 Bay Area Sound, a company set up by Clint Bajakian, who had worked extensively on composition and sound production on LucasArts games since 1994, produced the soundtrack. The Save the World soundtrack was composed by Jared Emerson-Johnson, Bajakian's former protégé, whose previous work included composition and sound editing for LucasArts. Emerson-Johnson's scores used live performances as opposed to synthesized music often used elsewhere in the video games industry; a small team of five musicians, including Emerson-Johnson and a recording engineer, produced the soundtrack. The score is primarily grounded in film noir jazz, inspired by the work of Henry Mancini and Charles Mingus. However, Emerson-Johnson noted that as the Sam & Max universe is "open-ended", he had the chance to explore into other musical genres in some episodes, such as "a song-and-dance Charleston number, faux Philip Glass, an ode to Nina Rota's music from The Godfather, and even some inspired retro 8-bit game music". Several songs were incorporated into the soundtrack, performed by Emerson-Johnson or Peter Barto, the voice actor for Agent Superball. Purcell later commented that Emerson-Johnson had seamlessly blended a "huge palette of genres and styles", while Ferguson stated that he believed that it was Emerson-Johnson's scores that created the vital atmosphere in the games, noting that prior to the implementation of the music, playing the games was an "unrelenting horror". The soundtrack to Sam & Max Save the World was published in July 2007.
