Telltale Games

Telltale Games is an American video game developer and publisher founded in 2004 in San Rafael, California by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors, and Troy Molander, all former LucasArts employees. The studio built its reputation on episodic narrative adventure games using licensed franchises before a sudden mass layoff in September 2018 effectively shuttered the company. A new Telltale Games was revived in 2019 under new ownership and continues to release episodic titles under the same name.

Founding and Early Output

Telltale formed after LucasArts scaled back its adventure game production, and the founders brought that tradition with them. Early releases included Telltale Texas Hold’Em, a poker game, and episodic adventures based on CSI and Bone. Sam and Max: Season One in 2006 was the studio’s first critically successful episodic series, adapting Steve Purcell’s cult comic characters into a comedic point-and-click format. Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People and Tales of Monkey Island followed, establishing Telltale as the primary studio keeping the episodic adventure genre alive during a period when most developers had abandoned it.

The Walking Dead and the Breakthrough

Telltale’s The Walking Dead released episodically across 2012 and became one of the most critically acclaimed games of that year. Rather than adapting the television show, it created an original story following Lee Everett, a convicted man, and Clementine, a young girl he finds alone during the zombie outbreak. The game’s emphasis on character-driven choices where decisions felt meaningful and consequential set a new standard for narrative games and won multiple Game of the Year awards. It sold over eight million episodes across the season and validated Telltale’s model at a much larger commercial scale than anything it had done before.

The Wolf Among Us, Batman, and Expansion

Following The Walking Dead’s success, Telltale expanded rapidly into multiple simultaneous licensed projects. The Wolf Among Us in 2013, based on Bill Willingham’s Fables comics, was broadly considered Telltale’s best writing outside The Walking Dead. Batman: The Telltale Series in 2016 reimagined Bruce Wayne’s story with a focus on his dual identity and moral choices. Game of Thrones, Minecraft: Story Mode, Guardians of the Galaxy, and The Walking Dead continuations ran simultaneously as the studio grew to over 400 employees. The pace of production across too many projects simultaneously is widely cited as a contributing factor to the quality inconsistency that characterized the studio’s later output.

Closure and Revival

In September 2018, Telltale Games announced it was shutting down with a skeleton crew retained only to finish Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix. The closure came without warning to most employees, with no severance packages, and the manner of the shutdown drew significant criticism from across the industry. The Walking Dead: The Final Season had just begun its episodic release and was handed to Skybound Games, the company founded by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, to complete. LCG Entertainment acquired the Telltale name, library, and tools in 2019 and relaunched the studio with a smaller team. The revived Telltale has released The Wolf Among Us 2 in episodic format and continues developing narrative adventure games under the original brand.