Telling the Tale - Teaser

On September 20th of 2018, things were looking good for the employees of Telltale Games. They were nearly finished with the final season of their award-winning episodic video game series, The Walking Dead, and their next-scheduled game, this one based on the show Stranger Things, was primed to be another in their long line of successes. Over the years, they acquired the licenses to make narrative-focused, episodically-released games in a ridiculously large number of franchises. They made games for Homestar Runner, Game of Thrones, and Jurassic Park. They gave Minecraft a “Story Mode.” They managed to get both DC and Marvel under their belt. And, perhaps most impressively, Universal let them make what is essentially Back to the Future 4 with Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as Doc Brown.

In an industry where licensed games, episodic games, and games in the narrative adventure genre were all pretty far away from the image of a typical blockbuster, Telltale Games were an aberration. They filled a niche, but they were the kings of that niche. Counting each episode they released as its own game, Telltale had put out over 130 video games in less than 15 years of being active. That’s a staggering statistic, and the machine showed no signs of slowing.

On September 21st, however, the studio closed for good. Employees were shocked by the news that, not only was Telltale Games apparently NOT doing excellently, but also that they had just 30 minutes to leave their offices. A titan in narrative video game development for nearly a decade and a half: gone in a half hour.

What happened? Was it a major investor suddenly getting cold feet? Was it a culture of work crunch, steadily draining developers of their spirit over the course of years? Was it regular old poor management?

-Dude, I don’t know.

I’m Mitchell Wolfe and I am a game developer, but I never worked at Telltale Games, so I don’t know what happened. What I do know is what happened next. Many of Telltale’s games suddenly disappeared from online retailers. They kind of had to, Telltale was gone. Who would you pay for the game? Where would you download it from? Some titles were saved by groups who were able to purchase their rights from the auctioning off of Telltale’s assets, one such group even acquiring the name “Telltale” and using it to rebrand themselves. Still, not every one of their games survived. If you’d like to play that Back to the Future game with actual Doc Brown, good luck finding it. Video game preservation is in such a difficult spot these days that something as simple as being delisted from Steam or the Playstation Network might be enough to bury a work of art in time forever.

The real tragedy of the fall of Telltale Games is the employees losing their jobs. Especially considering that they were living in the Bay Area [yeesh, that's expensive]. A secondary tragedy is the loss of their work. 

I can’t tell you what happened at Telltale that led to the events of September 21st 2018, but I can tell you about how they spent the previous 14 years. They were making games, and we’re going to talk about every single one of them.

Join my cohosts and me every week on Telling the Tale as we rifle through a collection of games spanning the traditional and the unique; the childish and the grossly mature; the Threepwood and the Strongbad. Every episode of the podcast will cover a different episode of a Telltale game episode that we don’t want to see be made irrelevant by the passage of time. Please point and click on your favorite podcasting app and subscribe to Telling the Tale.