For 11 years, the Walking Dead developer has been chasing down the future of interactive entertainment. As it turns out, though, the future is now
In 2004, following the high-profile cancellation of the adventure game Sam & Max: Freelance Police, a trio of former LucasArts employees founded California-based Telltale Games with a vision for “television-style gaming”: sitcom-sized episodes based on popular licences to be delivered digitally on a set schedule. At the time, cofounder Kevin Bruner expressed that Telltale’s plans were “bigger than videogames” – the studio wanted to class up interactive entertainment the same way HBO was doing for TV with high-quality scripted shows like The Sopranos.
Back then, Xbox Live Arcade was brand new; if you wanted a game, you went to a shop and bought a boxed copy. Download a one-to-two hour slice of a game each month instead of binge-playing the whole thing at once? You’re kidding, right?
Telltale’s first attempts weren’t far off the point-and-click adventures the company’s earliest employees worked on at LucasArts, and digital distribution took some getting used to. A PC-only developer for years, Telltale didn’t even show up on Xbox until 2009. But now, over a decade after forming, episodic games have found their footing and the name ‘Telltale’ has become synonymous with the choice-driven gameplay popularised in its 2012 breakout hit The Walking Dead. With series like Tales From The Borderlands, Game Of Thrones and Minecraft: Story Mode in its line-up, every Telltale release seems to get more buzz than the last.
“Getting people – and ourselves – to understand the way we wanted to entertain people was tricky. It’s something we didn’t expect to be able to do quite at this scale,” says Bruner, who became CEO in 2015. “We’re really true to our original vision, but we also have the ability to evolve that vision. I feel like one of the biggest things in my job now is to ask for things, because it feels like we’re in this magical time where things we ask for might actually happen! So we should ask while the getting’s good.”
And Telltale has been doing plenty of asking, sometimes unconventionally. With Tales From The Borderlands, for example, there may have been cocktails involved. “We were talking to Randy [Pitchford] and the folks at [Gearbox] at the VGAs after The Walking Dead won, and it was at the afterparty [that] an off-the-cuff idea of, ‘We should do something together with Borderlands, right?’ And the seed was planted,” Bruner explains, noting that many at Telltale were big Borderlands fans. “But then it became this itch that wouldn’t go away, where the more we thought about it, the more we were like, ‘Oh my god, we could do something really cool with Borderlands’.”
Their other recent blockbuster, based on HBO’s Game Of Thrones TV series, was born from a more traditional pitch: “HBO, they don’t do a lot of games licensing. Game Of Thrones is one of the crown jewels in the HBO portfolio, so that’s a big fish to go after and a big fish to land that took a lot of due diligence,” Bruner says. “So [going after licences] is a little bit of both, there’s the organic dreamy, ‘It’d be really cool to do something with Borderlands,’ and then there’s the bigger stuff that’s like, ‘There’s no way HBO would let us play with Game Of Thrones.’ And then you’re like, ‘Well maybe… what would it really take to make it happen?’ and you just do the work.”
And what if you want to make an episodic game based on Minecraft? You ask Notch, of course. “We started the conversation with Notch himself at GDC a few years ago,” Bruner explains of Minecraft: Story Mode. “He was familiar with some of the work that Telltale had done, and we were having a conversation about how cool we thought Minecraft was, and how cool he thought Telltale was, and we were like, ‘Well since we’re both obviously crazy cool, maybe we could do something together.’” Though the deal predated Microsoft’s Mojang acquisition, Bruner says Microsoft has been a great partner: “They really get Minecraft, and they’re doing the right thing with Minecraft.”
Telltale has proven with Tales From The Borderlands that an episodic story game based on another game can work, even across genres, but the initial reveal of Minecraft: Story Mode was met with some confusion. “It’s kind of similar to Borderlands; when people found out we were doing a Minecraft game, they were like, ‘What?! There’s no story in Minecraft, there are no characters,’ and all that,” Bruner laughs. “But I think we’ve put together a really great Minecraft story, that’s grounded in the things that are important to Minecraft – playing with your friends, building stuff with your friends, fighting, surviving, tearing stuff down. These are all things that are critical to the Minecraft world, and we’ve been able to build a really interesting story where all these elements are first-class citizens.”
With the first episode out now, the five-episode series follows a band of blocky friends (including a pig) on an adventure to save the Minecraft universe via the choice-driven gameplay Telltale does so well. Though being a Minecraft fan won’t be a prerequisite, Bruner says the team’s focus is first and foremost that core audience: “When we make a Minecraft game, we’re trying to make the best Minecraft game we could possibly make, not necessarily a game for people who like all the other Telltale games.”
With more than 70 million copies sold to date, that’s a big audience to satisfy. “When we started looking into it, [we found] Minecraft fans are all over the place. There are a ton of people who play Minecraft,” Bruner acknowledges. “There are a lot of kids that play, and it’s fun to make games for kids again because we haven’t done that in a long time. There are also a lot of adults who play, so in this case we get to make the best kind of content – a little cliché but it’s true – it’s content that works for all.” He likens the tone they’re aiming for to classic Amblin Entertainment movies like The Goonies – “films that are great for kids and have all kinds of gags and content that’s great for adults as well.”
