![]() ![]() People who are looking for an avenue to get out and tell great stories. Telltale provides those opportunities for someone who is working at another storytelling company like Pixar or Lucasfilm. There’s people that want to make great games, there’s people that want to tell great stories, and there’s people that want to understand how story and interactivity work together, and what that means for the future. I think we’re growing, and I think we’re growing in a place now where people recognize Telltale. Does adding two more series’ put any strain on that approach? Has Telltale grown significantly to account for it? In terms of scale, I know that the way your episodic teams work, there are a few fixed leads and then a more flexible support staff that jumps around between projects. ![]() Let’s expose that more to players.’ We’re having a super time with both of them, but they both offer different things. Whereas Game of Thrones gives us this very fleshed out story where we can get in and say, ‘What a great concept, let’s dive deeper into that. We can talk about what the world is like, what Pandora is like. We can talk about what a Vault Hunter is. We can tell how somebody became a Vault Hunter. While don’t need to be as fleshed out for that gameplay to work, gives us the whole world to play in. Borderlands has an idea, a concept, where they really cared about the world and made it something that they had a lot of freedom to just create a lot of wild ideas, yet it’s still very coherent. It’s interesting, Borderlands versus Game of Thrones. Obviously nothing like The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, but there’s a very humorous, richly realized universe once you look beyond the billions of guns and tons of aliens that you shoot in the face– You look at those two Gearbox games and they’re a lot of fun. Even in something like Borderlands, where the story and setting exist in service to the gameplay. It probably helps too that you’re drawing from richly realized fictional universes for these games. Being able to replicate that and bring the personality of each franchise we work on into the experience is, I think, another important breakthrough … to keep pushing us forward. We’ve created this thing that feels different but similar at the same time. I think that’s the biggest thing has done for us. It really gives us a place where we can tell a great story in a different way, but it still feels like a Telltale game. Now, taking other franchises and being able to interpret those franchises in that way allows us to keep it alive and fresh and new. What it is that resonated with people and what they liked. I think we’ve done a lot of really figuring out what the template should be and how to replicate what we did on The Walking Dead. I feel like we’re now starting to see that bear out. One of the key points I walked away from our chat last year with was, you see Telltale as taking a TV network-style approach of seasonal programming. The best time for us to chat in the midst of the ongoing crunch turned out to be studio’s GDC party, which happened to also coincide with the studio’s 10th year in business. And so it came to pass that Connors and I sat in the balcony looking out over San Francisco’s crowded Temple Nightclub as we chatted about where the company’s been and where it’s headed from here. With two ongoing series in active development plus a third – Tales from the Borderlands – due to arrive in the coming months and a more distant fourth, based on Game of Thrones, it’s busy times for Telltale Games. The San Rafael-based studio had fully established its formula for interactive storytelling, and now it was time to grow.Īrranging a third GDC sitdown with Connors proved to be challenging. The Wolf Among Us had just been announced, and the excitement was palpable as Connors and I discussed the state of the union at Telltale. Connors and his team at Telltale were fresh off the year-end accolades that The Walking Dead garnered at the end of 2012. Telltale had seen recent success with Back to the Future, but none of us knew for sure at that point how the studio’s coming comic book adaptation would rock the foundation of interactive storytelling. We met up on the last day of the show and had a leisurely chat after his GDC talk, which focused on the then-rising trend of digital distribution models. I first sat and chatted with Telltale Games’ CEO Dan Connors at the 2012 Game Developer’s Conference, just weeks before the studio released the first episode of The Walking Dead. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |