about the game's cancellation, and it was only when Farmer himself looked it up online that he found out. He expressed disappointment over the decision, claiming that Sam & Max Hit the Road had some of the best writing he had ever performed. According to Stemmle, the cancellation decision was prompted by the report of an external marketing analysis group hired by LucasArts, which claimed that the European market for adventure games "had simply disappeared. Not shrunk, not cratered, just... disappeared". A newly established German company, Bad Brain Entertainment, claimed to have entered negotiations with LucasArts to acquire the game, although nothing resulted from these talks. LucasArts subsequently dismissed many of the designers involved with developing their adventure games, and in 2006 stated that they did not intend to return to the adventure genre until the next decade. Some of the former Freelance Police development team formed Telltale Games in June 2004 to continue developing the sort of adventure games that LucasArts no longer wished to produce. Telltale Games later unsuccessfully attempted to buy the rights to Freelance Police from LucasArts, which would have enabled the team to finish developing the game. When the LucasArts license expired in mid-2005, Purcell took the franchise to Telltale Games, where it was developed into an episodic series of games. Very little of the work done on Freelance Police was carried over by the developers to Telltale Games; LucasArts still held onto the game's assets and Telltale was wary about using similar design patterns. The new series debuted in October 2006 with Sam & Max Save the World. Although Freelance Police was never released, Stemmle later reused its plot summary in the Telltale's Poker Night 2, where it is described as an off-screen adventure Sam and Max have during the course of the game. Based on Sam's dialogue, the game would have involved dealing with giant penguins from the land of Subarctica (renamed "Zyzobia" in Poker Night 2) who worshipped Max as their god. Bill Farmer revealed in a 2014 interview that one of the game's plot points included Sam and Max switching brains, with him and Jameson likewise doing impressions of each other's character. References External links Official Sam & Max: Freelance Police website, retrieved from archived version of August 6, 2003 Adventure games Single-player video games Point-and-click adventure games LucasArts games Cancelled Windows games Video games based on Sam & Max Video