Gaming Today Interviews TellTale Games About Sam and Max: Season Two

TellTale Games showed up at PAX this year with a new demo and some info regarding the next season of their popular Sam and Max adventure series. I got a chance to talk with Emily Morganti, the Marketing and Public Relations at TellTale, about what’s new with Sam and Max: Season Two. First she showed me a demo for Season Two, which included some familiar faces (Bosco, Sybil, Abe Lincoln’s head) as well as some new ones, like Stinky, the eccentric waitress in the new diner area (shown above). She also showed me a couple of new gameplay features, like Sam’s ability to run now, and the inclusion of some new mini-games; one of which involves a Punch Out-style boxing match between a rat and a creepy robot doll. All this was dripping with the trademark Sam and Max humor and had some genuine laugh-out-loud moments. After that, we sat down to discuss lessons learned from Season One and what fans can expect to see in Season Two. Full interview after the jump and be sure to check out some new screens that Chris wrote about.

GT: So tell me what you guys have done different this season as opposed to last season.

Well, on a technical level, there’s basically some of the stuff I showed you: you can run now, we’ve tried to work on some better controls in the driving to make it work better for people. We really listened to the feedback about Sybil and Bosco being plot devices as opposed to being just characters. So rather than them just having a shtick that’s kind of the same every episode, we’re trying to give them more of a storyline of their own. Sybil gets out of the office; Bosco gets out of the store. You’ll find they’re more like living creatures with their own things going on.

We’ve got a hint system that we’ve implemented, and we’re kind of hesitant to call it a “hint system,” because a lot of adventure gamers are like, “I don’t want a hint system.” The way that you got hints in Season One would be just to ask Max, and he’d tell you. It might be kind of a riddle, but he would still tell you what to do; and we felt like that took the player out of the experience of playing the game. So what we’ve done in Season Two is a bit more organic. If you have the hint system turned on — and it’s got different levels of how much it helps you — and you’ve spent a long time in a place and you haven’t really done anything, Max will offer a little nudge. And he just says it, so we’re trying to make it more like the game is just pointing you in the right direction without being too obvious and without having the player ask for it. But you can turn it off too. So you can have it in stages, or you can just turn it off completely. That’s one thing that I’m really interested to see how people react too.

GT: You guys were the first to really pull off the episodic gaming model really well, so are you going to make any tweaks to that model or keep it pretty much the same?

It’s pretty much the same; our development schedule is the same. We kind of work on multiple episodes at a time at different stages, so that’s something that we’re continuing. The episodes are still going to be coming out roughly a month apart, with the exception of [episodes] one and two. There might be a longer gap between those two just because it helps us ramp up. There’s more work that goes into making episode one than making the rest. We definitely learned from the experience of doing Season One, and I think we’re just in a position now where we’ve done it once so we kind of know what we’re doing. I don’t know if I’d say it makes everything go more smoothly, but at least it’s a known. I think we’re all pretty comfortable that we know how to do this now, and it seems to be working, so we’re going to keep doing it.

GT: Are the episodes going to be any longer?

I think they’re going to be about the same length. It’s interesting, we found that when they were coming out individually, that was usually the complete experience that most people would have. Especially in reviews too: ‘It’s great; it was just too short.’ [Season One] has been collected now into a retail product, and people are now reviewing the retail product; and I haven’t seen anyone complain about that. It’s just interesting to see what people expect and how they react to the game based on what those expectations are. We always planned to make games that took about four hours to play. If you’ve got a game coming out every month, it’s kind of hard to make it longer than that because people don’t finish [the first one] before the next one comes. So that was always our intention, and we did definitely see people say ‘I wish it was longer’; but we didn’t actually set out to make a longer game.

GT: I actually kind of liked it that way, because when I sat down and played an episode, I kind of knew what I was getting into. It was like watching a TV show.

Exactly, and you have some hope of finishing it in the time frame you set out for.

GT: Rather than just devoting hours and hours to it.

Exactly, and maybe never getting to the end because you don’t have time or you lose interest or whatever. That doesn’t happen with these games.

GT: So I guess you have plans to make a retail version of this season already in the works?

I think it’s definitely something we want to do again. It makes sense if you think of the game kind of like a TV show. A TV show comes out on DVD at the end [of a season] and people buy it. So far the retail is working great, because it’s reaching a different audience. You can buy this game at Wal-Mart, and those same people who are buying it at Wal-Mart are not the same people who subscribe to GameTap or look up Telltale’s website. So it reaches a different audience, and I think it kind of helps. Every time an episode comes out, we get a boost in sales for the previous episodes. It raises awareness, and the retail product is just an exception to that. It comes out and raises awareness about all of Season One and also Season Two. Now people who didn’t know there was a Sam and Max game at all know to look for Season Two.

GT: You mentioned when you were showing me the demo that the writer from episode four is doing the whole season now?

Well, he’s working working with Telltale full time now. He’s probably our one full-time writer; the rest of our writers divide their time up between writing and game design. So he’s not the only person writing Season Two, but he’s kind of a main player in writing the scripts. That’s Chuck Jordan. He wrote “Abe Lincoln Must Die,” and he also was very involved in writing The Curse of Monkey Island, so he’s been around.

GT: Those are definitely some good titles to have in your background. Now I grew up with Sam and Max, so I have to ask: how closely has Steve Purcell been working with Season Two? I know he was fairly involved with Season One.

Like with Season One, his main involvement is at the beginning, where he helps us establish the story in broad strokes and also the recurring characters; what they’re going to look like. He does a lot of concept art for us. Stinky, the waitress in the diner, was completely Steve’s design. So yeah, he’s pretty involved. He kind of does the damage control to make sure that what we come up with is going to work in Sam and Max’s world. Then he unleashes us and lets us take that where we want to take it. One of the many nice things about Steve is that he has a job at Pixar, he lives in northern California, and our office is between them. So basically he drives home from work and our office is on the way. As many times as we can get him to just stop by and bounce ideas off of him, we do that. He’s very busy with his job, and he has a wife and kids; but he’s also really involved, which has been nice. I’ve heard Dave Grossman, our design director, say that Steve is one of the most accessible license-holders he’s ever worked with; which is saying a lot because Dave’s worked with some big licenses.

GT: It sounds like you guys have a lot of fun working on these games.

(laughs) Yeah, I think we do.

GT: Do you have any ideas when you’re going to start releasing the first episodes for Season Two?

We have ideas, but we haven’t announced anything yet. We’re kind of nailing down a release date.

GT: This year? Next year?

It’ll be this year. We’re nailing down with GameTap exactly when its going to be. We’re probably going to make an announcement next month about that. Something we’re doing different is that — last season GameTap had a 15-day exclusivity on new episodes — this year it’s a one-day exclusivity. So it’s going to be getting out to people who don’t have GameTap a lot faster than it used to. So it’s coming soon.