that was that was we can build anything we want and we'll figure it out and we'll make it the best that became we can do whatever we want and then the cost of it became so expensive because we couldn't pull it back together as easily as we could in the earlier days.

Also because the fighting mechanics and the saber mechanics and all that stuff was a lot more complicated than puzzle game mechanics. So, you know, it was a difficult challenge and we were really, really confident going in that we could figure anything out. And sadly, the console market was too expensive for us to just figure out. and that's when people got kind of discouraged and started to leave. But you could never sit in a marketing meeting and hear someone say, oh, I think the next Monkey Island is going to sell 2 million units,

but you would hear people say that about if we do rebel assault again. So Jake, what was the fan culture like at this time? I remember being on those websites and being very jaded and frightened about the future of adventure games as a whole. I kind of want to set the context as to how almost seemingly miraculous it was to have these new episodic games in our life around the time of their original release. For sure. It's funny looking back at, you know, Grim Fandango came out in 1998 and then after that it felt like they're in the fan community and in sort of the online press at the time. It felt like there was this just like infinite doldrums of adventure games are dead, point and click

is dead. Everyone wants action games. And then it, it, it, it, You know, I mean, when you look back, it's like, oh, well, the longest journey came out right after that. And then it wasn't that long until other things happened. But at the time in the game community or in the adventure game in LucasArts community, it was pretty despondent, I would say. So when LucasArts announced freelance police in 2003, and it had been, you know, a few years since they'd done anything. And that game at the time was, I think, the first real-time 3D point-and-click adventure game that LucasArts had done. And it was, you know, Sam and Max had not been around since 1993. So it was a decade since those characters had come back after a few false starts at

sequels and other places. And it was this, it was very easy, I think, for the, for the adventure game community to really rally around Sam and Max freelance police in 2003. And then when LucasArts announced that it was canceled, it was like, okay, there's nothing, there's nothing left to be excited about at all as fan community. So then again, again, again, when Telltale said, you know, we're the people who were making Salmon Max freelance police and we started Telltale and they shipped Telltale Texas Holden. They shipped the Bone Games, which were all fun and cool. But I think that what people had kind of been hoping for in the back of their heads was that Telltale was going to announce. Now we're going to make Salmon Max. So when Telltale announced that, it was hugely exciting. I didn't, I wasn't working at Telltale yet when they announced it. And I had no idea what. to expect from those games, but it was like, uh, the like the dopamine rush of that news was real for me for sure after after that sort of a couple years of hang time, after what seemed like

infinity hang time after after quote unquote adventure games were killed a few years previous. And some things I wanted to talk about on this podcast where, you know, 2006 doesn't seem that long ago, but it actually was, if you think about the gaming ecosystem, Sam and Max saved the world, were coming into in that games at the time were viewed as I buy a box at a store there's a game inside and I put it in my PC these were some of the first digital download games I can remember

buying and even at the time it seems like 2006 we were like yes it's the future right but at the time people were very skeptical like oh I download this game but I don't really own it or what if I what if my computer dies there were so many questions it was a very different time and episodic games were an idea

that seemed like very viable for a while, but really TellTale was the one company that ran with the idea when Half Life and Sin, and I think that's all I can remember from that era, or the only other attempts at that kind of a format. Yeah, I remember the uncertainty thing being a big deal to the point that we ended up saying, if you buy the first season of Sam and Max from Telltale's website, we promise that we will press it to a DVD and mail it to you if you want it for the cost of buying the season past just to assure. people like we will finish this you can still get it on a disc now the only people who want it on a disc are physical edition collectors i think as opposed to back then it was like if it's not on a disc i don't know if i had actually purchased it that that mindset is is is gone now it seems like that is true i believe if you paid for the whole season up front you got the the the disc i do have the first two seasons on DVD because of that nice and whoever kept track of the records did an amazing job because for a period of time after the launch of the remastered version, you could

prove that you had the telltale versions and get a certain like half off on Steam. And for however reason it happened, they had my records on file. Yeah, we were happy to discover that all of that information still existed and that we were able to get just enough of it to let people log in and get that upgrade. I'm glad somebody kept up with that. But I really want to know, going back to 2006, what the development of these games was like because again this is 2006 I think most people wouldn't really be tapped into the idea of downloadable indie games

for a few more years the ecosystem was different and this kind of development was very different what was the development of these original six episodes like from the developer's perspective well it was it was interesting because it was we were getting in this notion

of closing products almost monthly close to monthly because the game tap deal it had that game tap component where they released a month before us um so we had delivery dates for them and then um and then we'd release on our website about a month later i think or there was some kind of some kind of blackout period that was part of the deal um that was part of the co-production deal that was helping us get the financing I think it was a two-week, two-week exclusivity window. Yeah, there was, there was, we would deliver to them, they would prep it, get it up, and then we would launch like two weeks later.

So we had a little bit of time after Game Tap had it with ourselves to kind of prep. And actually that time was a little bit, that was, that time went away as Telltale got older and it was like the minute it's done, put it out the door. But it was, it was regimented. And the thing about the thing about it that we were trying to do was trying to set up like a sitcom type of experience where once we built the first episode out there'd be assets, there'd be characters, there'd be things that we could use. So it would be building a bank of assets and then putting those assets together in new stories. And a lot of the work in that

time too was we were working on the tools that Kevin Bruner had made, the chore tool, which which enabled us to edit a lot of the script, edit a lot after the script was delivered. So kind of the secret sauce of telltale was that you could get timing and you could get shots right and you could adjust and make beats and jokes and moments work really well. That was really what we focused on. We had to get a balance of having a critical mass of assets, the voice, and then the right people in place who knew how to use the tool. to be able to put that all together and have it not be too compressed.

But there was this element of being able to tweak anything right up until the last few days that enabled it to make beats work and make things work really well, but also kind of had us sometimes just, you know, tweaking, over tweaking a little bit, but it was still, that was what we were learning how to balance all that out. When Dan says chore tool, that is C-H-O-R-E, which is short for choreography, the choreography tool was a sort of basically, I think, one of the most central components of the telltale workflow where writers could write a script in sort of, there's a separate interactive dialogue tool that would let you manage how

conversations would branch and how dialogue choices would work and what would happen when players click on different objects in the scene, but then for every little cluster of dialogue that the writers would write, the tool would churn out a choreography file or a chore file that had all the lines of dialogue with sort of default programmatic timing, where you know, every line follows one after the other in the way that you would expect a computer to do it. But if you opened up one of those chore files in the chore editor, it would basically look like you were in like Flash or Premiere or, you know, some timeline-based editor where it would populate a bunch of animations and poses for the characters based on mood tags that the

writers had put in, and then the voice and lip sync data would be in there as well. And then if you were a choreographer or a cinematic artist, your job was basically to go in and like Dan said, do editing of camera cuts, joke timing, acting performance. And you could sort of start with the thing that it programmatically built and then push things around. And then I think as people got better and better at it, and as the detail level went up, people would start just deleting the automatic things that the tool populated with. and basically do character acting and character performance entirely inside of this

choreography tool, sort of taking all the animations that the animation team made and then mix and match them into these bespoke performances per line. It was a pretty cool pipeline. And like Dan said, it let you iterate and iterate and iterate very fast, especially once we got a bigger and bigger team of choreographers who were super quick with this tool, to the point that you really did have to pry people's fingers off the keyboard at the last second because you could be working, you could just be messing with every piece of the sort of what's coming out of the screen up until the last second. It's a cool pipeline. It's fun to be back in it

a little bit right now. At this, at that point in its life cycle, with the tools still being a little bit technical and still kind of programery, we were really blessed to have Brendan Ferguson as the kind of lead designer director because he's hilarious and he was a good writer. But he, he was also a programmer. You know, so he was like one of those golden unicorn types. And at the end of the project, as he was coming down and he was doing the timing on the gags, he had the best laugh in the world. And you just hear him over there making himself laugh as he pulled the gags together.

And we just knew, you know, at that point that it was going to be, we were coming down at the end and it was going to be good. And Dan, you mentioned Game Tap earlier and only through going over the materials associated with this game, did I realize like, oh, yeah, this. This was a Game Tap exclusive, and I think we need to explain Game Tap to our listeners, because it maybe was around for a year, but it feels like it barely existed, and it was this head-of-its-time thing, and I believe it was owned by Turner, and essentially it was Netflix for games, mostly retro stuff, a big stuff like Street Fighter and Dig-Dug, and there was a huge ad campaign, and for some reason there were new episodes of Space Ghost Coast to Coast on it as well, so it was not just video games, it was also entertainment, but it was a PC-only, not streaming, but just kind of a game. It was a stream of games, but not necessarily like you're streaming a video of it. Yeah, it was kind of early stages. They had some early stage streaming technology, but it was it was downloads of, and I think

they had, what did they used to call that? It was the meme technology that used to have all of the old, all of the old arcade games in it. It was a lot of maim and emulation. A lot of Maine. If you were subscribed to Game Tap, you could download locally a ton of old games. I think that their attitude was like with Cartoon Network, you know, Turner Broadcasting either owned or owned or owned the rights to a ton of back catalog stuff. They had all the Hannah-Barbara stuff.

I think they had the rights to play Looney Tunes on TV, and they thought, okay, we have all this stuff instead of packaging it up in little network program and little like hour-long blocks on TBS, we should just do a whole network. And I think with GameTap, their idea was, well, Cartoon Network worked for huge back catalogs of cartoons. Maybe we can do a thing like that for video games where if people subscribe, they can play a bunch of Atari and Sega games. and then I think that they saw Sam and Max as potentially like their space ghost coast coast in cartoon network analogy where okay we've got this back catalog then we should have original content on top of it it's it's honestly very similar to what streaming TV services ended up doing you know a few years later yeah and were the Mach shorts made for GameTap those original Sam and Mac shorts made with the telltale tools yes okay I thought so game tab thing yeah game taps short with us GameTap was looking

for a way to get subscribers to come back. So they really like, when we pitched it to them, it was about the episodic model. So why would I sign up for a Game Tap subscription well so I can get the next Salmon Max? And they were really into the idea of how do we keep people engaged in the time between. So we pitched the machine of the stuff as well.

And, yeah, and they brought it on. So we were one of their lead, lead new titles, new content. And I think Jake's exactly right. They were looking at what they had done with like the old westerns on their classic movie channel and thought they could take the games and put the right interface around them

and the right user experience them and introduce them to the mainstream audience. You know, that's the theme that kind of, if you look back in like, from like 93 to 2012 even, the idea of bringing games to the mainstream audience was always the challenge that the new media companies were always kind of championing. And there was always a problem they wanted to solve.

So we always pitch telltale as someone that helps solve that problem, usually through storytelling and franchises. But, yeah, Game Tap, that was definitely what they were about. And I want to go back to the development of the original games very quickly here. So I feel like having played all of these every season, the first one, the games quickly changed in the second and third season in some big ways. And I want to know what lessons were learned from the development of this first season that were seen in the later episodes in the season two and three that would follow. Well, it's funny because I go back and when I play season one, I see the thing that was like the problem. We were always, always trying to solve, or at least I always had in my head that we needed to solve, which was like you get the big mission from the commissioner.

And he says, there's this huge thing. And now we need to save the world. And then the game would just kind of stop. And you'd start, you get taken out of the forward momentum of the gameplay experience and you get pulled back into the walk around and puzzle solving, which from an adventure game, perspective is the way old school, the way that the adventure game mechanic works. I think by the time we got to season three, we were starting to experiment with, with stuff that kind of propelled you into the next scene or kind of move the player along. That was, that was for me, if I look at the evolution of telltale towards Walking Dead. That's like by season three of Sam and Max, I see

us using Sima Max as a place to do some of that. But a lot of the other stuff was just about, more talent, us building the team up getting more talent, getting Jake involved, getting other people involved in the project that just brought more and more levels of talent and just more good people. And Steve's, I love Sam and Max because the license just begs talent to be as inspired and creative as they can be. And it's very attractive to people to come in and work on. So everything was getting better about the company. Our reach was, our distribution was, was increasing. The amount we could spend was increasing, building, writing new stories, getting more choreographers. This was all happening at the same time. So, you know, that was all

going into the product and being done through the product. Yeah, these remastered versions, they do a lot to dress up the original versions, but I feel like they still, even though they're worth playing, you can still see a company learning how to do this, a company with, you know, different production schedules where I totally forgot about these games, but every episode. There's at least one puzzle involving Boscos, the office, and Sybils. And I don't think that was done as often in the future. It felt like the games were less modular in that way. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I know from talking with Dave and Brendan when they were working on that season and when we were transitioning into seasons two and three, with the first

Sam and Macs season and it being the first big swing at an episodic adventure game, I think people didn't entirely know how to calibrate those things and you know it was thought thought about very much in terms of what if this is the video game version of a sitcom where every episode all of the supporting characters have their own b arc that sort of ties into the a arc but but every single time it's like oh bosco needs his his story for the wacky shenanigan that he's up to sybil needs to be up to something what are what's jimmy two teeth up to in sammy max's rat hole And I think with season two, they looked back at that and said, you know, it's good to have some of that, but it's probably better if those secondary character arcs actually either weave in and out of an episode where maybe some episodes, they wouldn't be involved in the story and some episodes they would, or taking their arcs and making them two or three episodes long, where Bosco is on the hunt for someone who's broken into his store. And then that doesn't resolve for two or three weeks. I think that was, that was definitely a lesson learned.

I think the other one was do players see the season as one big game or do they see the episodes as self-contained games? And I think where that division happened was another discovery where people's, the writers I think early on had all of the look at lines in Samu Max's office and the street and, you know, a lot of the recurring locations, they were the same across many episodes in early season one. And I think the rationale for that was, well, Sam and Max didn't change what they said about the window looking out of their office in Sam and Max at the road, whether you were 30 minutes into that game or seven hours into that game. The dialogue wouldn't

change. Whereas that's, I think, a thing that players thought, oh, well, if I'm getting the next episode, I should get new jokes for every single thing that I click on. And that was, I know, for the writers, they went like, leish, people are expecting us to write 13 jokes about the window. If there's 13 episodes, okay. I guess I guess we'll do that and again not being able to speak for those guys but my my memory of it was that that was also partly alleviated in in later in later seasons by just not going to every single location every single episode also meant you didn't have to write like what's funny about a gumball machine outside of a convenience store for the seventh time so that that evolution

happened over the seasons until season three I think is the one that Has basically no exact contextual repeats where in an episode, if you're in a, if you're in a location from a previous episode, you're going to be doing something different. The lighting is going to be different. The reason you're there is going to be different. I think they got more and more and more into that feeling of if we're ever showing you the same thing over again, you can trust that you're not going to be doing the same thing over again. Whereas in season one, you often were, it took many episodes across the season for the, the, the, jokes and the patterns of the episode are subverting themselves, I think. Like by the last couple episodes of season one, it feels like, oh, they are self-aware. These games do know that they've asked me to get Bosco to charge me some obscene amount for a puzzle solution. And he eventually is like, well, yeah, I'm going to keep doing it because you guys have done this five times.

You just keep giving me money. But I think we were able to move past that in the later seasons. Yeah, I did notice a lot of that because this time I played the games. I played them all back to back. Originally when I played the games, I played them within, you know, each one came out a month or two months apart from each other. So I didn't necessarily connect all the dots. But I remember playing these games in 2006, 2007, where the second it would start up, I would say, you know, oh, I'm going to look at everything in the office. I'm going to look at everything in Boscos. This time around, I just, I realized like,

oh, until maybe the fourth episode, a lot of these items have the same, you know, look at dialogue every time you click on them but you're right around episode three or four that's when the new joke start coming so it's like here's a new joke about the calendar here's a new joke about the phone or the dartboard and then you get some new props in the office later too to look at so definitely i saw it i definitely i really noticed that this time and playing through the games back to back i think that's probably because it was episode four was the one that was in production it that like it's pre-production started after we'd seen people play culture shock that's my memory is Episodes 1, 2, and 3 were all sort of in their staggered phases of production before

Culture Shot came out. Like, you know, when the first, when it premiered, we probably were already partway through production on episode 3, whereas episode 4 was the first one where we said, oh, we can actually collect data from how people are playing the games and start adapting the design from there. So that's why you suddenly get new jokes and refreshed sets and stuff in that episode. I think that's ultimately was that also end up becoming one of the. the special sauces of telltale when we really understood how to respond to what players were doing

and to really play into what they wanted. I think when we started season one, it was like we had this vision. Oh, we'll build it like a sitcom and we'll do it this way. And everything's going to be perfect because that's the best way to build it. And people understand sitcoms. And we had the whole plan worked out in our head. And then people actually played it and said, well, we're not buying into. to all these ideas that you thought were so great.

So we said, okay, let's respond to what they're saying. And the fourth episode ended up being really educated by all that. So it was almost like a second rev of the concept. And we got so good at that that we started kind of integrating that into an episode to episode. Or maybe, you know, we could respond by two episodes later from the thing that happened before and really started building that into our schedules. By season three, I think we were on our toes about that or pretty aware, Even by season two, like episodes four, episode four is so good and wraps up so many, so many things.

