How Sam & Max Hit The Road Taught Me To Love Words

People who know nothing about video games like to sling mud. They’ll say that games rot your brain, waste your time and distract from your studies.

I’m here to tell you that that’s a lie, and I have proof.

Be sure to click the video above to see how educational this game can really be.

When I was 10 years old, I convinced my Mom to buy me some games I’d seen in a local Macintosh magazine. The pickings were slim, so I ended up choosing a random collection of games from a company called LucasArts.

A few months later, my English teacher pulled my Mom aside to talk about something I’d written. “He’s using these really large words for a kid his age” she said, like “‘Miasma’ and ‘Turgid’. What has he been reading?”. My Mom didn’t know, so she came home, asked me the same question. I told her that I’d seen them in a video game called Sam & Max Hit the Road. I told her that I’d written them down, looked them up and that I’d like to learn more words. So my Mom went to our local library, picked up a bunch of SAT vocabulary audio tapes and handed them off to me.

I was in fourth grade.

Sam & Max Hit the Road, along with the rest of the Lucasarts games, made me fall in love with words in a way that no book ever had before.

If you don’t believe me, the video above is proof of that.