August 28, 2007

PAX 2007

Telltale’s Dave Grossman talks about making Sam & Max
By Michael Lafferty

“Everybody is sort of putting more and more icing on the cake as we go, so it’s really sweet at the end”

Sitting down and chatting with Dave Grossman, Design Director for Telltale games, is a bit of fun, almost in the same way that playing Sam & Max is entertainment that never quite takes the direction you are expecting it to go. But then, that is almost like the company of Telltale Games itself.

Telltale took Sam and Max and through the freedom afforded by self-digital distribution made the game it wanted to, not the game some publisher may have asked them to make. Some corporations will play it safe, eschewing humor that dances on the edge for the sake of what they perceive as broader appeal. Telltale goes for the humor that makes the dev team laugh. It is almost is if they think that if they are laughing while making the game, others will laugh when playing it.

And they are right.

And when it comes to Grossman, he has had a long and storied background in the games industry. He worked for LucasArts and was in on the Monkey Island series (The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge) and the co-designed the Day of the Tentacle title. He quit LucasArts in 1994 and worked for a company (Hulabee) that evolved into Humongous Entertainment. There he worked on such wonderful children’s games as the Pajama Sam series. Not merely a game designer, he has also had books published based on Pajama Sam and Freddi Fish. He also wrote two interactive books for Fisher-Price/Nickelodeon based on the SpongeBob SquarePants and Fairly OddParents licenses.

GameZone caught up with Grossman and company (Emily Morganti, Kevin Bruner and Jonathan Sgro) at the Penny Arcade Expo in the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle on the last day of the event. It was, to say the least, an entertaining chat.

We sat here and watched some of the scenes for Season Two of the next Sam & Max, and you guys were cracking up … still.  What determines, when you are making the game, if something is funny or crosses too far over the line to be funny?

Dave: I think our approach to that is to hire good writers, and then edit them.

But it has to be a group concept, because while you can have good writers, you have to graphically support what they write.

Dave: When we are doing the writing it is a little bit like a tele-play or movie script where the writer is putting in some instructions to the animators, so he is kind of thinking visually. And then those guys (the animators) usually add stuff rather than subtract stuff. There are usually a few surprises, too, when we see what the animation looks like. We go ‘oh, hey, that’s much funnier than it was before.’ So everybody has kind of got their part. The voice actors, too, actually do quite a bit. It’s usually a lot funnier after they get done with it.

So it’s a collaborative effort?

Dave: Ya, everybody is sort of putting more and more icing on the cake as we go, so it’s really sweet at the end.

Episodic content has not really taken off before …

Dave: It’s been tried a few times. I actually tried to do it before with a company called Hulabee and a children’s game, and the digital download market wasn’t big enough before to support it and now it is. So now it’s become possible to sell small games online and keep your company going.

But isn’t there a point where Sam & Max, because of the way it was received, is no longer a small game. And as others have said, doesn’t there come a point where you become your own worse competition because now you have to live up to the success of that title?

Dave: True, but each episode by itself is small. It takes a couple of months for production and they are overlapped so we can actually get them out on a monthly release schedule. But we are usually working on three or four of them at the same time. One is in design, one is in script phase and one is being animated and one is kind of polished up and heading out the door. End to end, it is probably three or four month.

When you started to work on Sam and Max, what made you go with the three-d look as opposed to the two-dimensional cel-shaded cartoon look?

Dave: We are basically an entirely 3D studio and we do that so we can move the cameras around a lot and be cinematic in a way that filmmakers and TV guys are. If we were drawing everything in 2D, then we wouldn’t have the opportunity to do that.

With the success of Sam & Max, did you find that you had to allocate more resources to the title?

Dave: Titles aren’t allowed to develop egos any more than people are. It has to stay within the boundaries we set for it, which seems to working fairly well.

What made you determine that Sam & Max would make a good game property?

Dave: It was a comic book that was published (by Steve Purcell) back in the ‘80s and I believe he got the idea from his brother, who used to draw these little sketchy comics when they were kids, and there was this vaguely dog-shaped guy and this vaguely rabbit-shaped guy and they always confused each other as to which was one was Sam and which one was Max. And he would leave them laying around the house and Steve would finish them for him. And eventually, for his birthday one year, he gave Steve the rights to Sam and Max so he started publishing comics about them and the rest is history.

It originally became a game property at LucasArts in the early ‘90s, and the reason that it is is that Steve was working there and a lot of us were working there at the same time were familiar with his work. And everybody kept saying, ‘we should do a Sam & Max game, we should do a Sam & Max game.’ And it ended being, I think, the only time Lucas did a game that was actually licensed from somebody else. Despite the fact he was working there, Steve owns Sam and Max. So we did that, and the result was Hit the Road that came out in 1993. There was a lot of fan support for it and so there were various attempts to do a sequel over the years that failed for various reasons. But we were all still in touch with Steve. And these guys (points around the table) were working on the last version that failed in 2004 and when that happened they immediately left and formed Telltale. So Sam and Max was kind of always in the back of everybody’s mind and they still wanted to do it. It was a matter of LucasArts still had the rights for a little while, they had kind of a lien on them that would run out if they didn’t publish anything within a couple of years. Steve actually said that he asked them if he could have the rights back right away and they wouldn’t do it, for whatever reason but then eventually they did run out and we started talking to him, and Sam and Max is in the store now.

You’ve really opened up the market for episodic content. I think Telltale really changed the way people perceive it.

Dave: I hope so. Now it seems … just judging by the things we hear here and at the Game Developers Conference that they are going to try to do something similar and I hope that they do succeed, because I would like to see it be something that not only we do, I would like to see it be something that we do the best.

Have you projected this series beyond Season Two?

Dave: We just assume we are going to make Sam and Max forever. We don’t have specific plans for what is going to happen in Season Three. We don’t look too far ahead, the world may change between now and then and we could be stale.

And again, you have to up the ante every time and there could be a point where …

Kevin: We run out of funny.

Dave: Maximum funniness where people start laughing themselves to death. Then we would be in big trouble. Everything implodes.

In a story that has so much humor, do you find it a challenge to direct people along the storyline?

Dave: No, I think it is easier. If you are doing a serious storyline, then people notice if the pieces don’t fit together perfectly. Whereas if you are being funny about it if you find yourself with some things that don’t quite line up, you just poke fun at yourself and people laugh along with you. I think comedy is just generally easier than drama to do.

What’s been the biggest joy of making Sam and Max?

Dave: It’s fun to write like Steve (Purcell), actually. That’s the biggest kick for me. I’ve known him a long time and never got to work on a Sam & Max title before. And it’s fun to imagine myself sitting in the chair wearing his hat and speaking through his characters.

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