Today Steam kicked off their Zombies vs. Vampires Fest, and Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is in it with a 50% discount! (The soundtrack too!)
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/24214/Sam__Max_Beyond_Time_and_Space_Game__Soundtrack/
And now a rambling history lesson for those who weren’t breathlessly hanging on Telltale’s every move back in 2008…
Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space was the second season of Sam & Max episodes, which came out about once a month. One criticism of the first season was that the episodes felt too “samey,” with a lot of time spent in Sam & Max's office and on their street, and the team set out to change this in Season Two.
The result was five episodes set in dramatically different locales. We started at the North Pole, then jumped through the Bermuda Triangle to Easter Island, then stopped off in Stuttgart, Germany, for an episode named Night of the Raving Dead. Hit it!
[embed trailer]
Vampires? Check! Zombies? Check! It’s as if designer Brendan Q. Ferguson inserted a quarter into a Zoltar fortune-telling machine, but instead of saying “I wish I were big,” he said “Tell me about a Steam promotion that will happen seventeen years from now”—and then he spread the word to the rest of the team and they dreamed up this episode accordingly.
The vampire in question is Jurgen, impeccably voiced by William Kasten (the same voice actor as Max). Jurgen is one of the characters whose model we spruced up in the remaster with tweaks that included adding car keys to one of his nipple rings, as originally suggested by Steve Purcell.
Want some more behind-the-scenes tidbits? Check out the Night of the Raving Dead commentary, which was inculded on Telltale's bonus DVD for Season Pass subscribers back in the day.
Now let’s acknowledge the zombified elephant in the room: Sam & Max isn’t the Telltale game most people would expect to find in a Zombies vs. Vampires Fest. Of course, during the season's episodic run back in 2007–2008, Lee and Clementine weren’t even a glimmer in the dev team’s eyes.
But the fun thing about remasters is that we can slip in new references to other games that didn’t exist at the time, and we did exactly that when we added two Walking Dead Easter eggs to Night of the Raving Dead. Happy hunting!
