Dan and I were talking about the end of the first game, and how the part in Barrel Haven wasn't there. Is any of that going to be introduced in this game instead?

Yeah, there's a little bit of time overlap between the first game and the second game. One of the things that I think the first game didn't do very well is you didn't see the end coming. We're going to back up a little bit in time. The Cow Race game starts after Phoney has snuck away from Gran'ma's house in the middle of the night.

So we are going to see that part from the end of the book that wasn't included in the first game.

Yes, and this time around we're not sticking as closely to the book, either. We're taking some more liberties. Jeff Smith is still really involved in the design, and he's actually getting a lot of enjoyment out of the way we're… it's more like rearranging time and the order that things happen. We're not really trying to change any of the events that happen, it's still the story. But we don't want this next game to end as abruptly, so it has a more standard rise and fall, and it lands a little more smoothly. You should be able to see the end coming. So yeah, we're definitely learning from what we've done, but I don't think any of it's going to affect the production cycles, or the amount of time. I think the Cow Race is going to be a much better game than Boneville.

When is the projected release date?

Spring. It really all depends… we just want it to be right, so we'll say spring for now, and we'll probably announce a month soon.

Is it primarily the same team as Boneville?

Yeah, Dave and Heather [Logas] are designing, Randy [Tudor] is doing all the gameplay programming. It's the same team. We're hiring some new people, so hopefully one of them will get to help Randy out as a programmer.

Will Dave Grossman also be involved with Sam & Max?

The way it works is, Dave is the senior designer, so Dave oversees absolutely everything. Dave is enormously experienced and very talented, so we use him everywhere we possibly can. Dave makes CSI suggestions as well. The general strategy is there will be a writer/designer per project, and Dave's our [famed designer Shigeru] "Miyamoto," let's put it that way. He oversees everything from a design perspective. And then it ends up that Dave and generally I, since I'm responsible for the actual production, end up banging heads on a lot on things. "Should we do this, can we not do this." It works out well.

Because the production schedules are staggered, is that what allows you to be working on so many projects at the same time?

No, we have two teams. The people working on CSI right now are working on CSI. The core technology guys—myself, Graham McDermott, John Sgro, we work on both projects, but no, each project has a separate team right now. We hope there's more CSI work in the future. Not being able to talk about CSI has been really frustrating, because it's looking really good. We really feel like we're raising the bar for what it can be. Bringing it into 3D is a big deal, making it look nice, making it play nice. So we're really proud of everything we've been doing with CSI. Can't wait for screenshots to get out, it looks so different than everything else.

As far as what you have brought to the franchise, besides the move to 3D, are there other Telltale touches?

The interacting with evidence. The tools. Previously all the tools were just little cursors, and now the tools are real 3D objects. You just get a much better sense of immersion, like you're actually doing stuff. It definitely feels more like a TV show. I think it's like moving from a board game to more of a live-action game.

There's been a lot of confusion about whether you're going to make nine Bone games total (one game per book). What's the plan?

There aren't enough interactive possibilities in book three to make a complete game. It's an uphill battle for us on that front. Only having one game out is a struggle for us right now, because it's hard for the average gamer out there buying our games, feeling like, "Wow, this was cool, but darn, it was short." We're going to give them more right away. We're excited about the pattern, and we think that they're going to be excited about the pattern, but we haven't delivered enough for anybody to feel the pattern yet. There is some mistrust from other companies that have claimed to do this. We're okay with that, we just have to ride it out, and once we get a few things going then it'll make sense to people. The other thing is the book per episode. Book one mapped really nicely to the size game we want to make. Book two maps really nicely to the game we're going to make. So the pattern that we are going to be giving people is book one was called Out from Boneville, game one was Out from Boneville. Book two is The Great Cow Race, game two will be The Great Cow Race.

That sets an expectation.

Yeah. So not until we get to the game that's after that do we break that pattern, and I believe that even with all the explaining in the world, people are going to see game one / book one, game two / book two, nine books, $180 for the series. Why should I pay $180 for a game?

You said book three doesn't have as many opportunities for interactivity. Do you have any ideas about how you'll handle that?

