LucasArts Pulls the Plug on S&M

Posted on March 3, 2004

Get your mind out of the gutter — I’m talking about their decision to cancel the upcoming PC game “Sam and Max, Freelance Police“.

Sam and Max was the sequel to the classic 1993 game “Sam and Max Hit the Road“, and both were based on Steve Purcell’s awesomely funny Sam and Max comics.

Who are Sam and Max? Sam is a dog. Max is a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing”. Together they solve highly implausible crimes through the application of firepower, snack foods, and deus ex machina.

The comics are a riot. Take this bit from their Christmas special, “The Damned Don’t Dance”:

SAM: You must have had visions of sugarplums dancing in your head, little pal!
MAX: Oh, thank God! I thought it was a twitching, lemon-sized brain tumor.

Or this exchange, as the Freelance Police speed towards an encounter with an otherworldly evil in “Beast From the Cereal Aisle”:

SAM: Max, in America, it’s customary to drive on the right.
MAX: It’s turning into a damn police state, Sam!

Or this bit, when our heroes are captured by evil, highway-roaming, manatee-kidnapping pirates in the “On the Road” comic:

SAM: What ARE you guys? And why did you suddenly drop your half-assed pirate dialect?
PIRATE: We’re Buccaneers! We used to have mundane office jobs, working in cubicles with water coolers and coffee cups with clever slogans and those wacky calendars with photos of diseased-looking chimps wearing neckties.
SAM: But you’ve got hooks and peg legs.
PIRATE: Funny about that.

(Check out The Quotable Sam & Max for more quotes.)

Besides the comics, the ’93 game lives on in the memory of geeks everywhere. So a sequel seemed like a must-buy. But the suits at LucasArts have apparently decided to take the money they were investing in this product and plow it instead into some other highly creative venture, like another Star Wars game.

Great.

Thanks for nothing, LucasArts, ya big bunch of doorknobs.