Sam & Max – Episodic gaming that works
It’s safe to say that I learned some of my English from the great adventure games from LucasArts and Sierra. There was something magical about the Space Quest series, Indiana Joneses, Maniac Mansions, Monkey Islands and, yes, even Leisure Suit Larries that I’m afraid is lost to that era and can’t be resurrected (cf. the hopefully last Monkey Island and the boring puzzle-fests like Longest Journey and other pre-rendered 3D pixel hunting games.). The geniuses behind these games have, wisely, realised the same and have for most part abandoned the ideas of making a new epic. Instead, for example, one of the hilarious guys behind Day of the Tentacle, Tim Schafer, set up a new shop and couple of years ago released an underrated masterpiece, Psychonauts. If I’ve read the eccentric news items from Double Fine’s homepages correctly, he and his team is working on something new, which will probably be something totally awesome.
The other great mind behind Day of the Tentacle, Dave Grossman, did something similar when Telltale Games (which was founded by LucasArts veterans) released the Season One of Sam & Max, the long overdue sequel(s?) to one of the funniest adventure games ever, Sam & Max: Hit the Road.
What Telltale Games did was not release a game, but a series of games that were only available as digital downloads. After the release of the first episode on October 2006, they released a new episode about every month until they completed the six-episode season on May 2007. They reused many of the expensive resources involved in adventure games (like graphics, engine and voice) and could keep other costs at minimum partly thanks to the internet and partly thanks to the (almost) guaranteed interest by the hardcore adventure gaming community.
Another LucasArts veteran, Ron Gilbert, had for a long time talked about how episodic gaming would be the future and I have to admit that he might be right. He’s also working on something right now.
One thing that, I think, Telltale Games did really well was to take care of the community. Between episodes they actively published tidbits on their blog and released little short animations or soundtrack pieces on the website. They also knew how to take care of their customers as the subscribers to the whole season could get the episodes couple of days earlier than the rest and also can now get the whole season on a DVD for just the cost of shipping. If this isn’t caring for your customers, I don’t know what is. Apparently there were some free space on the DVD, as they have also filled it to the brim with extras. The icing of the cake is that they really seem to know their audience and the tradition of the genre as for 5 additional dollars (which is like, what, 1 euro today?) they’ll put in a file full of little trinkets. I fondly remember the time when many games came with some extra stuff in the box. If I’m not mistaken, solutions to many of the puzzles in the Leisure Suit Larry 3 we hidden in the extra stuff. Today you’re lucky if there’s anything else in the DVD box than the game disc.
One really exciting turn was when someone somewhere realised that there was nothing stopping Telltale Games publishing Sam & Max on Wii – the only “next-gen” console with a suitable control device for adventure games. The two-button remote is ideal for adventure games (dare I say even better than a mouse?), the Wii itself is ideal for this kind of non-hardcore gaming (like Halo, Counterstrike or GTA) and does have a channel for digital delivery, the game itself is family friendly (aka Nintendo-friendly) in a non-Manhunt 2 way (unless you start to wonder where Max keeps his gun). I’d love to see this happen.
I have doubts that something that cool could ever get done, but then again, I was quite sure there’d never be a “proper” Sam & Max sequel. (Sam & Max: Freelance Police? Let’s never mention that anywhere ever again.)
I just realised I didn’t mention Grim Fandango, the finest adventure game ever with a fitting theme for a genre then singing its swan song. So, there.
Kari has never owned a console, but the possibility of Sam & Max and the fun of Mario Strikers on Wii haunt him and keep him awake at night occasionally.
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Indeed, Grim Fandango was amazing and I’m really saddened by the fact that these types of games seem to have taken a step back from our shoot-em-up culture.
Still, I recently came across a game called Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), by a Frenchman called David Cage (great interview here ), and it renewed my hope in gaming somewhat. It offers a puzzling story, multiple endings, and an innovative way to control characters during certain situations. Really an amazing game, also for PC, I think!
What I would also like to see is the revival of some of these old games on flash or similar. It seems to me that the processing-power is minimal, especially if you focus on 2-d games, which should be sufficient to tell a story.
Vince, I think Ron Gilbert’s essay I linked above is spot on why these games have taken many steps back in our world of Halos and Half-lifes. The adventure games are either illogical puzzle-fests or semi-interactive movies. Unfortunately, at points Sam&Max Season One is too much like the latter type.
The sad situation of adventure gaming today is well known and discussed a lot all around the web, but in my post I wanted to bring out the possibilites of episodic, casual gaming (spending 15 min bursts with a game, like Wii Sports, instead of multi-hour sessions, like most new games seem to expect, even Psychonauts) in the world of internet connected consoles in our living rooms.
The other point I was aiming at was how in niche markets superior customer or community service might be the key for success. I mean, Telltale wants returning customers, it’s their lifeline. Compare this to the fiasco with Vista Ultimate Extras. This is the way companies usually treat their loyal community base. DRM music? Sony’s rootkit fiasco? PS3’s blinking HDCP copy protection fiasco? Starforce copy protection screwing with your computer settings?
Even in this detail Telltale made the right call. You needed to activate the downloaded episodes for obvious reasons, but the games on the DVD have no copy protection. Thank you Telltale for not treating your customers as thiefs. This means also that in the future someone might be able to reverse-engineer them a la ScummVM.
Activation-based copy protections are not future-proof and I’d like to fantasise this is one of the main reasons Telltale left them off the physical DVD.
Interesting insights, Kari. Sounds a lot like the blue ocean strategy discussion we had on Jeremy’s post on Nintendo.
Just like in real life, the people who are usually the least trusting are the ones that can be least trusted. So all this DRM means to me is that people feel that the products they produce are such low quality that they must screw over customers so it doesn’t get stolen. If these companies were to find a product that provides such rich content that it cannot be copied, it would be the perfect copy-protection, like you said.
Unfortunately mass-production means that these companies, because of under-capacity and low margins, simply don’t have the ability to provide rich content, which leaves room for smaller companies to provide such a service instead.
The other side of the coin to this is that as a companies production increases, their customer service usually goes down. At least, I think so. I would love to hear examples where this is not the case. I’m sure Apple is an example, but they are still at 10% market-share and have a fixed number of platforms to support.
[...] time again for the weekend edition of Tech IT Easy. It was almost a year ago when I wrote about Sam & Max games in the context of episodic gaming and how episodic format combined with digital delivery might save some niche gaming genres, like [...]