It's like the culmination of so many things that, that it's just we were really, we really understood it, I think, by that before. And we were talking about Steve Purcell earlier, obviously the creator of Sam and Max. He owns the right to these characters. And how much of an oversight did he have over what you were doing? I know he was probably very busy at Pixar at the time. Can you talk about his role in the development of these games? from season one he helped us kick off some of the ideas he worked closely with dave um in pulling together the uber story and brenden and uh you know i i remember the lincoln monument

the lincoln's head that whole thing came up over mexican food um and margaritas um so it was always great to have him involved and and steve just one of those guys if you can get him you want them to be involved. He does a lot of keeping the characters. And Jay can talk to this, but he does a lot of keeping the characters on point, like making sure that they're drawn correctly and making sure that new characters have the right feel and flavor.

I think there are two things he told us not to do. And one of them had to do with a lactating max. And I can't remember the second, but it was worse. I remember one that was not worse, but bummed me. out as a Salmon Max fan, even though I understand it, which was that in season two of Sam and Max, spoilers for season two of Sam and Max, which I guess is a 12-year-old spoiler, so it's fine.

Mr. Spatula, Sammon Max's pet goldfish becomes evil for reasons unknown. In the very opening cutscene of season, they just look at their goldfish. Like, something's wrong with this guy. Oh, he's become evil. And then in the second episode of season two, Mr. Spatula, their goldfish, is very, very, briefly alluded to be the mastermind villain behind that episode in a way that is very strange. And it's because the original version of that, or not the original, but one one rev of that story that the writers were looking at had Mr. Spatula turn into Max Salmon, who is, you know,

Mack Salmon, Sam and Max, he in the comic books and in the, in the brief Fox Kids cartoon show is this like angry fish in a fish bowl set atop a metal body in a wheelchair that rolls into Sammax's office like some sort of Bond villain and just starts like screaming at them and monologuing about how they made him this way and he's their nemesis and they have no idea who he is the writers wanted to put a Max Salmon origin story into season two and have Mr. Spatchitla be the one who becomes him which is why if there's babies in that episode and there's chimps, which are also somehow involved in Max Salmon in the comic book. But I remember Steve said he always thought that Max Salmon, the character was funnier,

and part of the point of it worked best for him when no one has any idea where Max Salmon came from, and he didn't like the idea of telling an origin story for this character, even if the end result of it would be that Sam and Max themselves had no idea that this crazy series of plot twists had somehow created this guy who rolled into their office, whereas the players would know. I think for Steve, the players even knowing the backstory of Max Salmon was not really in line with how he saw that character. So that episode got changed right before it went into production, I think, to be the thing that it is now where Mr. Spatula stays Mr. Spatula.

But somewhere in the video games source, art data source, there's a version of Mr. Spatula who's like pumped up to be larger and more Max Salmon like an efficient. I think that the idea was that Harry Mulman's robot body that he leaves on the moon at the end of episode six would have become the body that Max Salmon rolls in on. I don't remember. I do remember that as a big Salmon Max nerd hearing that there was going to be a Mack Salmon origin story, I thought, oh, that's cool. And then Steve said, no, that's not very cool. And I had to be like, oh, yeah, that's true. It's totally not cool and not a thing that I would have wanted to see in the game.

Well, I could definitely sense his presence in the game because within the past year before we're playing these. remastered versions I had played through the first game and watched a bit of the cartoon and going into this I was expecting the the voices to be a little off not in sense of the characters speaking but in sense of what they're saying in the dialogue but it was very spot on and one thing I was kind of happy to see was that Sam and Max are always like slightly dated characters they're always kind of 20 or 30 years out of time and going into this I was expecting there's going to be some you know George W. Bush era jokes and maybe there's a few but from what I from what I played it really

feels like it could be a new release. There's very little outside of, like, a joke about the terror level or whatever. It does not feel like a 2006 written game. That's good to hear. I'm sure Dave and Brendan will be very happy to hear that. Yeah, it's cool that they kept it, like, they kept it dated back to the so dated to like the 50s or 70s or just such odd, odd, offbeat cultural references that it doesn't seem dated. It just seems offbeat.

Yeah. And one last question I wanted to ask before we talk about the remastered versions is I was entering the press at the time that these original games are coming out. And something I noticed was that the press had a kind of a difficulty in terms of how they covered episodic gaming. What did you think the reception to these games was like at the time? You know, people just loaded us up with questions. And it wasn't exactly right, but we knew from what people were asking us that we could fix what they had problems with. So, you know, in a way, you kind of, if you're doing something that is innovative, you just have to expect, if people don't hate it and don't

pan it and are interested enough to ask questions about it and questions that they're asking are like in line with the questions you're having, that's actually a helpful, good thing, and that helped form every solution that we had and help form everything that we did. So, you know, it's hard to look at it like with hurt feelings or anything, though I do think, you know, there are a lot of two short kind of things that you could. couldn't understand how short or how long it was until it was all done and it was like six or eight hours and what should the length of each episode be. I think the difficult question was a big one because we were kind of trying to make adventure games a little more accessible, you know,

to turn it from games where the really smart people could figure out to games that people could think they were smart if they figured it out. So, you know, we made changes in a lot of, we were changing a lot of things at once. And for the most part, I think people were, the core adventure game fans and people that love Sam and Max were happy that it was on, that the tone was right and that it was funny and that there was a lot of, there was a lot of obvious care being put into the product that most of, to me, most of the complaints I either agreed with or they helped to solve problems that we were contemplating our head about how do we do this anyway.

and you know that that's my memory of it yeah going back to these for the first time in a while it made me think that we really lost something with episodic gaming because as an adventure game fan it feels like this could be the ideal version of the experience because it's something that's

in your life for two to three hours there's just enough you know there's just enough things in the world to brush up against not too many to overwhelm you and it's never like punishingly hard if if you want to brute force a solution there are so few things in the world that you can eventually figure it out

compared to a larger adventure game. I just felt like this did feel like what could have been the future for the format. Well, thank you, yeah. That was, and I'm glad that people playing it now is a, we've decided to make it a single game and you can still choose to play it in episodes,

finish one, wait a little while, and play the next one so it doesn't get exhausting or frustrating, you know, but some people do like the frustration. It's true. And yeah, I don't know if I would recommend playing them back to back like I did because I think they were designed to have a little time between them, but I didn't have a bad time. I just felt like, oh, I'm back at the office again or I'm back at Boscos again. And I remember being a little more excited originally because a month had passed since I had seen my friends.

