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Freelance Police office – file cabinet and stacks of paper

Big news! After a year and a half on preorder, my Sam & Max figures from Boss Fight Studio are finally here! But that’s not even the biggest news…

Sam & Max Save the World — the game my roombox is based on — is being rereleased on PC and Nintendo Switch!

Sam & Max Save the World Remastered will be out on December 2, and I’m handling PR for the launch. The new version was created by a small team of people who worked on the original and acquired the rights after Telltale (the game’s developer) shut down in 2018. Read all about it in this VICE Games article and feast your eyes on the trailer below.

If you’re just here for the dollhouses and have no idea what I’m talking about, my first post about the Freelance Police roombox has a crash course on the history of this series and my connection to it.

The Freelance Police office looks more cartoony in the new version — closer to Steve Purcell’s comics.

It now has lighting and shadows that the tech couldn’t handle in the original, and the color of the walls is more green. (But I will not repaint my walls!)

Here’s how my office looks so far:

This weekend I made the file cabinet to the right of Sam’s desk. I made this out of 1/16″ thick basswood, with 1/4″ square basswood as supports inside the cabinet. (The cabinet is hollow with fake drawers.)

I wanted to make the drawers square like they are in the game, but in order to have three square drawers I would have had to make the file cabinet shorter, and then it would have seemed too short next to Sam.

I assembled the cabinet by gluing the front and side pieces to 1/4″ square supports.


The support pieces are slightly shorter than the cabinet pieces. I lined them up at the bottom, leaving an approximately 1/16″ gap at the top.

The top piece sits on those support pieces.

My front, back, and sides weren’t all exactly the same length. I lined them up at the bottom, so the top was uneven. After gluing in the top piece, I cleaned up the top on the disc sander. Then I hand sanded the whole cabinet with fine grit sandpaper to make it nice and smooth.

Here’s how it looks next to Sam. Seems a little short, but as I mentioned above I was limited by the height of the drawer fronts.

I painted the cabinet and drawer fronts with blue metallic paint.

While the paint dried, I worked on the cardboard box that sits on top of the file cabinet. A box would have been easy enough to make, but I recently stumbled across this kit on Etsy and jumped at the opportunity to not have to figure it out myself. I’ll use the smaller boxes that came in the kit in the attic roombox.

The box came scored, so all I had to do was fold and glue. Simplest kit I ever assembled!

Next I printed out the labels for the box and the drawer fronts. (Special thanks to Sam & Max developer Randy Tutor for sending me the textures!) These are test prints on my black and white printer, hence the fuzziness.

There’s a story behind the dates. On March 3, 2004, LucasArts’ Sam & Max Freelance Police game was cancelled. Several people from the development team moved on to work at Telltale, and they put a 03-03-04 label on the box as a nod to Freelance Police’s cancellation. In the new remastered version, a second label has been added: 09-21-18, the day Telltale shut down.

Once I got the label sizes how I wanted them, I printed them out in color and sprayed them with UV sealer.

(I use fancy Epson presentation paper for color printing. When I only have a few things to print in color, I print them out in a row like this and then slice off the printed part, so I can print on the unused part of the paper later.)

Here’s how they look on the box.

There’s a towering stack of paper inside the box and another one next to the file cabinet. To make these, I used the paper cutter to cut scrap paper into 3/4″ wide strips.

I folded these into an accordion.

Then I dabbed glue on each segment of the accordion and squished it into a stack.

I added wood blocks to the bottom of the box so I wouldn’t have to fill the entire box with paper stacks.

Once paper is added, you can’t see the blocks.

Before gluing in the paper stacks, I added a piece hanging out.

Then I glued in the paper stacks. For the piece on top, I used a leftover sheet of printed paper from the bulletin board project. This is another texture extracted from the game.

I made some more paper stacks to go next to the file cabinet.

Zooming in on the original Telltale version of Sam & Max’s office, I noticed a file folder next to the paper stack. My cardboard box kit came with a few freebie manila folders, so I used one of these along with another printout left over from the bulletin board.

I put together an issue of Alien Love Triangle Times to go on top of the paper stack. This is also extracted from the game textures.


Here’s how it all looks. Sam is excited!

I used wire cutters to cut down heavy duty staples for the drawer handles.

The handles were tough to glue on. Tacky glue didn’t hold so I eventually used Super Glue.

Voila!


5 Comments

  1. ann

    Such detail! And it all adds to the authenticity that you are wanting to create. Very nice. And I appreciate the personal connection to this project. Bravo, Emily.

  2. Marilyn

    Wow! Love it.
    I’ll have to remember the staple trick for some file cabinets I’ve been working on.
    Marilyn

  3. Diane

    Looks great!

  4. Chris V

    That looks fantastic and the figures are really cool! And you get to work with them, too. How neat! A fun project!

  5. Sheila

    Oh wow! That’s really looking great. So glad your figures came in! I’m going to keep that staple trick in mind. Much better than trying to shape jewelry wire.

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