In just a few short years, Telltale Games has gone from independent startup to the industry's leading developer of adventure games. Comprised of former LucasArts adventure game devs, their work with titles like Sam & Max and Bone have repopularized the genre amongst gaming enthusiasts. Now the team is gearing up for the June debut of their latest project, Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People.

Recently I had the chance to sit down with Telltale Games own Emily Morganti. Hit the jump to check out our chit chat, wherein we discuss the imminent release of Strong Bad, the future of Sam & Max, and everything in between.

Will the Strongbad game be running on the same engine as Sam & Max?

Yes, we use the same engine for all of our games. The core technology is the same, but we've added some functionality to the engine to allow us to create graphics that look more like the 2D style the Chapmans use in the Homestarrunner.com cartoons.

The first episode is expected to hit in June. When can we expect the second?

We're still working out the schedule. The goal is to have episodes coming out on a monthly basis, like we've done with the Sam & Max games, but since the game is coming out on WiiWare as well as PC, it's not entirely within our control. Right now we're working out the schedule with Nintendo, and when we've figured out exactly how the releases will be handled, we'll let everyone know.

The Strongbad series has often dipped it's wick in gaming references. Can we expect to see playable versions of games like Peasant's Quest or Secret Collect hidden inside the game world?

I don't know about playable versions of those games, but each episode will feature some kind of arcade-style game for you to play within the game. In the first episode, that game is Snake Boxer 5, a top-down boxing game that's reminiscent of old Atari titles. I'm not sure what else you'll be seeing, but I've heard the designers are working on a pretty bizarre "edutainment" title for one of the other episodes…

Not a lot has been floating around in the way of plot details. Any beans you'd like to spill for us?

The first episode will be called Homestar Ruiner, and it involves Strong Bad messing up Homestar's life and then having to make things right again. It feels like you're playing a super long Homestarrunner.com cartoon, which is pretty cool considering how funny the Chapmans' cartoons are.

Season Two of Sam & Max has recently wrapped up on PC's. Any plans for a Season Three?

Yes, we'll be returning to Sam & Max in early 2009. Also, the first six Sam & Max episodes are coming to Wii this fall, which is very exciting since it's something fans have been asking about for a really long time. The six episodes will be packaged together as a Wii retail product.

When word of Sam & Max possibly coming to the Wii hit last year, there was talk of it coming as downloadable episodic content. Can you tell us a little about why you chose to go with a retail disc instead?

The main reason is that even though we'd been keeping the episodes small so they'd be easy to download over the internet, they're still too big to meet WiiWare's requirements. We could have spent time trying to get them smaller but because the episodes were already complete and make for a pretty good "box set", and because people had been asking for a Sam & Max Wii product for such a long time, we decided it would be better to focus our energy on bringing them out as a retail product instead. That doesn't mean we'll never explore the possibility of Sam & Max games on WiiWare, but for now, retail made more sense.

What would you say Telltale learned from their experience trying to bring Sam & Max to WiiWare that helped when developing the Strong Bad game?

We actually started working on Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People before Sam & Max Wii. We knew from the beginning that we wanted SBCG4AP on WiiWare as well as PC, and this influenced some of the design decisions, one of the biggest considerations being download size. Since we knew WiiWare had a certain limit, the designers and programmers have had this at the front of their minds from the very beginning of SBCG4AP's development.

There are also interface decisions that were made because we thought they would work better on the Wii. For example, in Sam & Max, dialogue options are listed at the bottom of the screen through lines of text. In Strong Bad, dialogue options appear above the character's heads, and the topics are represented by pictures instead of text. Either way is fine on the PC, but the more visual approach works better on the Wii.

When last we spoke with you in late 2006, you had said there was some talk of bringing Sam & Max to Xbox Live Arcade. Is there a possibility we'll still see that?

We'd still like to do it. Our tools currently allow us to develop for PC, Xbox 360, and Wii. So many people had been asking for Sam & Max to come to Wii that it seemed the obvious place to start, but we're not ruling out other platforms in the future. We're interested in PlayStation, also… we want our games to be everywhere!

During that last interview, we had also asked you about the possibility of porting Sam & Max to the Mac. You told us "A company called Vanbrio ported Out from Boneville to Mac for us, and we are seeing how that does and weighing our options for future Mac ports moving forward." It's been more than a year since that interview -- how did Boneville do on the Mac? Can we expect to see Sam & Max make their way to the house of Apple?

We learned that porting an individual game to the Mac wasn't necessarily the right way to go. There's no question that the port allowed Mac users to play the game, and it was well received by that audience, but the game wasn't easy to update because we couldn't do it ourselves with our own tools, and porting any of our other games to the Mac would have required starting again from scratch.

The difference between this and our console support is that whether we're developing for PC, Xbox 360, or Wii, the game is developed in the same environment. Then we essentially push a button and it comes out working for one of those platforms. (Okay, it's not quite that easy, but that's the general idea.) It's much easier for us to iterate since we're using our own development tools, and we're able to develop for multiple platforms simultaneously, as we are right now with SBCG4AP.

I'm not going to say we'll never do Mac games, because as I mentioned above, we do want to get our games out on as many platforms as possible, but getting onto the consoles has been a bigger priority. A lot of Mac users who are also gamers own Wiis, so I think we'll hit some at least some of that audience with our Wii titles.

Speaking of Bone, it's been two years since Episode 2: The Great Cow Race was released. Any chance we'll see a third?

We're not working on a new Bone game right now. It's a great license, but we've found that the monthly, seasonal episodic schedule that we established with Sam & Max and are now carrying over to Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People works really well for the type of content we want to do. Bone doesn't fit into that mold as well. I'll never say never, but it's not in the cards at the moment.

Many thanks to Emily Morganti and the team over at Telltale Games for taking the time to speak with us.

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