Sam & Max: Freelance Police (Video Game)
| “Sam & Max: Freelance Police” | |||||||
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| Developer | LucasArts | ||||||
| Publisher(s) | LucasArts | ||||||
| Designer(s) | Michael Stemmle Steve Purcell | ||||||
| Release date | canceled | ||||||
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Sam & Max: Freelance Police was the title of the planned sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road, developed by LucasArts. Like it's predecessor, Freelance Police was a Point and Click Adventure Game, but it was also the franchise's first foray into 3D animation. Despite great anticipation among both the Sam & Max fandom and Lucasarts adventure game enthusiasts, Lucasarts announced it's cancellation on March 3, 2004 due to "current market place realities and underlying economic considerations" (a phrase ironically later used by the Soda Poppers in What's new, Beelzebub?).
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[edit] Overview
Sam & Max: Freelance Police was designed by LucasArts as a graphic adventure game and sequel to the 1993 title Sam & Max Hit the Road. The game was to feature 3D computer graphics rendered in real-time. The game engine contained elements from other LucasArts games, including those from Gladius, RTX Red Rock, Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels and Star Wars: Obi-Wan. Graphical features such as shaders, bump maps and lightmaps were used to give a 3D effect to 2D textures in the game. Little was revealed of the gameplay, other than that Freelance Police would not follow the same control scheme used in 3D LucasArts adventures Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island, but would return to the point-and-click mechanics used in the 2D LucasArts games. As in Sam & Max Hit the Road, Freelance Police would contain a mixture of optional and compulsory minigames, 19 in total. The game was designed so that the player character could not die or reach a dead end.
Steve Purcell, the creator of Sam & Max, assisted in the development of both the plot and the artistic direction, producing concept art of various characters and locales.
Due to the nature of the story, LucasArts considered releasing the game in episodic fashion and using digital distribution, an option favored by the development team but opposed by the management division, who preferred the more traditional methods of retail distribution. Post-release bonus content was also considered; Stemmle remarked that such content would include new power-ups, minigames and "maybe even entirely new interactive Sam & Max cases [the player] can download".
[edit] Plot
A combination of previews and interviews provide some information about the game's plot. In a January 2004 interview, lead designer Michael Stemmle provided a rough outline: the game's story was "really six stories, loosely held together by a thrilling über-plot". Each individual story contained a separate case for the Freelance Police, taking place in a variety of environments, including a space station and a neopagan bacchanal, and featuring "freakish bad guys". Stemmle stated that the intention was to keep the "über-plot" concealed for a while, but noted that it contained "all the barely plausible grandeur that fans have come to expect from Sam and Max". In another interview Steve Purcell mentioned that the main plot "had to do with a hidden tropical continent called Subarctica ruled by an enormous penguin queen".
Furthermore, in an interview with PC Gamer Stemmle mentions that in one case "Sam and Max pose as members of a street gang to put the kibosh on an unexpected outbreak of gang warfare at a high-school dance" and near the end of another they "face off against a honked-off beauty contestant in an ice-themed destruction derby". A preview in the German magazine Gamestar reveals that one case involved a villainous Artificial Intelligence made from tortilla chips.
Besides the return of the titular characters, only one other character, Flint Paper, was confirmed for the game. Stemmle had Paper planned for a "critical role" in the game's plot.
[edit] Aftermath
The cancellation caused considerable uproar among the community and spurred the creation of several petitions, all of which were ignored. It also caused several of the game's developers to abandon LucasArts and form their own company: Telltale Games. This got many fans hoping that a new sequel was in the works. This hope would be vindicated later, but not before another newcomer gave it a shot.
Late 2004 the German upstart publisher Bad Brain Entertainment entered into negotiations with LucasArts to buy the rights to Freelance Police. In December they dropped several hints about this (despite being under an NDA at the time). However, these negotiations were ultimately fruitless. In May 2005 LucasArts' license expired and the video game rights reverted to Steve Purcell, who preferred to do business with Telltale Games. Telltale went on to announce the first season of an episodic video game series featuring the Freelance Police four months later.
A box with the date 03-03-04 (The date of Freelance Police's cancelation) can be found in Sam and Max's office during the first season of the Telltale series. When examining it, Sam describes it as a "particularly gruesome" case. In Situation: Comedy, Sam says they are famous in the Internet petition sort of way, a reference to the numerous petitions to finish this game. In Ice Station Santa one of the answers of the first question of Stinky's Quiz is "March 3, 2004". Another reference can be found in the second season episode Moai Better Blues, where one of the things Sam finds in a large lost and found box on Easter Island is a working Beta version of the game.
[edit] External Links
- Download the trailer at LucasFiles
- feature story at MixnMojo
- MixnMojo media gallery
- MixnMojo interviews about Hit the Road, also touching on Freelance Police
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This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Sam & Max: Freelance Police. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Sam & Max Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