Yeah, that's awesome. The further into the later seasons you get, I think the more they become a bingeable game because like basically from the halfway point or the two-thirds point of season two through all of season three, all the episodes. and on cliffhangers, and then the next thing that happens is something new, whereas, yeah, the first season is a lot more, I guess, episodic instead of serialized. Yeah, season three is my favorite. Hopefully you will get to that at some point in the future, some sort of remaster, but I just loved how every episode is a new setting, and there are new mechanics and new characters. It just felt surprising with every new episode.

In this corner on the greenlit podcast network, Chris Sebs and Matt Wilson. And in this corner on the Greenlit podcast network, Chris Sebs and Matt Wilson. And in this quarter, VHS I is. Fusing animation and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks, movie fighters. We watch movies and beat them up. Come on, guys, we're going to be late for class. Oh, darn, not on our first day.

Don't worry. I pressurized all of our bike tires to optimal PSI for speed. Wow. So we should be able to average 9.6 miles per hour, which should get us to class on time. We love Pofford University for teaching us to skills. Kills. Podford University, iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts.

Hello, M-A-F-I-A-O-B-A-O baby. Welcome, welcome, generous friends, days and weeks and tokens to spend. We're just regular businessmen, just human me and teddy bear. Teddy bears is oodles and fun. Slots and sandwiches and poker and guns. So I want to talk, no mobsters, nary a one, with you and me and teddy bear. Not mafia, no. We're mafia free.

So I want to talk about Sam and Max Save the World remastered. And before I begin my more in-depth questions, how did this whole creation come into being? Telltale was closing its doors and there was a company been brought in to put assets on sale to try to make money to pay back creditors. or and and we knew the I knew the assets were available so I thought well you know we could do something here and I thought Jake might be interested so basically I called Jake and said hey what do you think should we should we try to secure these assets and do something with it and Jake was super positive so that motivated me to call Steve and Steve was positive so then you know I called Randy and John and both of them Randy Tudor and John

our other partners in, you know, part of the heart and soul of all things telltale. And now skunk-kabe. And everybody was into it. And we knew we could do it. You know, it was one of those things that's like,

okay, let's see what we've got. And that was kind of the next phase, was getting the drop of assets and having Jake and Randy and John really get in there and look at like, okay, how far away are we from making this all happen? And, you know, we just put a, good plan together at that point and kind of knew what what was going to be what was possible you know

one of our key theories was that we could take those old assets and move them up to the modern engine and once once randy and john really kind of and tim ingram came in and helped us with that as well on the programming side once they figured that out then it was like okay what do we where do we prioritize i think one thing that people probably rightly dinged the early telltale releases for was the visual presentation you know the the sort of renderer and lighting system that powered especially the first you know

oh man maybe even five years of telltale stuff was pretty primitive even by the standards of like contemporary games that were around it at the time and but but looking back on it and you know just first just doing a gut check of my memory of what those of what the sort of raw

actual art assets looked like and then thinking about how much the lighting technology in the Telltale Pipeline had come forward in the next 15 years it was cool to be able to look back at the original games and think okay these are a thing that

fans and the press said maybe didn't have the best graphics but secretly I think that the graphics and the style in those games might have been really good and they were just held back by kind of the last step in the engine pipeline when it came to how they were lit how they

were you know just anti-aliist or how the data was compressed. And I bet that if we go back to all of those source assets and just put great lighting on them, touch up the materials, go back to the source textures the artists originally made before they were compressed, I bet this game is going to look way nicer than people remember,

or at least it'll look like a more pleasant version of what they remember, and then they'll go back and look at the original 2006 one and go, whoa, okay, there was a big change there. It was cool to be. be able to look back and say, wow, all the artists and animators did fantastic work that was kind of held back by both just the tech at the time, sort of the limitations of really trying to be an early kind of double A indie developer. They were held back by having to try to keep the file size small for old downloads. But really, it was an awesome reminder when we first

got all those assets that, you know, all the people who were working on this thing were just top tier amazing developers who made work that then kind of got uh you know it was almost like muffled behind a bunch of other tech that got in the way and I think part of the fun for us was being able to look at all that work and like sort of get the schmutz off the screen and let the and let the voice performances in animation and environmental art actually speak for itself maybe more than it could have in the original release yeah you're totally right when I first played the remastered versions for a five or ten minutes to check them out i was like oh yeah they just made this game work at a higher resolution on my new computer that's great and then i went back to look

at a long play of the first game and then that's when i was blown away and then i read all of your notes on steam as to everything you change and i said oh my god the i the assets really hold up and you're right the final step along the way just making it work for a 2006 era computer is what was holding all of that all of those assets back yeah i mean to to be fair the the the way that we reveal that they were being held back was by completely relighting the game, changing some of the camera compositions to be better for widescreen, going back and

you know, dumpster diving through old audio files and stuff. But the intent of it was all to say like the style that the art team set, the tone that the writers set, like all of this stuff probably will punch harder and get people even more excited if we can

shine it up nice. And you have very thoroughly documented just how much you've changed I mentioned that Steam page earlier today. If you look at just the list of changes, they're fascinating to read, and there are so many things going on there. So everyone should go out and check that out if you want to see how much work was put into it. What I really want to know is how what was it like to work with this older technology?

How difficult was it to actually go in and fix things, add camera angles, add new lighting, add new voice lines and new voice actors? That's a thing that I do wish that we had Randy Tudor on for Randy Tudor is the lead gameplay programmer on the remaster of Samimax and the original Sam and Max release and many or most of Telltale's games for the entirety of its existence. Randy was sort of the frontline program around those games. But it was easier than I was expecting it to be.

I hadn't been at Telltale since 2013, I think, around the time Walking Dead Season 2 came out, whereas all the other guys were there were like the first people in the door at Telltale and the last people out the door at the end of Telltale. So those guys saw the entire arc. And I was thinking, geez, This is from 2006, and we're going to try and run it on.

We are using the version of the Telltale tool that shipped the Walking Dead final season. It was the last, like the last check-in, basically, it was the one that we got. And I was thinking, we're going to have to push this game through, you know, whatever, 13 years of code changes. This is crazy. But Randy got the gist of it up and working pretty quickly. There were some big pain points of getting the entire script and the sort of interactive dialogue stuff. converted over from the dialogue tool 1.0 to a new big rewrite that happened right around the time of season three. But other than that, a pretty janky version of the game was up and running pretty

quick. And then it was Randy and John just climbing over everything, fixing all sorts of bugs. But it was surprisingly quick that we had a version of the game with like no lighting and a lot of animation pops. And sometimes where a character would open their mouth and the completely wrong line would come out or the subtitle would say no dialogue here, but you could play through 80% of the season pretty fast, which meant at least for me. And we brought back Eric Parsons, who is a cinematic artist and director at Telltale to help us go through and clean up some of the cinematic stuff. I think for both of us, there was a little hump at the beginning of getting used to using this tool set again, but then the muscle memory comes back and you're pretty fast.

You know, I think one thing about Telltale that is cool is that just the core philosophy of how its engine should work didn't change for a huge time in its production. So most of the same paradigms were still there ready and waiting for us, assuming we could get the data into the right format and get the game scripting to be working in a way that the newer engine was expecting it to. So once that was the case, then it becomes the dangerous George Lucas situation of like, oh, wow, we do have it up and working. and we could change everything if we wanted. So then it became, you know, we'd have to go through. And when we did play-throughs, we'd have to assess this thing could be plused up. This thing could be changed. Do we think that it would help push the spirit of the original game?

Or is this a thing that maybe looking back, we wish we had done differently? Or is this just a thing that we look at now and think, ugh, that's just not good. And we could probably do better. Or like later seasons did better. Could we pull an asset back from season two or three that was a nicer, version of this. There were sort of the spectrum of choices you had to make. And then it did become more of a creative exercise than I was expecting, I think, once we got past the technical hurdles. But it always kind of felt like a swirling miasma of new technology,

old technology, new decisions, old decisions, and everyone kind of collaboratively working together to turn it into a thing that would be appealing and look new, but still feel like the old one. And what would you say, and what would you say? the bigger changes like the lighting engine. It's now a widescreen game. What would you say are the smaller changes people might not notice unless they go back to the original? Some of the things that I really liked upon looking at your notes for the update were that basically Sam and Max's character models were tweaked maybe 5%, but then going back to the original ones,

that 5% really makes a difference. And that was all based on input by Steve Purcell. Yeah, that was Steve Purcell and John Scrow, who was Telltale's technical director for its entire existence. I think John did a lot of the modeling work on the original Sam and Max, and I think when he was talking to Vice gaming, he said that they were some of the first game character models that he had paid entirely himself, I think. I don't want to get that wrong, but I think he looked at those now and went, we could do better.

So he and Steve went back and forth on that. That was an interesting problem because we wanted to get the proportions pushed to look more like the comics and, you know, more like the way people remember them from hit the road and whatnot. But you can't change the position of any bone in their body too much or it would break the hundreds of animations that the entire game is based on, which, you know, might be fine if it was just for some cinematic sequences you could correct. But because all of the telltale performances are built from pieces, you can't change that stuff too much or the everything made in the, in the choreography tool by all the cinematic artists would start going out of sync and it would

start looking like Sam had a bunch of, like Sam was. Like Sam was made of a Sam costume full of rodents or something if all of his bones are jumbling around in the wrong place but yeah Steve and John worked on those and they came out great we a lot of the smaller tweaks were closer to like places where Sam and X were in conversations with the character and all of the cameras were kind of a little closer

to maybe like your mom's vacation photos where everyone's face is right in the middle of the frame we kind of just like nudged them a little bit more into the rule of thirds or sort of fixed the focus length on some cameras to be a little bit more pleasing some of that was to adjust for widescreen and some of it was just like we know what all these same people who worked on these cinematics how they shot the games in season two and three when everyone had gotten better at churning out high quality content faster and we took some of that some of that uh just cinematic language back into the earlier parts of the season especially um the entire user interface was redone partly because this season has game pad support and partly because We just thought we could make it play more cleanly if we cleaned up the interface. I'm trying to think if there's, like, my favorite stuff that we snuck in is kind of the Star Wars special edition stuff, where we're just hidden in a few corners throughout the game are little teasers for later seasons, which totally, that was a subjective question of like, should we admit inside of the content that we know that the later seasons exist? But that's not a very pure remastering, but it seemed kind of irresistibly fun to like, on the sign for Bosco's inconvenience, we know from season two that the original proprietor of it is his mom, Mama Bosco, who we now have a character design for and we have a bunch of really great illustrations for.

So I just stuck a faded old like, you know, bodega sign style painting of her on the oning of the store hidden in shadow and kind of scraped away over the decades. Some people noticed it and they were happy. And like, great, okay, that's a fun thing to add in. It's totally anachronistic if you imagine this as a straight remaster. But it felt like, ah, the original game still exists. This is going to be, part of this is going to be fun for people who played the originals and just want to see what changed, what are they stitching together, what are they plussing up?

And to have a little forward and backward-looking Easter eggs like that was a fun little thing to add in. A lot has changed in terms of presentation. Very little has changed in terms of content, but you have changed a few things, a few lines, a few puzzles. And in one case, an entire voice actor. Can you talk about your choices you made in terms of those things? There were a few jokes that I think when we played through together, like we would play each episode two or three times in large group over the course of development. Like first, we would just fire it up to watch to see what we even had to work with. Then we'd do a mid-production check-in to see, I think.

were going and then at the end say okay uh did we do it and in those early playthroughs there were times when a character would say something and even when we were playing together on zoom you would sort of hear everyone kind of like like awkwardly coughed a little bit of silence instead of laughter and then maybe you would hear the sound of some typing and there was moments where I think it wasn't that we disliked a line exactly but I think it's closer to there were some jokes at the time that I think, how do I even say it? It's just not stuff that I would want to put in a new game for a new audience with my name on it. And that's, I guess, speaking for myself.

