In two weeks, you’ll be able to play Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse on your Xbox for the very first time. The final season of Telltale’s episodic Sam & Max trilogy was never ported to Xbox when it first came out in 2010, leaving fans of this comedy adventure series hanging for all these years.
For the uninitiated, Sam & Max are the Freelance Police, a pair of dog and rabbity-thing detectives whose esoteric wit and unconventional crime-fighting techniques have amused and baffled the unwashed masses for the past 37 years. Their credits include indie comics, a Saturday morning cartoon, and, of course, video games.
LucasArts was the first studio to make Sam & Max games, and I was working there as a producer when Sam & Max: Freelance Police was cancelled in 2004. If you were an adventure game fan at the time, you probably remember the uproar—the game was almost finished, previews were glowing, and 32,000 pissed off fans signed an online petition to try to reverse the decision.
The petition didn’t work, but it inspired me and several other Freelance Police team members to start a new studio, Telltale Games. After LucasArts’ rights to make a game about the dog and rabbity-thing crime fighters expired, we teamed up with the series creator, Steve Purcell, to make our own episodic Sam & Max games.
One reason for Freelance Police’s cancellation was that it was a PC game, and all the best-sellers at the time were for consoles. Telltale also started out as a PC developer (it was still the biggest platform for adventure games, our favorite genre), but as the studio grew, we also branched out to consoles. In 2009 we ported the first two Sam & Max seasons, Sam & Max Save the World and Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, to Xbox 360.
Telltale went on to make one more Sam & Max season, subtitled The Devil’s Playhouse, which came out episodically from April to August 2010—but this one never made it to Xbox. At that point in the studio’s history (before we really hit it big with The Walking Dead), we had our hands full as we refined our vision for interactive storytelling and took on new licenses. We couldn’t support more than one or two platforms at a time back then, and though we always intended to port The Devil’s Playhouse to Xbox, it just never happened… until now!
In a sad twist of fate, Telltale ran into financial trouble in 2018 and the studio shut down. I was no longer working there, but I saw an opportunity to go back to this series that had been so central to my career. (Even before I worked on Sam & Max: Freelance Police, one of my very first games as a QA lead was LucasArts’ 1994 adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road.) I called up some of the same friends who were there at the beginning of Telltale and we bought the rights to the episodic Sam & Max trilogy.
Since then, we’ve been remastering these games—a real labor of love to get them looking as good and playing as well as we always wanted but didn’t have the resources or expertise to achieve at the time. If you’ve played our Sam & Max Save the World or Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space remasters, you know what a vast improvement they are over the originals, with added widescreen and gamepad support, higher quality visuals and audio, 4K graphics and HDR support on Xbox One X and newer, and lots more additions and refinements.
The remastered version of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse will close out the trilogy on August 14, and you can preorder it today with a 10% discount. Compared to the first two seasons (which were some of Telltale’s earliest games), The Devil’s Playhouse was made by a larger team that had hit its stride. It’s definitely the weirdest and most ambitious of the three games, and we’re always hearing from fans that it’s their favorite.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but the basic storyline is that Max (the rabbity-thing) stumbles upon a magic toy that gives him random glimpses of the future. His newfound psychic powers attract the attention of an alien warlord named General Skun-ka’pe, who wants the Toys of Power for his own not-so-altruistic purposes… and things quickly spiral out of control.
Across five episodes (released all at once, Netflix-style), you’ll get to mess around with Max’s psychic powers, play as Sam & Max’s great-grandfathers, plunder an Egyptian tomb, confront Lovecraftian monsters, and fend off an army of Sam clones wearing sparkly gold underwear.
If you need to get caught up before playing this final entry in the Sam & Max trilogy, the first two remasters are 40% off on Xbox through August 12 (our deepest discount to date).
And on August 14, we invite you to take your seats, turn off your cell phones, and prepare yourselves for an epic comedy saga. The lights have dimmed, the curtains are opened… the show’s about to begin in Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse!
