About 50 thousand people have written or otherwise harassed me about this news, so it’s sort of suspicious that it’s taken me so long to get it posted. Sorry about that.

A week ago, the gaming site Gamasutra ran an interview with Steve Purcell, in a feature titled “Playing Catch-Up: Steve Purcell.” The article is a great read, as it touches on what led Purcell into the games industry in the first place, his time at LucasArts, what he’s been up to the last few years, and of course the oft-mourned Sam & Max Freelance Police game.

The part of the story that made everyone’s head and/or genetalia explode, though, was a bit at the very end in which Purcell answers a question about “getting back into games,” which went like this:

Finally, Steve concludes his comments with equivocation about whether his involvement in the game industry is completely behind him:”Would I get back into games? Sure. The [Sam & Max] license is back in in my hands now so we’ll see what happens in the near future.”

Of course, he immediately qualifies that with, “In the meantime, when I’m not working at Pixar, I’m exploring other bizarre concepts, doing some painting, and cobbling together material for my website which will be called Spudvision.com,” so I wouldn’t start obsessively refreshing certain websites of known ex-Sam & Maxers quite yet, but it’s still very promising news to hear.

Thanks to Pollo, Master Jodi, Lutzifer, Michael, Donovan, Sean, Marek, Spaff, and Jason for writing or harassing me about this. Clearly you are all hardcore.

Thanks to the persistent digging and online harvesting of the Unofficial Sam & Max forumites, a couple of previously unseen animation clips from Sam & Max Freelance Police have been discovered.

On the portfolio site for animator Joe White, if you visit the animation page, you can check out a great clip of Max shaving his butt in the office paper shredder, some walking animations, and a clip of Sam and Max busting out some moves in a dance-a-thon.

The rest of Joe White’s site is also pretty cool and worth checking out.

About two months ago (yes, I’m a failure), Steve Purcell wrote in to let me know that a short comic story written by him and drawn by Mike Mignola and Kevin Nowlan appeared in the book “Batman Villains Secret Files & Origins 2005.” The story they contributed tells a campy version of the origin of the character Clayface. According to Purcell, “it was done many years ago and then canned by the Batman editor at the time who thought it was disrespectful to the characters.”

If you can’t find it in your local comic shop, you might want to check online. For instance, I found it here. You may find it elsewhere.