Telltale Games
Telltale Incorporated was an American video game developer based in San Rafael, California. The company was founded in July 2004 by former LucasArts developers Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, following LucasArts' decision to leave the adventure game genre. Telltale established itself to focus on adventure games using a novel episodic release schedule using digital distribution, creating its own game engine, the Telltale Tool, to support this. It closed in October 2018 after filing for bankruptcy protection.
Telltale's initial successes were with games using intellectual properties with small but dedicated fan bases including Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Homestar Runner, and Bone. Around 2010, the studio gained more lucrative licensing opportunities in more mainstream properties such as Back to the Future, ''Jurassic Park, and Law & Order. Telltale's critical breakout game came in 2012's The Walking Dead, based on the comic book series of the same name. It introduced a more narrative-directed approach that diverged from the standard adventure game "point and click" gameplay. The Walking Dead gave players the ability to make choices that could affect how future events in the game or its sequels played out, effectively allowing players to craft their own personalized take on the offered story. Nearly all of Telltale's adventure games afterwards featured this player choice-driven approach. The Walking Dead was critically acclaimed and considered to have revitalized the adventure game genre since LucasArts' departure from it in 2004.
Telltale continued to expand with new licensing deals for episodic adventure games over the next few years, including for Minecraft, Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Batman. However the rate of production created a "crunch time" culture behind the scenes, leaving poor company morale, little room for creativity to veer from the formula set by The Walking Dead or improvements on the Telltale Tool. A management shakeup occurred in early 2017, with CEO Bruner stepping down, and Pete Hawley, formerly of Zynga, brought in to fix Telltale's problems. Internal restructuring led to a layoff of 25% of the company's staff in November 2017, along with an emphasis to slow down game production to improve production quality, retire the Telltale Tool for a more standard game engine, and seek other lucrative properties to develop for. This resulted in an early 2018 deal with Netflix in which Telltale would adapt its Minecraft: Story Mode into an interactive program for the streaming service, and Netflix licensing the rights to Telltale for an adventure game based on its show Stranger Things.
In the midst of releasing The Walking Dead: The Final Season, the company was forced to initiate a "majority studio closure" after their last investor had pulled out of funding. Telltale announced on September 21, 2018, that it had let go of all but 25 of its staff as part of this closure, with the remaining skeleton crew completing specific obligations, such as finishing the Minecraft: Story Mode'' project porting to Netflix. Telltale Games filed for assignment in October 2018. Many assets were later acquired by LCG Entertainment, which revived the Telltale Games name as part of its business in August 2019, retaining many of the company's previous licenses and offering former staff freelance positions.
History
Foundation and initial growth (2004–2010)
Telltale Games was founded in San Rafael, California, by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, a group of former LucasArts employees who worked on the studio's adventure games. In March 2004, LucasArts recognized that there were "current market place realities and underlying economic considerations" that made adventure games too risky to release, and canceled work on two sequels of previous adventure games, Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max: Freelance Police, as well as laying off many of those developers. Bruner, Connors and Molander were not among the layoffs, but felt that the change of direction at LucasArts was not favorable, and departed the company later that year to found Telltale Games in July 2004. The studio opening was announced on October 4. The name "Telltale" was selected by Bruner as the three envisioned themselves creating more adventure games but de-emphasizing puzzle elements in favor of narrative aspects, telling a tale to the user. Technology attorney Ira P. Rothken negotiated publishing and licensing deals for the company.File:Telltale Games Team - 920448657 - barret.jpg|thumb|right|The team of Telltale Games at San Diego Comic-con in July 2007; from left to right: Chuck Jordan, Jake Rodkin, Dave Grossman, Daniel Farjam Herrera, Doug Tabacco, Emily Morganti, and also a demo version of Sam & Max Save the World
The company's initial goal was to develop a new Sam & Max game in an episodic format. Grossman said that Telltale identified that Sam & Max had a small but dedicated audience allowing them to develop a title that would be successful in reaching out to this group and not requiring them to seek out a bigger license that would have incurred more development costs. Developing a Sam & Max game required both development of tools to produce the game, and the license to make it. At the time of the studio's founding, the license for Sam & Max was still held by LucasArts, who refused to negotiate a deal nor license the work on Sam & Max: Freelance Police for Telltale to complete it. Telltale waited out the licensing period until around mid-2005, after which Steve Purcell, Sam & Maxs creator, immediately offered the license to Telltale.
Until they could get to that point, the studio developed other games to bring in revenue and keep the studio afloat. On February 11, 2005, the company released their first game, Telltale Texas Hold'em, a poker card game simulator which was intended primarily to test the Telltale Tool, their in-house game engine. They used the license around Jeff Smith's Bone comic book series to test the episodic format. Though initially planned for a five-episode series, Telltale only released two episodes in 2005 and 2006 and the remaining episode had been canceled. Alongside Bone, Telltale developed a series of games for Ubisoft around the CSI television series, including CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder, CSI: Hard Evidence, CSI: Deadly Intent, and CSI: Fatal Conspiracy; though these games were also developed as episodes, they were each released in single packages. Outside of Ubisoft, few other publishers were interested in distributing Telltale's early games, forcing them to turn to their own distribution system.
Once they had secured the rights to Sam & Max, Telltale set about to making this game with an episodic approach, with episodes planned to be released on a tight monthly basis through their partner, GameTap. Sam & Max: Season One was considered a success for the company, and considered one of the first successful demonstration of an episodic release in video games. The success led to additional funding through two rounds of angel investment, including Matthew Le Merle and members of angel group Keiretsu Forum. The studio created a second season for Sam & Max, and found additional niche intellectual property areas, including Wallace & Gromit and Homestar Runner, to continue the episodic adventure game format. When Darrell Rodriguez became CEO of LucasArts in 2008, he wanted to see the old LucasArts adventure properties flourish, leading to a license for Telltale to create a new game in the Monkey Island series, Tales of Monkey Island. Telltale was also able to expand their release platforms beyond personal computers, with releases of these games on various consoles at the time.
