The Tragic Story of Telltale Games
The Tragic Story of Telltale Games
Top 10 Greatest Telltale Games
Welcome to MojoPlays! Today, we’re looking at the tragic story of Telltale Games. Where did it all go wrong? Point-and-click adventure games were once some of the most popular games out there, and many of them remain classics to this day. One studio, in particular, was the best in the business in the 1990s: LucasArts. LucasArts games like “The Secret of Monkey Island” and “Grim Fandango” were iconic, but the company eventually stopped focusing on adventure games entirely. The quality of its output began to deteriorate and, in 2012, Disney acquired the company. But many LucasArts developers never lost faith in adventure games, and some of them left LucasArts long before its acquisition so that they could make the games they wanted to. In 2004, three ex-LucasArts developers came together to found Telltale Games, which eventually became the industry’s new and highly acclaimed powerhouse of adventure and episodic games. These developers were Troy Molander, Dan Connors, and Kevin Bruner, with Connors and Bruner both serving as the studio’s CEOs at different points. In the beginning, Telltale Games released small games that managed to find an audience, starting with the poker game “Telltale Texas Hold’em”. But they were most known for reviving the “Sam & Max” series after the video games were dropped by LucasArts. “Sam & Max” has always had a healthy fanbase, and these fans loved Telltale’s new games, starting with “Sam & Max Save the World” in 2006. The game is still a cult hit and remains one of the best titles Telltale ever produced during its entire run. After “Sam & Max” proved that people still wanted point-and-click adventure games with dialogue options and tricky puzzles, Telltale’s slow rise began, with studio heads always on the hunt for new licensed products they could put their trademark spin on. They got to tackle another LucasArts IP in 2009 with “Tales of Monkey Island”, and then finally started branching out into even bigger properties like “Back to the Future” and “Jurassic Park”. “Jurassic Park” was a glitchy mess that had some good moments, but ultimately didn’t live up to the movies, while “Back to the Future” fared much better critically. But Telltale isn’t best-known now for any of these games, beloved as “Sam & Max” still is. In actuality, Telltale is synonymous with a game that’s both their greatest success and the instrument of their own demise. In 2012, “The Walking Dead” was released. Directed by Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin among others, “The Walking Dead” was lightning in a bottle. Coming at the height of the zombie resurgence in pop culture, the game follows convicted murderer Lee as he tries to look after a young girl named Clementine in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, teaching her survival skills she’d still be using by the final season. This poignant and human story, with players forced to choose between which characters lived and died, was one of the best games of the year and became the mold all subsequent Telltale Games would have to fit in. It was closely followed by 2013’s “The Wolf Among Us”, which was just as popular critically despite having far less mainstream appeal than “The Walking Dead”, which had its second season premiere before the year was out. But after “The Walking Dead” season one, only two of the many games Telltale released before its closure were actually profitable: “The Wolf Among Us” and “Minecraft: Story Mode”. Telltale’s money to hire more staff and produce more games wasn’t coming from profits but from the investment of its business partners who were providing the licenses for the games. The studio was deep into an unsustainable business model. It ended up with nearly 400 employees at its peak which it was totally unable to manage, with non-stop, mandatory crunch required to keep churning out games. These games were getting more and more similar and were all built on an engine that was increasingly outdated and difficult for new developers to use. Games were unpolished, full of bugs, and though there were a few gems lots of them were completely forgettable. The studio suffered more when the brains behind “The Walking Dead”, Vanaman and Rodkin, left to start their own indie studio, Campo Santo; they’d eventually go on to make 2016’s “Firewatch”. On the outside, concern began to rise for Telltale Games, which was producing more games with bigger IPs with more staff, but without the glowing critical reviews or high sales figures they needed. Then, on September 21st, 2018, a deal with Lionsgate, the studio’s last big investor, fell through, and 90% of its staff were laid off. They were reportedly given just a half hour to leave and take with them whatever personal effects they could carry, receiving no warning and no severance. These developers suddenly found themselves stuck in one of the US’s most expensive cities, San Francisco, with no job and no financial support from Telltale, which had retained a tiny crew of just two-dozen people to finish “Minecraft”. A class-action lawsuit was even brought against what remained of the company for breaking labor laws by not paying severance or offering any notice. Since the death of Telltale, other studios stepped in to both hire those developers and buy up the licenses to some of Telltale’s biggest franchises. In particular, Skybound Entertainment hired many Telltale developers and put them to work on the last two episodes of “The Walking Dead’s” final season, while the new Telltale Games, officially LCG Entertainment, has announced a sequel to “The Wolf Among Us”. Ultimately, Telltale Games got too big for its boots. The studio heads came from humble beginnings and found themselves completely unable to effectively manage a staff of over 300 developers, which led to an abundance of bland, broken games offering no financial stability. It was only ever a matter of time.
