45 Facts About Telltale Games

Telltale Games 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 Games 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 was founded in San Rafael, California, by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, a group of former LucasArts employees that worked on the studio's adventure games.

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 developed as episodes, they were each released in single packages.

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 Games to create a new game in the Monkey Island series, Tales of Monkey Island.

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Telltale Games followed up Puzzle Agent with a sequel, Puzzle Agent 2, in 2011.

In June 2010, Telltale Games announced that they had secured licenses with NBC Universal to develop two episodic series based on Back to the Future and Jurassic Park.

On retrospective after the studio's closure, former employees of Telltale Games 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.

Telltale Games relocated to a larger space and expanded from 125 to 160 in mid-2013.

Telltale Games continued to grow, at its peak having about 400 employees in mid-2017.

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.

Telltale Games announced that Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer and Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello joined Telltale Games's board of directors.

However, this approach to development had created a perpetual state of "crunch time" within Telltale Games, according to several current and former staff speaking to USgamer, The Verge, and Variety in 2017.

Further, anonymous sources from Telltale stated that very few of the games were profitable, with only The Walking Dead: The First Season, Minecraft: Story Mode, and revenues from publishing 7 Days to Die turning a profit.

Batman: The Telltale Games Series, released in 2016 was said to be one of the worst commercial failures for the company.

Rather than other corporate "fixers" who take control of a company for a temporary period to help it regain its financial footing, Hawley had committed to staying with Telltale Games after helping the company to get past these problems.

In June 2018, Telltale announced a partnership with Netflix for the streaming service to provide its games to subscribers, with the first planned game being Minecraft: Story Mode.

Alongside this, Telltale Games announced that they were working on a yet-untitled game based on Netflix's original property, Stranger Things.

Telltale Games executives had to make the decision to end all production as soon as possible without this investment.

Telltale Games released the second episode of four of The Walking Dead: The Final Season as scheduled on September 25,2018, and stated that it had been contacted by "multiple potential partners" to help bring the last two episodes of the series to completion in some manner.

Two anonymous sources speaking to Ethan Gach of Kotaku clarified that Telltale Games was trying to convince potential development partners to hire the staff Telltale Games had laid off so the staff could remotely finish the two remaining episodes of The Walking Dead: The Final Season.

Telltale Games saw assignment proceedings begin on October 11,2018, working through Sherwood Partners to liquidate all remaining assets; the company remains in assignment as of April 2019.

Under the leadership of founders Jamie Ottilie and Brian Waddle, the new Telltale is set to re-release the old Telltale's back-catalog, as well as work on new games based on Telltale-affiliated properties.

The new Telltale Games was expected to start small for the first six months to regain distribution channels, and the company has offered former staff of the old Telltale Games freelance roles within the company with the potential for full-time positions at a later point in time.

Partners in the new Telltale include publisher Athlon Games, which will handle distribution, and financial contributors Chris Kingsley, Lyle Hall and Tobias Sjogren.

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The first game under this new company was a re-release of Batman: The Telltale Games Series, adding in a new noir-style shader among other fixes, which was released in December 2019.

Telltale Games announced The Wolf Among Us 2 at The Game Awards 2019.

Former employees of the original Telltale Games were skeptical of LCG's approach to the relaunch of Telltale Games, considering that offering only freelance work while in San Francisco, which has one of the highest costs-of-living in the country, is risky.

Telltale Games considered their studio something between a video game developer and a cable or streaming network with production capabilities like HBO or Netflix.

In general, Telltale offered its games as a one-time "season pass" purchase for the game's season when the first episode of the season was released, with the user then entitled to all planned episodes for that season.

In retail, Telltale Games published complete seasons after the season's digital release was over, but adopted a model where they could publish, at the same time as the digital release, a retail disc that contains the first episode.

For some of their games, Telltale developed additional downloadable content, such as 400 Days for The Walking Dead, or three additional episodes for Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1, which must be purchased separately from the season pass.

Telltale Games aimed to present itself on as many digital platforms and avenues as possible.

Telltale Games was one of the companies who Sony confirmed pledged PlayStation 4 third-party support at the PlayStation Meeting 2013.

Telltale Games had committed to developing and re-releasing seasons for the Nintendo Switch.

Telltale Games Tool is a proprietary game engine developed by Telltale Games.

Telltale Games commenced development on the engine shortly after its founding, initially referring to the engine as the "Telltale Games Engine and Toolset".

Telltale Tool has been used for every game developed by Telltale Games, and continued to receive improvements since the initial version, such as compatibility to new systems and better graphics capabilities.

Until 2016, Telltale Games Tool did not have a physics engine, meaning that if a scene required an object to fall, this had to be animated by hand, taking time from other more productive activities.

The aged feature set of the Telltale Tool led to a perception that many of Telltale's games had an abnormally high rate of bugs and other technical flaws, pervasive enough to pose a significant risk of impeding players' ability to progress through a given game.

Telltale Games moved to an improved version of their engine around early 2016, partially implemented first in The Walking Dead: Michonne and completed for the release of Batman: The Telltale Games Series.

The updated Telltale Games Tool provided direct support for DirectX 11 features, including physics-based models, texture mapping and blending, and dynamic lighting and shadows.

In mid-June 2018, Variety reported that Telltale Games was moving away from the Telltale Games Tool and instead toward the established Unity game engine.

Former employees of Telltale Games have gone on to adapt the narrative aspects of these games into their own products.

Adam Hines and Sean Krankel, both writers for Telltale Games, left to launch Night School Studio in 2014, subsequently releasing Oxenfree which heavily used a "walk and talk" mechanic as part of its gameplay.

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