Sam & Max: Flintlocked!

The Game

Sam and Max must solve their stickiest case yet: the suspicious disappearance of their beloved hard-boiled private eye neighbor, Flint Paper. For their last case, they had to cross the seedy underbelly of Route 66 America. Now, they're faced with a mystery so tangled, sordid, and nefarious, they'll have to cross the entire globe (and beyond) to get to the bottom of things. Only you can help them figure out what happened to Flint Paper.

The Backstory

A mere three days after LucasArts's much-bemoaned cancellation of Sam & Max Freelance Police in 2004, a team of angry but dedicated fans (including myself) began to assemble themselves into a development team that envisioned a massive fan-made sequel to the original Sam & Max Hit the Road.

It would be called Sam & Max: Flintlocked!

But back in the wild west of the circa-2004 internet, dear reader, there were almost no tools to help with the development of a project this scale. No social media or video chat. No cloud file sharing. All we had was a message board and occasional IRC team chats. And we all had lives outside of working on this project. So you can imagine it was slow-going. But we stayed motivated for a couple of years.

Enthusiasm for Flintlocked began to dwindle once Telltale Games announced production of their own Sam & Max games. While we initially saw no problem with two competing Sam & Max games coming out, we began to lose heart after Telltale started releasing their episodes. We noticed several major scenarios and puzzles from our game were also incidentally appearing in Telltale's games. For example, the climax of Part 1 in Flintlocked was going to center around Sam and Max invading a TV studio and hijacking a "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" rip-off, and a large part of Part 3 was going to take place on the moon. I'm not saying Telltale had a mole on our message board or anything (or did they?), but it was all pretty disheartening.

After this, our team more or less stopped checking the discussion boards, and the project was unceremoniously scrapped. It was probably a good thing in the long run, however. In hindsight, Telltale Games succeeded with the unique Sam & Max brand of humor far more than we ever could've hoped to.

(The game was last edited on July 23, 2007, so this is what I'm considering the game's "release date" for itch.io purposes. The files were first made available online on October 11, 2009, on my main website at the time, ridgwayfilms.com)

The Team

• Storyline Dept. Director: Brushguy
• Contributing Story Writers:
  2short, Brushguy, Cerno, CallMeDave, SMNMX, TheFreak, toenail1, tygerbug, woxel1 / Purple Penguin
• Artwork Dept. Director: Larrin
• Background Artist: Mike Scott
• Background Coloring: Red Penguin
• Sprite Artists: Brushguy, Lagomorph, Mike Scott
• Comic Cutscenes: Mike Scott
• Music Dept. Director: woxel1 / Purple Penguin
• Assistant Musicians: evilswisspony, Larrin
• Programming Dept. Director: James Isaac
• SLUDGE Programmers: Brushguy, James Isaac
• Discussion & Development Forum Host: thedaemon
• Project Launchers (who sadly abandoned the project): a_monkey, ball o twine
• Website by: Brushguy, James Isaac
• Game Programmed in: SLUDGE by Hungry Software

The Elephant in the Room

Obligatorily, I've got to answer the question you surely have on your lips if you browsed to this page: "Are you ever going to finish this game?" The short answer is "probably not," with a "but never say never" tacked on to the end. Over the last 20 years, I've lost touch with almost the entire original development team, and I feel it wouldn't be right to try to complete this project without at least a few of them onboard to finish it. Additionally, my list of game development projects I'd much rather be working on instead of a crusty unfinished 20-year-old fangame is pretty long. So I'm not going to rule it out, but don't hold your breath either. Just enjoy the fact that we managed to accomplish something, even if it wasn't a finished game.