Telltale Games

» see telltalegames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

telltale showed up on my radar around 2012 with the walking dead season one. by then i was a working computer engineer with ttnet broadband at home and a steam library on the side. honestly, i had not played a point-and-click adventure since the 90s monkey island era and the genre felt closed. then telltale's walking dead arrived as five downloadable episodes that everyone in english-language pc gaming media talked about for a year. it was the one telltale title that the studio's reputation rested on for the rest of its life.

kevin bruner and dan connors started the company in july 2004 in san rafael, california. they were lucasarts adventure-game devs who left after lucasarts cancelled sam and max freelance police in march of that year, a few weeks before it was supposed to ship. back then. the original plan was to keep making the kind of episodic adventures lucasarts had given up on, with sam and max season one shipping in late 2006 after telltale licensed the property back from steve purcell.

i was not paying close attention through the sam and max years, but anyway, the walking dead in 2012 was the breakout. about a million sales in the first twenty days. honestly, the format kept the lucasarts adventure-game bones, point at a thing, click on a thing, talk through a dialog tree. they layered choice-driven narrative on top and shipped in five episodes spread across a year, with the line "clementine will remember that" carrying the load of the new mechanic. the studio won the 2012 game-of-the-year prize at the spike vga awards over journey and dishonored.

the scale story was clear from reviews. in those days. the wolf among us in 2013 was the second success, based on the fables comic. then came game of thrones in 2014 and batman in 2016, alongside tales from the borderlands and minecraft story mode and guardians of the galaxy in the next two years. by 2017 the studio had about 400 employees in san rafael and was running eight licensed series in parallel. honestly, none of them shipped on time. the engine, the same one they had built on top of unity for the walking dead, could not keep up with the rendering demands of the later licenses.

i pretty much only knew the september 2018 end from gaming press at the time. management called an all-hands meeting on september 21, told the room the studio was closing, gave employees thirty minutes to clear their desks. the layoffs covered about 250 of 275 staff, with twenty-five kept on to finish a minecraft story mode netflix deal. there was no severance and the health insurance ended within days. a class-action warn act lawsuit was filed three days later and settled in 2021 for about 4.5 million dollars.

~ the dossier ~

~ the format ~

the telltale format was a five-episode season released across the calendar year, each episode about two hours long, with the next one coming roughly two months later. you played one episode and then waited for the next, the way you would wait for a tv season. the dialog tree was the engine and the choices were the marketing line. honestly, most of the choices did not change the ending more than cosmetically. but the studio was selling the feeling of having an effect on the story, not the actual branching state.

that worked for the walking dead because clementine's relationship with lee carried the whole season and you wanted to believe your choices mattered to her. by the time minecraft story mode shipped in 2015 the format had become predictable, the choices visibly cosmetic, the writing thinner.

~ the day it died ~

the september 2018 collapse was not a slow wind-down. lionsgate had pulled out of a planned investment a few weeks earlier. an existing investor closed a credit line on friday september 14. management spent the next week trying to find replacement funding and on the morning of september 21 the answer was no. the kentucky lawsuit alleged warn act violations for the no-notice layoff, which under federal law requires sixty days warning for layoffs of that scale.

the remaining minecraft story mode team finished the netflix port and was let go in november 2018. the san rafael office was emptied by the end of that month. honestly, the licensed properties returned to their rights holders. fables went back to dc and the walking dead license went back to skybound, with hbo taking the game-of-thrones rights with it on the way out.

~ what it became ~

in august 2019 a new company called lcg entertainment, run by jamie ottilie and brian waddle, acquired the telltale name and a portion of the back catalog out of the bankruptcy estate. relaunched the studio in malibu with about a dozen staff and a small slate. but yeah, the new telltale shipped a remaster of the walking dead in 2019 and announced the wolf among us 2 in december of that year, which has been in development through six anniversaries and is still unreleased in 2026.

the studio is not the same legal entity that shipped clementine's story. it shares a logo and a brand and most of the people who actually built the walking dead now work somewhere else. dontnod and supermassive and deck nine. that scattered-into-other-studios outcome is the most telltale-like ending the company could have had.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »