Sam & Max Dev Blog Post 1 - Hello World

Hello Sam & Max fans, and anyone else who has stumbled upon this!

I’m Mike from HappyGiant and we’re working on the new Sam & Max VR Game we’re calling Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual!. We’ve assembled a team of veterans who worked on Sam&Max: Hit the Road, their first game, to design this game. This includes myself, Mike Stemmle, Peter Chan, Bay Area Sound, and of course, Steve Purcell. More on that in future posts.

A little about me - I worked at LucasArts “back in the day” (term us older fellows use to obfuscate dates). I began in the QA department, testing games like Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle, while I learned what making games was all about. Within a short period of time I miraculously made the jump over to the art department, and after not too long I was assigned to work on my first full game, start to finish. That game was Sam & Max Hit the Road! And continuing in the “dumb luck” theme, they had me sit next to this guy wearing a Fedora and plucking a banjo. He had evil looking toys and sadistically cute drawings all around him. I liked him before meeting him! This guy was Steve Purcell (the creator of Sam & Max). So as we made the game, I sat next to Steve for probably 9+ months, processing every piece of art and animation in the game, and soaking up all things Steve, and Sam & Max. I would take my daily early stroll over to “A” building to deliver a floppy disc of the day’s art to Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark, who would would wire it up (code it into the game). But Steve and I had similar enough tastes, there was always something to talk about. I just remember laughing a lot. From Lost in Space, to Planet of the Apes, to teaching me who Rick Baker was … there was non stop references and laughing going on (the latter mainly by me!). I definitely recall hearing and saying “Oh the Pain!” … and “get your stinking paws off me you dirty ape!” many times.

Fast forward a few years and many games later at LucasArts, my role evolved into basically being the guy who figured out how the art path was gonna work on new games. And as the tech was evolving so rapidly, we had to basically reinvent how we were going to make each game. In the early years it was about making 2D animation as good as it could be. I created the entire art path for the The Dig, and worked on it extensively, among others. As 3D crept into our lives, I started focusing on video and cutscenes. My last project at Lucas was Dark Forces 2 (the one with all the video cutscenes). It was pretty thrilling to be shooting the first live action new Star Wars sequences in, well, a very long time. And we shot it entirely on blue screen after working closely with Skywalker Ranch using the techniques they were developing for Young Indy TV series at the time. This of course became quite common in Hollywood, but this was years before that.

After my Lucas years I did a start-up with people I knew from ILM, Lucas’ effect division, to create a tool to use for special effects. It was a tool we used at LucasArts in a rough form, and I jumped at the chance. That got me back the East Coast where I grew up, but it wasn’t long before the creative bug got me. I left that company as it was being sold and formed my first company, Pileated Pictures. In the early years we did a lot of Flash work, as it reminded me a lot of the early Lucas days. Eventually we got back into games, apps, mobile and more. We’ve been making games for ourselves, and clients for well over a decade. We had spent over 5 years mastering Augmenting Reality, working with Niantic and others. And we had also developed in Virtual Reality in that time, and worked with many AR and VR headsets. The hardware similarities between AR and VR were something that allowed us to jump between the two mediums with relative ease. When an opportunity arose to make a VR Game, we contemplated a few ideas, but somehow someway, Sam and Max bubbled to the surface. I had always kept in touch with Steve, so I reached out to see what he thought. To my astonishment and delight, he said yes … and away we went!

I began this blog to help fans get a sense of what this new game is, and why we’ve chosen to make the game we have. This post is getting long, so I will save that for the next post, and beyond. Come on back for more teases and insight. Thanks to everyone for their support. —Mike