And I know that that gets into questions of historical preservation and whatever else. But the easiest answer was just, I don't think most people are going to miss this. I don't think new players are going to appreciate those jokes. I personally don't appreciate it at this point. and the original release we're going to keep bundling with the game and it's going to stay available forever so we're not literally doing the

like destroy all the original prints of your original work thing. It was a tough decision for us. It's not exactly a tough decision. We all looked at that and said these like tiny lines of content. It's like six or so lines like under a tenth of a percent or something

of content. but you know we all said ah we don't really want this stuff in the game but we knew people would have strong feelings about it we ourselves as you know video game fan nerd people you have feelings about the idea of preserving a work versus changing a work and you know everyone like i keep citing has went through the the saga of experiencing the star war special editions and you know you know i think the one thing that did did take work was was changing the actor and that was a hard thing to do from a from a development standpoint it wasn't easy for us to do but we thought it was we all agreed from our same perspective that it was the right thing to do um so we

so we bit the bullet and did it um and that was the way it was with with all the changes was we all felt like it was the right thing to do. And Jake has been really pushing us hard to get the old copies up so everyone knows that we have no intention of destroying any content or or getting rid of the old game. But for the new game, for the way we feel about things, if we felt like something was grown worthy and out of time and mean to a, in a kind of a bat in a way then we just we just made the choice to make the change right and we're talking about the voice actor for bosco who in the original release of the game was a white actor playing a black character and putting on a kind of stereotypical voice and you know again 2006 doesn't feel like that

long ago but it was 15 years ago and in that time we've had conversations about you know characters like a poo on the simpsons and only in recent in the last few years have we been casting animated characters appropriately. So that has a lot of different baggage now than it did in 2006. And these were not really conversations that were being had in the mainstream at that time. But you guys are right. The original versions are available. And in the notes on Steam, all the notes about the changes, you were very upfront about

this line was changed. Here's why we changed it. Here's the replacement line. There was no, like, you know, behind the scenes tinkering that you're not being up front about. What was it like working with someone voicing a game, responding? to characters who had their lines recorded so long ago, how long did it take him to get it or get into it? You know, it didn't actually take him that long to get into it. And part of that

was because of the work of Bay Area Sound, which is just a two-person company, it's Julian Kwasnowski, who's a guy from the LucasArts Sound Department back in the day, and Jared Emerson Johnson, who writes and performs a lot of the music in Tell Tell Games. They, they handled the voice session for this. And in the session, the way that they had had it set up was they had all of the feeder lines and the follow-up lines just set up to digitally play in the booth so that even though the lines were ancient, we were able to have OG Banks, the new voice actor for Bosco, just act against all of it in context. And he ended up picking it up really, really quickly, which was great. It was weird being in a voice session for Sam and Max,

especially for me being in a voice session for Sam and Max season one, because that was not a thing that I did on season one. I was in some of the season three voice sessions. But so in that way it was surreal to be like, oh, I remember this joke. And I remember how the old lion read was said and then having to make myself not

push OG to just read it exactly the way that I wanted it to be heard because I've been listening to that same line read for 15 years. But he fell into it really quickly and a lot of that. I credit both to just him being a great actor and to the sort of technical work for the remote studio

set up that Bay Area Sound did that let us just run it as if the other actors were there reading their lines. We ultimately did actually bring OG back for a pickup session after the game shipped, which is totally crazy to think about that we did that. But I feel like part of that was on me. I think when we directed him for the very first part of the game, he just was flat and a little more naturalistic. And part of that was just, I was interested in hearing that take on his character but I don't I don't know if it made a great first impression for a re-record of a new actor so we brought him back in after having gone through the entire season with him and actually for like patch 1.0.3 we ended up updating a few dozen of his very first lines to be more energetic and

more conspiratorial and more sort of in line with I think what people's expectation of that character will be and I have to say it felt really good to do something that ridiculous for a tiny patch for a remaster of a 15 year old game to be like, okay, you know, fine. We probably could have landed this one better and OG was totally game for it and people were really happy that we did it. Were any other actors available for re-recorded lines or was it really just Bosco who had the re-recorded lines? I think it was just Bosco. There might be a couple of lines from the cops, the computer obsolescence prevention society because those characters are or at times have been voiced by Jared from Bay Area Sound Composer.

But everything else, no one else, we didn't talk to any of the other actors about doing re-records. We didn't feel like we ended up having to. So all of the rest of the game is just literally an audio remaster of the source way files from the original voice recording sessions. My last question before we wrap up here is that one thing I was surprised to see is that you folks have brought back a lot of the ancillary materials from the release of this game.

Promotional videos, machinima shorts, commentaries. Can you talk about how much of that you've restored or found and if there's still more that you're trying to put online?

Well, I'll just start by saying my favorite moments of all of it have been finding the little things that happened in the office that were just crazy things

that no other never would have been made in any other context ever and re-releasing them and having a place to put them up and expose them to people. So that's, that's been really, I've really enjoyed that.

And, you know, we do have a, we do have a lot of stuff. And Jake's, Jake's been great going through it. And there's so much, so much great marketing material. And it only gets better as the seasons go on. So, yeah, it's really cool. Some of that stuff, uh, Telltale kept on their file servers. Telltale was just as a studio, very, very good about archiving digital copies of most things. I guess part of that is because they were a digital first studio.

You know, they, there were physical. physical copies of anything didn't really exist. Even most of the artists were worked digitally for most of the production of that company and everything internally moved really quickly. So there, I think culturally was not a lot of tolerance for, oh, yeah, I left that somewhere and I didn't check it in. Most people checked everything into the servers. I personally am an exception to that.

