Sam & Max's War Song: An oral history, 20 years later

In 2004, following LucasArts' cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, members of its development team formed Telltale Games to make episodic narrative games. I worked there from 2006 to 2009, doing public relations and marketing.

Telltale later became known for choice-driven games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but it cut its teeth on traditional point-and-click adventures, including three Sam & Max seasons. Sam & Max Season One (later renamed Sam & Max Save the World) debuted almost 20 years ago for subscribers of Turner Broadcasting's game streaming service, GameTap, followed by a worldwide release on Telltale's website two weeks later.

Six Sam & Max games came out over seven months, establishing Telltale as a pioneer in episodic game development. The studio eventually grew to more than 400 people before shuttering in 2018, but the team was still small and green during Season One's 2006-2007 run, figuring things out in real time. The showtune it snuck into episode 4, Abe Lincoln Must Die!, was an early triumph.

A surprise highlight of the season, the sequence internally dubbed "the War Song" was a three-minute musical number complete with Secret Service agents dancing the can-can — and it almost didn't make it into the episode. I gathered five people involved in the song's creation to reflect on how they pulled it off and what it meant for the studio: art director David Bogan, composer Jared Emerson-Johnson, design director Dave Grossman, writer Chuck Jordan, and Jake Rodkin, who at the time was a graphic designer and community manager on Telltale's web team.