Taking the role of Jake, the player solves puzzles, converses with characters from the Callahan's Place series and visits locations such as the Amazon rainforest, Transylvania and outer space.

First planned as a self-published title, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon switched to publisher Take-Two late in development, and was subsequently mismarketed as a work of Western fiction.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon became Mandel's last project at Legend Entertainment, and was the company's penultimate adventure game, followed by John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles (1998).

[4] Believing the Callahan's stories to be a good fit for the adventure genre, Mandel considered the idea of adapting them "for a decade" and pitched the concept to Sierra during his time at the company,[5] where he had begun to work in 1990.

Mandel's chance to create Callahan's Crosstime Saloon came after his departure from Sierra,[7] which he left during the development of Space Quest 6 because of his distaste for the company's changing corporate culture.

Legend co-founders Bob Bates and Mike Verdu then asked Mandel to select two potential authors to adapt, so that the company could begin a new project after the failure of The Belgariad.

"[3] According to Mandel, Robinson's short story collections also supplied the basis for the game's episodic structure, a design decision he believed was necessary to capture the Callahan's Place style.

[10] In adapting the Callahan's Place books for computers, Josh Mandel described feeling "a huge responsibility in the temporary custody I had been granted with these characters",[7] in part thanks to the "terrifying omnipresent knowledge" that its protective fans would be critical of a game unfaithful to Spider Robinson's work.

According to Mandel, the decision to break from the series' universal setting of Callahan's bar came early: he found it "unnecessarily literal" to limit the game to a single area, and unrealistic to include puzzles in the bargoers' past-tense flashback sequences.

[5] Legend Entertainment was a small development house of only 13 employees when Mandel joined,[14] and the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon team reached 22 members by late 1996.

Game design documents at Legend were written in a "pseudocode" format rather than in plain text, and the company was unused to working in the style Mandel had used at Sierra.

"[15] Callahan's Crosstime Saloon was initially set to be self-published by Legend Entertainment,[2][4] but the company began to transition away from publishing in mid-1996, when it offloaded sections of its business to Random House's RandomSoft branch.

[18] In September 1996, Legend signed the publishing rights for Callahan's Crosstime Saloon over to Take-Two Interactive, which wanted the project as part of its effort to expand and diversify its portfolio.

[22] In preparation for the game's release, Take-Two incorrectly advertised Callahan's Crosstime Saloon as a work of Western fiction,[23] a mistake that Mandel claimed had occurred "because nobody at the company [had] bothered to play it — or even ASK what it's about — before publishing it.

"[24] Calling Take-Two "the bottom of the barrel of the games industry", Mandel also accused the publisher of failing to market Callahan's Crosstime Saloon past January 1997 and of creating substandard packaging for the project.

[22] According to Mandel, Take-Two mistakenly produced and released the unfinished beta of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon rather its completed gold master,[9] an event he later called the worst moment of his game career.

"[30] Writing for Rock Paper Shotgun in 2016, Richard Cobbett praised the humor of Josh Mandel, and blamed publisher Take Two that "[this] truly excellent adventure slipped instantly into obscurity".

[33] Cobbett highlighted the game again for PC Gamer, contrasting its technological limits with its "great characters, packed locations, superb background detail, endless throwaway jokes, and ... cheesy one-liners".

He later said that he had become "extremely depressed about" Take-Two's handling of the game, and felt that his lack of coding knowledge would make him a "financial drain" at the small and troubled Legend, as he did not expect to receive another designer position for some time.

[36] Thereafter, the studio sold to publisher GT Interactive and changed its focus to developing shooter games such as Unreal II: The Awakening and The Wheel of Time.