I was very green and I'm a very sloppy person. So I did a lot of the original Samimax Machinima shorts. and one of the reasons that those aren't remastered is because I didn't check in a lot of the actual game data for it. I just kept the video files. I'm sorry, everyone. But Telltale themselves gave us a huge bulk copy of a ton of old marketing stuff.

And as one of the people who did a lot of the marketing on these games, it's been pretty easy for me to sort of sift through all of that crap and find the things I remember. also me and Doug Tobacco did the special edition collector's DVDs that we gave to people and unbeknownst to Telltale we both kept copies of the source material for those DVDs. So I had some of that myself and the parts that I didn't have Telltale still also had. So a lot of it has been just going through a ton of different redundant backups, going through the DVDs themselves, the source for the DVDs, searching our memory,

searching YouTube and a bunch of defunct websites, old YouTube channels, just even to remember what are all the things that we made and then going back and finding the highest quality versions of those and dumping them to the internet at a quality level that's as good as it can be. Most of those special features are still, were not made higher res than SD for season one because it was, you know, even YouTube was barely ADHD at that point. If it was HD. I think GameTamp was still streaming any of their content in 4x3 SD to people. So all the stuff on season one was 480P. And some of it was even interlaced. So it was, it's mostly just been collecting as much of that old video content as we can, putting it in places that will treat

SD video reasonably well and then trying to get it uploaded. I think we've hit the end of the Samimax season one videos. Although just saying that sentence I now remember that there's at least two or three that I know that I know still exists somewhere that we haven't uploaded but like Dan said we've we've got a bunch of that stuff for seasons two and three as well and we're just slowly collating it so that it's ready when we have you know when the when the games themselves are ready I think it's my hope that with the later seasons will be faster with getting the archival material up and getting the original releases of the game up instead of it's sort of slowly trickling out over months but yeah it's been fun putting

all that stuff out after the game has come out in a way because we keep surprising people with more and more things where we put out a remaster of the game and people said oh that's cool and then we put out you know five or six hours of old special features and commentary tracks and people said what you have those okay that's surprising and then we put out the free DLC of the original release

which people thought wasn't coming back for some reason but then people like whoa what okay so I don't know how many hours of special features that are still sitting on all these file servers that we inherited from telltale, but it's been fun pouring over them. I'm looking forward to seeing what else we find. People can find those at your YouTube account. It's Skunk Capé on YouTube?

It's Skunk Cape Games. Okay. Awesome. So to wrap up both of you, let us know where we can find you online. And it also sounds like there could possibly be more remastered versions. As Jake, you just mentioned things about the future seasons. Is that in the cards? Are you looking at it right now? Like, what is going on with the other two seasons of this series?

We have nothing specific to announce right now. now, but also we're working on season two. Ah, okay. I like, I like the sound of that. But outside of Sam and Max remastered, it's on Switch, it's on PC, and is there anything else either of you want to promote anything on social media, anything else you're working on? I think, as of yesterday, it was just the fifth anniversary of Firewatch, so congrats on that, Jake. Oh, thanks. No, I don't know. Check out Sam and Max. Play those games. They're great.

Do anything else you wanted to promote, Dan? I don't have anything to promote. I think I'm loving doing the Sammax stuff. And, you know, Bay Area Sound, we didn't mention that they did new music for this as well. And we're working with them to figure out how to get the music out in some interesting ways, too. So we'll have an announcement on that. But Jared wrote some new pieces for this as well, and those have been really cool. The soundtrack is available digitally right now on, on, you can buy it on Steam. You can buy it on, I think Skunkap Games has a band camp.

But, you know, people keep asking, when's it on Spotify? wins it on Apple music. Is there going to be a physical release? No, no, no, no. Or we're looking at all that stuff. But the music in Sammax has always been, like, top tier, great stuff. And, yeah, Jared brought back some of the original musicians and wrote five new tracks for season one.

And they really blend into the original season. And I think kind of elevate the entire score. So if you liked that music or if you just kind of like cartoony jazz, I really recommend checking out the soundtrack that Jared's done. If you search for Samomax Save the World. soundtrack you'll probably find a few links for it on the internet great well thank you so much to jake and dan and everyone out there please buy sam and max save the world remastered so thanks again to dan conners and jake rodkin of skuncape games or skunkie games however you want to call it

please check out sam and max save the world remastered it's great a great collection of classic now classic adventure games as for retronauts if you want to support the show and get all these episodes a week ahead of time and add free and at a higher bit right and possibly two extra bonus episodes every month please go to patreon.com slash retronauts for three bucks a month you get all these episodes one week ahead of time add free and at a higher bit rate but if you want to step up to the five dollar level you will get two bonus full length episodes every month only available to patrons of the five dollar level or higher we started doing this in january of 2020 so if you're new to the patreon or new to retronauts you have more than a year's worth of bonus episodes to listen to probably

up to 30 at this point in time so yeah we have a lot of stuff going on in the patreon there are higher levels of course. If you want to give more, there are higher awards. But if you want those bonus episodes, again, it is five bucks a month at patreon.com slash retronauts. And that will also get you a weekly column and podcast this week in retro by Diamond Fight. So that's another bonus on top of the two bonus podcasts every month at patreon.com slash retronauts. As for me, I have been your host for this one, Bob Mackey.

You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And I have other podcasts outside of Retronauts. Those are Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon where you look at it. different cartoon from different series every week and you can find those wherever you find podcast or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

Sign up there for a similar deal to what you get at Patreon.com slash Retronauts. You get early access and podcast without ads but also at the $5 level at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We have all of our mini series and starting very soon on that Patreon will be Talking of the Hill season two part one.

11 new episodes of Talking of the Hill starting on March 26. so you want to check that out at patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Thank you so much for listening, folks. We'll see you next time for another new episode of Retronauts. We'll see you then. ...toe...

...toe... ...the... ...the... ...the... ...and...