Sam & Max Wii-bound?

What we heard: Even before it was released, Telltale Games had its eyes on the Wii. In September 2006--two months before the console debuted in North America--the independent developer asked fans to e-mail Nintendo expressing interest in a Wii edition of its episodic revival of the Sam & Max adventure series.

According to a post on Telltale's blog, the effort paid off. Within hours, Nintendo apparently called Telltale to talk about the possibility of Sam & Max coming to the Wii. The developer then publicly urged the flood of e-mails to stop--and then quickly clammed up about any efforts to bring the wise-crackin' crime-fighting duo to platforms beyond the PC. When job listings for Wii and Xbox 360 programmers appeared on Telltale's site in early 2007, they begat rumors of Sam & Max outings on both platforms...until the developer revealed that it was porting CSI: Hard Evidence to the consoles.

Over the weekend, though, the prospect of a Wii Sam & Max was raised again, courtesy of the aforementioned press release. Tucked inside an announcement saying JoWood would publish the Wii version of Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None was news that "JoWood plans to adapt further successful adventure-game licenses for the Nintendo Wii." The company went on to say that "One of the next projects [is] Sam & Max. Already named Adventure [game] of the year by readers of the German computer-game magazine PC Games (as seen the February 2008 issue), Sam & Max will also soon be hunting criminals on the Nintendo Wii."

The official story: Unfortunately, no further details about the Wii version of Sam & Max were revealed in the JoWood release, and neither JoWood nor Telltale would comment on JoWood's own press release. Presumably, though, JoWood would be publishing a Telltale-developed version of the game in Europe, as it does for several other developers. Details on the game's North American plans--including a US publisher and release date--remain unknown.

Bogus or not bogus?: Not bogus that a Sam & Max Wii port is planned. JoWood wouldn't simply pull such a project out of thin air, and the low-graphics, point-and-click adventure title would work well on the console. However, until more details are known, its release is far from assured.