Telltale Games was a video game studio formed in 2004 by several former members of LucasArts who had previously worked on the cancelled Sam & Max: Freelance Police and to a lesser extent Sam & Max Hit the Road, shortly following the cancellation of the former game. Telltale Games was founded by Dan Connors and Kevin Bruner to create episodic adventure games, which were no longer considered viable by LucasArts.
In 2005, Telltale obtained the license to Sam & Max from Steve Purcell following the expiration of LucasArts' rights to create Sam & Max games the same year, and proceeded to make three episodic video games using the Sam & Max characters: Sam & Max Save the World (formerly known as Sam & Max: Season One) from 2006-2007, Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space (formerly known as Sam & Max: Season Two) from 2007-2008, and Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse during 2010. As part of the episodic format, each game was split up into several smaller "episodes", with the full game comprising a single "season".
While Telltale never released any further Sam & Max games following The Devil's Playhouse, Max and Sam appeared as tournament opponents in the Telltale-developed crossover games Poker Night at the Inventory and Poker Night 2 respectively, and Sam & Max continued to be referenced in many of Telltale's future games, most notably via the recurring Banang joke item which first appeared in Beyond Time and Space.
Aside from Sam & Max, their other notable games included Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Tales of Monkey Island, The Walking Dead series, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands and Minecraft Story Mode. Most of their video games were based on licensed, pre-existing intellectual properties, but Telltale also released smaller video games based on original properties, such as the Puzzle Agent series and Hector: Badge of Carnage.
Telltale Games announced it was undergoing a "majority studio closure" on September 21, 2018, and fully closed on October 11, 2018. The rights to the Telltale Sam & Max video games were acquired by Skunkape Games: a studio formed by several ex-Telltale developers in early 2020. Skunkape has released remasters of both Save the World and Beyond Time and Space on December 2, 2020 and December 8th, 2021 respectively; a remaster of The Devil's Playhouse has also been confirmed to be in development.
Trivia
- Not counting the Skunkape Games remasters of the Telltale Sam & Max games or the cancelled Freelance Police, Telltale Games is the first and currently only developer involved with the series to have developed multiple Sam & Max video games.