The following interview with Sam & Max Season One lead designer Dave Grossman was published on 1up.com just before Bright Side of the Moon was released in April of 2007. You can read the original here.

Assuming this last episode hits on schedule, Telltale has done the impossible and shipped an episodic season on time. From the outside, it seems to have gone pretty smoothly. True?

Smooth as silk! We thought of every detail before we started, and absolutely nothing went wrong, and I'm totally lying to you right now. Or maybe not totally. Given the complexity of the project, the brevity of the schedule and the fact that we hadn't done this to quite the same degree before, it went remarkably smoothly. We had to make adjustments on the fly all the time to keep ourselves on the mark for both quality and deadline, but fortunately, the team is full of seasoned professionals who can handle that sort of thing. Very little time was wasted over the course of the season, and only a few people actually caught fire.


Were there any big surprises along the way?

Did I ever tell you about the time one of the voice actors had a medical emergency and had to drop out at the last minute and we didn't have a backup? Or the month that more or less everybody in the office came down with the flu? Or the time the wrecking ball came crashing through the wall during a playtest session? OK, that last one didn't happen, but I was expecting it after the others.


Did you ever have any last minute doubt that one of the episodes wouldn't ship on time?

Not really, and especially not at the last minute. I'm pretty confident about the production. My anxieties are all about whether people will think they're fun. I keep hearing that they are, but Mom's probably just saying that to be nice.


What are some things you can look at in the final episode and say, "these are this way because of feedback we got over the course of the season?"

We eventually (for the final episode) changed the way you get hints as a direct response to user feedback, and we'll probably change it again in the future. And we made the games harder as we went along, which we had always figured we would do but if the feedback hadn't backed us up we would have changed our minds. And we started writing a lot more new lines for looking at the miscellaneous objects in the environments because people really seemed to want us to. We even changed the time of day. Oh, and we decided to make the games much funnier.


What would you do differently if making Season 1 all over again?

I'd spend more time up front planning the structure of the season as a whole so that things would feel even more connected across the episodes. Of course, I always want to spend more time designing stuff, and the only way I know I'm finished is that a deadline appears and I have to move on and think about something else.


What's the best moment in Season 1?

The day Jared sent us the music for the singing bear heads in the third episode. I'm a sucker for a good musical number. The Hooray It's War song from episode four wins on sheer production value, but Mafia Free You and Me is my favorite one to listen to. I was humming it for weeks.


Worst?

The day Heather's sea monkeys got spilled. That didn't have anything specifically to do with Sam & Max, as far as I know, but it was a terrible tragedy nonetheless.


Okay, so by now everyone knows there's a Season 2 in the works. Give us a hint about what to expect.

No.