Telltale Games has just announced that the dog and rabbity-thing crime-fighting team's episodic adventures will launch on Xbox LIVE® Arcade on June 17, 2009 with Sam & Max Save the World, a bundle of six award-winning comedy games.

Sam & Max Save the World, which was known as Sam & Max Season One for previous releases, has been enhanced for Xbox LIVE Arcade with achievements, widescreen and HD graphic support, and updates to the gameplay controls. The game is in English with subtitles in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. The Xbox LIVE Arcade download will sell for 1600 Microsoft points—less than 300 points per episode.

Sam & Max Save the World is a sitcom-style game with an overarching story that develops across its six episodes. The series kicks off close to home with a trio of former child stars who propagate self-help video tapes with hypnotic qualities throughout Sam and Max's neighborhood. Each subsequent episode takes the Freelance Police deeper into this mind control plot, from a casino run by unusually cuddly Mafioso to the White House and finally to a disturbingly blissful lunar retreat, where Sam and Max must face down the mastermind behind it all. The Save the World episodes have won a variety of awards, including a "Funniest Game" nod from GameSpot, plus "Editor's Choice" and "Adventure Game of the Year" accolades from publications including IGN, PC Gamer, and GameSpy.

The June 17 release comes less than a month after Telltale's Xbox LIVE Arcade debut with Fright of the Bumblebees, the first of four Wallace & Gromit episodes. The remaining Wallace & Gromit games and Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, the second season of Freelance Police adventures, will be appearing on the channel in the coming months.

Sam and Max got their start in comics in 1987, courtesy of cartoonist Steve Purcell. They have appeared in several formats over the years, including a graphic adventure game, Sam & Max Hit the Road, in 1993; an award-winning animated series in 1998; and an online web comic in 2006, for which Purcell was awarded an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. The 20th Anniversary Edition of the Surfin' the Highway comic anthology has been nominated for a 2009 Eisner Award.