The Summer of Sam & Max
The Latest: Sam & Max: Bright Side of the Moon Commentary Tracks

Hey! This section's from 2007, so please ignore the dates. Thanks! :)

Sam & Max Season One is done, but we're not! Every week for the entire summer, the web guys and Sam & Max dev team will be joining forces to dish out morsel after morsel of top shelf Sam & Max content, from tell-all commentary tracks to a history retrospective to some awesome surprises you'll probably guess ahead of time on the forums. We'll be updating every Tuesday, so come back often! For now...



Many passionate tales are born out of sibling rivalry. Cain and Abel. Romulus and Remus. Sam & Max: Freelance Police.

This particular tale starts way back in the disco era, when budding artist Dave Purcell invented a comic about a dog and rabbit team of detectives, Sam and Max. Dave would often leave unfinished comics lying around the house. To torture him in the way that only siblings can, older brother Steve would finish the comics as parodies of the stories Dave was trying to tell, with Sam & Max messing up each other's names, shooting at each other, and making fun of how they had been drawn.
Above: Steve Purcell, age 5. That's a lot of fish.



Rare glimpse of Dave Purcell's Sam & Max in Comic #2,
costarring the enigmatic Moo Hoo Man.		Steve's rendition of Dave's characters,
drawn to piss off his brother.


What started as a prank evolved into something bigger when Steve went from making fun of his brother's Sam & Max comics to writing his own.

Above: Sam & Max's first trip to the moon, circa 1978.

Ultimately Dave relinquished the characters, and one birthday he signed them over to Steve in a handwritten contract, giving Steve the freedom to develop the Freelance Police into the duo we know today.

Turn the page to find out how.


This website is archived by Jennifer McMurray. Although she is a community moderator for Telltale Games, she is not an employee, and as such, this archive is no longer hosted by Telltale. It is archived for preservation purposes for the WE Computers Museum Preservation Project.