Players itching for less family-friendly fare can instead return to Telltale’s The Walking Dead series this autumn, but in contrast to Telltale’s usual five-episode seasons, The Walking Dead: Michonne will be a three-episode “mini-series” starring the katana-wielding fan favourite from The Walking Dead comics and TV show. “[Michonne is] a really important canon character, and I think it’s a real testament to [comic publisher] Skybound and Telltale that we’re going to bring her into the interactive space,” Bruner says. “And she’s an awesome canon character. Michonne is such a sophisticated character, she’s not just like a ‘badass ninja’ or anything like that, even though she is a badass. She’s a really complicated, sophisticated character, and she’s fantastic for the kind of stories we like to tell.”
The mini-series shouldn’t be confused with The Walking Dead: Season Three, also in the works. “We had this opportunity to tell a Michonne story, and we think it’s going to be an incredibly cool Michonne story, but we also want to continue the Walking Dead universe that Telltale has built. This is a way that we can get both of those to happen at the same time,” Bruner explains. While this story won’t intersect with the adventures of Clementine and Telltale’s other The Walking Dead characters, it may still have an impact on some of the future comics, as creator Robert Kirkman has given his blessing for Telltale’s Michonne story to become canon. “It’s really amazing that Robert has given us a moment in the comics where we get to tell officially what’s happening with Michonne,” Bruner says. “He is helping us craft the story – it’s not written by Robert Kirkman – but Robert is closely involved with the story, providing a lot of input.”
But the most exciting things happening at Telltale these days are the ones they won’t talk about. In February they announced a “significant” investment – rumoured to be in the ballpark of $40 million (£26 million) – from Lionsgate Entertainment, the media company behind The Hunger Games, Mad Men, and Orange Is The New Black. (“Big Boo will remember this,” anyone?) Telltale has also teamed up with Marvel Entertainment on an unannounced project slated for 2017. Though Bruner’s tightlipped regarding these partnerships, he’s clearly excited about what they mean for the future of interactive entertainment. Like he said in the early days, this is bigger than games.
“Walking in from work and saying ‘Xbox on’ is pretty cutting edge, it’s ‘the future’. And I think everybody wants to figure out, for traditional videogames, what the next generation of entertainment or ‘the future’ is going to be,” Bruner says. Of course, Telltale has been working on this puzzle for years, but thanks to the big licences it’s landing and the ease of delivering episodes over services like Xbox Live, TV-style gaming has gone mainstream. “There are people who come home after work or after school and the first thing they do is turn on their Xbox. They don’t turn on their cable box or anything else, the Xbox is their primary form of entertainment, and when they’re done playing games, then they go browse the internet or watch regular TV. We think, for that kind of person, Telltale’s content is really rich,” Bruner explains. “You can play really hardcore games and then instead of watching TV [afterward], you can play a Telltale game. That’s the kind of thing the partnerships with Lionsgate and Marvel will help us build – content for that generation of people, people for whom their Xbox is more important than their cable box.”
With episodic gaming proven and Telltalestyle games a genre other developers are now mimicking, Telltale’s next big experiment will be “super shows,” which Bruner describes as “part live-action scripted entertainment and part Telltale game, [with] the choice-based gameplay. There have been other initiatives that have done TV and game combined, but [super shows] are going to be handled in a very Telltale way. With partners like Lionsgate who know the television world so well, and our ten, eleven-year run with interactive storytelling, we’re really enthused about being able to point our guns at a more traditional medium and see what we can do there.”
Considering the size of Lionsgate’s investment and that the press release announcing it hinted at collaboration on original properties, this all sounds like it goes beyond Telltale’s usual licensing practice. “The thing is, with Lionsgate, they’re a very progressive story company as well [as a big media company]. They’ve really embraced Netflix, they do commercialist binge-watching television as well as their traditional stuff, and they’re best in class from a scripted narrative point of view,” Bruner says. “When we were talking with them about where the future lies, there’s alignment on where we think people are going to be – that same idea of people who come home and tell their Xbox to turn on. Both [we] and Lionsgate are really interested in bringing content to that person’s life.”
With so few details available at the moment, it’s hard to picture how super shows will work at this point, but one thing’s certain: they’ll be released episodically. “We’ve talked about all the different ways to get our episodes out there. We certainly pay attention to what Netflix is doing, and what other game companies are doing, but right now we really like the spaces in-between the episodes and the cliffhangers, and the opportunity the community has to talk,” Bruner says. “So we’re going to stay serialised… and probably build more around it, more ways to support that space between episodes.”
Whatever the future brings, Bruner stresses that even with the greater visibility they’re enjoying these days, Telltale will keep making games the Telltale way: “We’re still very independently driven. We still live and die by the games we decide to build and the way that we build them and whether or not people like them. We like it like that.”