We'll go over into book four and beyond. In book three they spend a lot of time talking and wandering around the forest. A lot of it can be condensed. We're pulling some of the important story points that need to be told into Cow Race, so some of that information will be there and we can start narratively a little deeper into book three. It's part of the plan. We don't have a crystal clear plan, but book three is mostly wandering around the forest, learning the history of why they're all there, and unless we're just going to wander around and talk, we need more stuff to happen there.

Sounds like a good opportunity for some dialogue puzzles.

You'll be in the forest quite a bit, but if we were literally following the book, it would be very difficult. We'd have to do some really arbitrary kind of, "Hmm, how are we going to get across this river while we talk about the history of the valley?" And, "Hmm, how are we going to get around these big rocks while we discuss more history of the valley?" We can do a little bit better than that.



Dan and I talked a bit about Sam & Max, and I understand you're still at the drawing board. Any ideas about how similar or different it's going to be, compared to the previous Sam & Max games?

I think the general direction that we're going right now—and it's still really preliminary—is it's going to be a little grittier, a little closer to Steve's comic. The Lucas games were really kind of bright and candy-colored, and we're not going to lose the cartoony, wacky world, but if you look at Steve's art, his art is a little bit grittier. He's said that the Sam & Max world should be looked at through the bottom of a dirty ashtray. Right now we're just exploring ways of how we can still keep it funny and whimsical, but just have a little bit more edge. At Lucas, the Freelance Police project was, "How do we take the 1993 game and pull it forward?" We're looking at Sam & Max a little bit more holistically here, to say, "How can we take the Lucas game, the TV shows, all the comics, Steve himself, and look at it as a whole? How do we really capture what Steve wants Sam & Max to be?"

Is the idea to base the game on comics he's already written?

No. I think it'll be new stuff. It'll probably be pre-existing ideas that Steve's had for a long time, so in that sense it's similar to Bone; we have a lot of material we can draw from, it's just not published material at this point. Steve hasn't come and dumped a whole bunch of unfinished comics on us—it's all in his head—but he's like, "I've always wished that Sam and Max could have done this," and we're like, "Oh, okay, we can cover that." That's the great thing about Sam and Max, they can go anywhere. They can go into space, they can travel through time. Bone is this very serious, epic storyline, where Sam & Max can just be anywhere at any time.

Do you anticipate the puzzles, the kinds of things the player's doing, to be very different than what you have us doing in Bone?

Yes. Sam & Max is a different audience. Bone is with Scholastic, and it's a younger audience. Sam & Max is going to be a game for older, more experienced gamers. When we put the difficulty meter on the website, it was to kind of let people know that where we're coming from, Bone is on the easy side. Infocom, when they made games, had beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We would classify Bone as beginner, although I think "beginner" is the wrong word for it. It's a 2 out of 6. Sam & Max will be a more sophisticated game.

Someone commented on our forum recently that Bone doesn't have any wacky puzzles, and someone else said, "Let them save that for Sam & Max."

You know… I like all the puzzles in Bone. I have some problems with Bone, but I think most of the puzzles were pretty good. But the Sam & Max puzzles will be more sophisticated, more traditional adventure gamer stuff. I definitely think Sam & Max is more the game that most of the regular adventure crowd is going to be expecting from us, but we're all very happy with Bone. We've been big Bone fans for a long time. It's just that you can't do a Bone game the same way you would do a Sam & Max game. We've read on some of the forums where it's like, "We're a little nervous that Telltale has Sam & Max." We absolutely realize that Sam & Max and Bone are different beasts. That's another good thing about getting CSI out. The poker game [Telltale Texas Hold'Em] and Bone look very similar, candy-colored, bright stuff, and it's like, "We can do different art." In the next year we'll definitely prove our diversity, and I think it'll go a long way.

Is there anything else you want to share with our readers?

Just hang in there, keep the faith. Buy Bone for all of your friends at Christmas. We're doing something different. It's just going to take a little bit more time for people to figure out who we are.

Many thanks to Kevin and Dan for satisfying our curiosity. They've given us a lot to look forward to. Keep your eye on Adventure Gamers to see what else Telltale Games comes up with in 2006.