Sam & Max: Hit the Road

Release Date: November 1993

Platform Played On: PC

2018 Placement: #23 (-9)

What It Is:

A staple of the point-and-click adventure genre, Sam and Max is a glorious game where you control Sam (and try to control Max) as they hit the road and go on an adventure. They go everywhere, from the World’s Largest Ball of Twine to Bumpusville (a play on Graceland) to the Celebrity Vegetable Museum. You navigate the world and find clues and items that unlock new locations to visit, all the while keeping track of your inventory and what puzzles you need to solve at every location. There’s no combat, just puzzles and navigating dialogue.

And that dialogue is also funny as hell. Max is an asshole, and Sam tries to keep him in line but isn’t exactly the greatest either. They’re set on a case to find a missing Bigfoot and everything about every situation they get in is absurd but also hilarious. A large chunk of the formation of my particular brand of humor can be traced back to LucasArts’ point-and-click adventures – and Sam and Max is just pure gold from start to finish.

Why It’s Important To Me:

Okay, maybe I should have saved that “formation of my humor” bit for this part, because that’s a huge reason this game sticks in my mind. I wasn’t much of a PC gamer but I replayed Hit the Road constantly growing up, to the point that I could easily navigate this wide open-world puzzle game. It’s one of those games where every time I boot it up I just feel happy and at home. At one point in my life I could probably have recited at least half the dialogue of this game from memory.

It also was one of the games that made me fall in love with point-and-click adventures as a genre. While it’s lost its luster nowadays (as my patience for solving incredibly obtuse puzzles has lessened as I’ve grown older) I still hold the genre on a high pedestal. LucasArts killed it in the 90s with their point-and-click adventure games and I really consider them to be a cornerstone of my childhood in gaming.

My Strongest Memory:

Getting stuck at the Mystery Vortex. Getting stuck at the World’s Largest Ball of Time. Getting stuck at Bumpusville. Honestly I got stuck a lot in this game and had to confer with friends who also played it. Back before the days of GameFAQs and YouTube, the only way to solve getting stuck was to crowdsource with your gaming buddies. And that was a lot of the fun of this game: figuring out the puzzles together. One of us would get stuck somewhere and we’d all chip in to bail them out before getting stuck somewhere else. It was the water cooler talk of elementary school.

It was also the first game that made me fervently wish for a sequel. I longed for a new Sam and Max entry, prayed for it. When Telltale finally revived it I was absolutely ecstatic. Unfortunately their episodic games weren’t up my alley as much as the original – still perfectly fine and I was glad to get more Sam and Max, but boy they didn’t hold a candle to my nostalgia.

Why It’s #32:

Look, here’s the power of this game: mid-typing this entry I went to Steam and bought it so I could replay it because I jazzed myself up over it. It’s $6. You could do a lot worse with $6. And hey, there’s plenty of internet to help you now so you won’t get stuck nearly as much as I did.