Sam and Max Hit the Road
filfre.net
filfre.net
I vaguely remember my dad taking me to go and buy a Soundblaster card so the sound worked properly!
Day Of The Tentacle was another one, never owned it but played at friends houses
While the machine itself was the cheapest we could get at the Escom store because we were kind of broke (14000 ATS, around 1500 Euros in today's money), my dad granted me a Soundblaster 16 card, a double-speed CD-ROM drive and a couple of game collections on CD. One of those collections contained both DOTT and Sam & Max Hit The Road.
Making special boot floppies for managing conventional, expanded and extended memory so I could get those games to work was probably my introduction to technical trouble-shooting. And when eventually I got to get Sam & Max going and heard the Mad Scientist in the intro actually talking I completely lost my shit, because I expected no more than closed captions and some wavetable midi tunes in the background.
Loved that game so much for its artistic style and weird characters. Tunnel of Love, Big Foot, Giraffe Girl, the Country Singer douchebag ... what a colorful ensemble!
Ah yea, fiddling around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to make funky menus to show the games I had installed (I think, it was a while ago ... also something to do with mscdex .. but that might have been later)
What will we see next on here - the Neverhood? Loom? Leisure Suit Larry?
As a young kid without the patience to grapple with adventure game puzzles (and no internet service), I had to resort quite a few times to calling the LucasArts 900 number for walkthrough tips. I've often wondered how much that boosted their games revenue!
My first professional programming job was located in the Presidio campus where LucasArts had been headquartered. It had just closed its doors shortly before I started there, but the old LucasArts store stayed open for a few extra months to clear out some inventory. I grabbed a logo hat which I've since misplaced.
Awhile back the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco had a whole featured exhibit of Purcell's work, and as a fan of the old game I had to make the pilgrimage. If you're an old Sam & Max fan looking to scratch the nostalgia itch, the old comics are pretty great and the "Route 66 in decay" esthetic is possibly even better suited to our times than it was the late 80s and early 90s.
It was supposed to time out after a minute or so of no interaction, but the bill showed the line was connected for over 60 at something like $0.75 a minute.
The worst part (to me) was that it didn't help me find Frog Rock. I found out a decade later when I ripped the disc to play in SCUMMVM that there was a defect with the CD that my 1x reader at the time probably couldn't handle.