Sam & Max Hit the Road

Sam & Max Hit the Road brings Steve Purcell's comic about a dog detective in a suit and his hyperactive rabbit partner to life as a game. The duo sets out to find an escaped Bigfoot from a carnival sideshow, and along the way drives across an America full of backwater tourist traps — from the world's biggest ball of twine to the Cave of Mystery and a park full of concrete dinosaurs. The story is really just an excuse for a series of absurd scenes, but it holds together better than you'd expect from this source material.

The controls dropped the verb list in favor of a circular icon-based cursor, which sped the game up and made it clearer. Max functions as a living item in the inventory — he can be used on practically anything, usually resulting in violence or nonsense — and much of the fun lies precisely in trying things out just to see how the two heroes react. The puzzles are built on comic-book logic and are occasionally quite wild; along the way there are also several minigames that serve as breathers between locations.

Technically it was a VGA game with hand-drawn animation and a CD version that included full voice acting; the voices of Sam and Max rank among the most memorable in the entire genre. The music mixes jazz, surf rock, and bigbeat, and fits the road-trip mood perfectly. At the time the game was praised for its humor and style, though commercially it wasn't among the studio's biggest hits. Today Hit the Road is valued as one of the funniest games of the nineties and as proof that an adventure game can pull off a properly crazy tone. Its influence can be seen in the characters' later comebacks and in the whole wave of comedic adventure games. Today's players will especially enjoy how confidently relaxed the game is: it has no pathos, doesn't push the plot, and trusts that every screen will deliver at least one extra joke. A minor issue is that some puzzles require exactly the kind of thinking the two main heroes have, so sometimes trial and error works better than logic. Even so, it remains one of the most distinctive titles of its era.