Leaderboard

Steve ended up doing a bunch of work on this release in addition to his and Laserschwert's collab on the back of the box map. Here's a look at a few pieces of it, using photos he posted to the Sam & Max Funhouse Facebook page as visual aids: He did the cover to the Conroy Bumpus Live from Bumpusville "EP" (really just a mini CD that could fit in the case file envelope). I wonder how long it's been since Steve last drew Conroy Bumpus?! The CD contains the same redbook audio tracks that were found on the original CD-ROM edition of the game in the 90s, with the track order changed slightly so "King of the Creatures" is first. The box includes a real version of the fake "official Hit The Road totally unrelated board game,", which actually started its life as a double page spread in the On The Road comic (which is also included in this edition as a miniature reprint of the original book!). We thought it would be cool to do the board game as an actual board game, instead of an art print or postcard or something, but that meant it would need pieces! After kicking around a few ideas, Steve proposed doing a collection of fake vintage bottle caps, representative of the heroes of the game. It was perfect for the "crap found between the cracks of the car seat on a long road trip" vibe we wanted for the collectors edition, and Limited Run was into the idea and found someone who could print them up for us. It also meant Steve ended up doing portraits of Trixie and Bruno! The game board is dice based, so we did a die stolen from the Savage Jungle Inn, lettering and palm tree logos on the 1 side, and the "savage jungle" logo from the sign outside printed between the pips on the 2 side. (not pictured) Also in the case file evelope is a piece of the World's Largest Ball of Twine! The idea here was this is a cheesy little chotchkie you could pick up on a spindle rack by the cash register in the spinning restuaurant, or in the museum. It seemed like the sort of cheesy tourist trap souvenir you'd be able to get there. Limited Run agreed to cut a zillion little pieces of twine so we were good to go. Steve did the retro illustration of the Ball and restaurant. There's a bunch of other crazy stuff buried the deeper you dig, like these scribbly storyboards of an early idea for the game's opening: I don't want to spoil all the contents, though, as I know there are people out there who ordered it and still haven't received it.

One part of my contribution to the box design was cleaning up the USA map that's seen on the back of the box. The idea was for me to upscale the original game's background, while Steve would just provide a few little icons to represent the different locations in the game, as he wouldn't have time in his schedule to re-paint the whole map. Right away it was clear, that those pesky longitude/latitude lines would never upscale cleanly, so my first step was to paint those out: Easy enough, right? Let's get to upscaling (correcting the non-square-pixel aspect ratio while we're at it)! Eww... well, clearly this wouldn't work, neither with the text overlay nor Sam & Max themselves. Luckily, Steve offered to repaint those overlays as well, so back to the original background, to give Steve some space to work his magic. Recreating the game's ugly banding was actually harder than I expected, but after all it turned out fine. Back to upscaling! Ah, much better. Using a combination of different ESRGAN models allowed me to not only get nice outlines, but also reign in the banding, which I so faithfully re-created. Ah, well. But this was still looking a bit too clean, so it just made sense to add a bit of a brush texture overlay. Yes, that'll do. For the coordinate grid, I just recreated the lines at high resolution. Now comes the real magic, once Steve adds his overlays. It still boggles my mind that so many years later, we are getting brand-new HTR art from Steve Purcell! Steve also added the brushy lines and scribbles along the route... ... and Jake then wrangled it all into a beat-up, folded map, tying it all together for the back of the box. The end.