To supplement their normal episodic games, Telltale created a pilot program in early 2010 to explore one-off games that would explore other gameplay and storytelling approaches that could eventually be incorporated into their episodic games. The first game, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, a puzzle-solving game in collaboration with Graham Annable, was released in June 2010, while Poker Night at the Inventory, a crossover poker game featuring characters from Sam and Max, Homestar Runner, Valve's Team Fortress 2, and the webcomic Penny Arcade, was released late in 2010. Telltale followed up Puzzle Agent with a sequel, Puzzle Agent 2, in 2011. In 2013, Telltale continued the series with Poker Night 2. The Walking Dead started out as a pilot program game that was known internally as the "zombie prototype". In general, few of these games brought in large revenues, and until 2010, the founders feared that investors would suddenly pull out of the company and would force its closure.
Major franchise acquisitions (2010–2016)
Having established themselves as working with comedy franchises, Telltale chose to work with dramatic franchises as well as comedy series. In June 2010, Telltale announced that they had secured licenses with NBC Universal to develop two episodic series based on Back to the Future and Jurassic Park. Notably, Telltale's Jurassic Park: The Game was the first game to break away from the standard adventure game format, including elements like quick time events and time-limited choices which would become a core gameplay element in their future adventure games. Telltale obtained the license from NBC Universal to develop episodic series around the Law & Order franchise in April 2011.By 2010, Telltale had proven itself successful, with yearly revenues of $10 million, 90% greater than the previous year. Part of this was attributed to Back to the Future: The Game, which Steve Allison, the senior vice-president of marketing, called in 2011 their "most successful franchise to date". Allison stated that for most of their games, they only need to sell 100,000 copies to break even, but many of their recent releases have seen twice that number or more. The studio expanded from 90 to 140 employees. They had obtained a license in 2011 to develop a King's Quest adventure game based on the original Sierra games, but Activision took back the rights in 2013, which were subsequently used by The Odd Gentlemen to create their 2015 episodic King's Quest game.
Telltale's breakthrough success came with the licenses of the comic book series The Walking Dead and Fables in association with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in 2011. Allison anticipated that The Walking Dead series could be a $20 to $30 million franchise. Their The Walking Dead video game presented an alteration of Telltale's approach, as rather than a traditional adventure game where players would need to solve puzzles, The Walking Dead was more focused on providing a cinematic experience but presenting choices to the player, either through dialog trees or through quick time events, that would create "determinants" that would feed into latter parts of the episode and into future episodes; one example would be deciding which of one of two characters to save from a zombie attack at the spur of the moment. While these decisions do not have a direct impact on the game's overall narrative and structure, it provides a more personalized story around what decisions the player had made. This format proved highly successful: the game sold one million copies in 20 days, exceeded 8.5 million episode purchases by 2013, and an estimated $40 million in revenue. The success led to two additional 5-episode seasons, a 3-episode mini-season and a final 4-episode season. The Walking Dead is considered to have revitalized the waning adventure game genre due to this more emotionally driven focus. Since The Walking Dead, nearly all of Telltale's games have used a similar approach of being built around the impacts of the player's choices as determinants in later episodes and seasons.
Telltale has had several other licensing details from popular works, including Tales from the Borderlands based on the Borderlands series by Gearbox Software, and Game of Thrones, based on the HBO television show adaption, Minecraft: Story Mode based on the Mojang game, Minecraft, Batman from DC Comics, and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series from Marvel Comics. On retrospective after the studio's closure, former employees of Telltale believed that the studio's expansion into all these additional licensed properties were trying to replicate the success of The Walking Dead, moving the company from a risk-taker to seeking risk aversion strategies. This was also propagated by the weight of the licensed properties: they had taken more conservative approaches to deliver a game that mirrored The Walking Dead, a well-known product, rather than take risks and potentially lose the license.
Telltale relocated to a larger space and expanded from 125 to 160 in mid-2013. Around 2015, the company had grown to 200 to 250 employees. The company continued to grow, at its peak having about 400 employees in mid-2017. In the midst of this growth, in 2014–2015, the management of Telltale recognized the need to restructure to handle more projects and more staff. This led to original chief executive officer Dan Connors resigning and being replaced by co-founder Kevin Bruner, who was also the firm's president. Connors noted that with the studio's continued growth, it had begun experiencing growth-specific challenges. Connors stated that Bruner's ascension to CEO would best enable Telltale Games to act on future expansion opportunities. Connors remained on the board of directors, and also served as a creative consultant. Internally, there were concerns about this transition and Brunner's influence on it; an anonymous quality control employee writing in Gamasutra after the firm's closure called this transition "the beginning of the end" for Telltale.
With Bruner's placement as CEO in January 2015, Telltale said it was developing a game based on its own intellectual property as a result of this leadership change. In February 2015, Lionsgate announced an investment within Telltale Games to produce a number of "Super Shows", a hybrid interactive work combining television and video game elements, which would be distributed through non-traditional channels such as through streaming services. The first Super Show planned was an original intellectual property developed by Telltale that would be able to take advantage of this format. Telltale also announced that Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer and Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello joined Telltale's board of directors. Alongside this, Lionsgate had invested into Telltale. The "Super Show" concept never got out of pre-production, due to issues that arose with the studio in 2016 and 2017, according to Variety.