On October 4th, 2004, the minds of former Lucas Arts developers Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors, and Troy Molander came together to create the game development and publishing studio many would come to know as Telltale. Based in San Rafael, California, the company was created with the idea of video games as a narrative-based experience, as opposed to the action first, story later experiences being offered by many other AAA companies at the time. Their first game, an adaption of the animated television series, Sam and Max, fully embraced this idea of a full narrative driven experience, already establishing the company’s niche in a market dominated by games focused more action than storytelling. After a couple of releases, the company was able to create an established formula for their games, dividing their choose-your-path narratives into multiple episodes that would be released over a course of time with weeks between them. However, it wouldn’t be until they adapted Back to The Future when they’d captured the public’s attention.
While Back to the Future wasn’t a massive hit, it allowed Telltale to gain the reputation it needed in order to secure other franchises for them to adapt. It wouldn’t be long before they were able to get a hold of the licenses for franchises such as Jurassic Park and The Walking Dead. While the former’s game adaption didn’t capture the attention of many, the latter’s first adaption (which would later be known as “Season One”, released in 2012) exploded in popularity, causing Telltale to seize their place in the gaming industry. Divided into five parts, The Walking Dead: The Game turned heads with its compelling story, characters, and player decisions. Winning over 90 game of the year awards (including the VGX award for Game of the Year), it was celebrated by gamers everywhere for its unique approach to gaming. In January 2013, Forbes released an article reporting that Telltale claimed to have sold 8.5 million episodes of The Walking Dead, resulting in around forty-million dollars in sales. By December of 2013, the gaming community would be graced with “Episode One” of The Walking Dead: Season Two. In an article released by Tech Times in July of 2014, they had reported that The Walking Dead adaptions had sold around twenty-eight million episodes, confirming that they would indeed be creating a “Season Three”.
Over the course of their existence, Telltale would adapt many other well-known franchises into games, including Fables, Batman, Borderlands, Minecraft, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Game of Thrones. The company itself grew quite a reputation, winning many awards and praises. While many of their games received good feedback, nothing would surpass the sheer popularity of The Walking Dead. However, over time, the company would begin to see fan’s opinions of the formulaic game franchises change over time, resulting much more harsh criticisms from reviewers and everyday gamers alike. While The Walking Dead: The Game would receive an IGN review of 9.3 out of 10, the second episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season would only receive a score of 5.0 out of ten. This drastic decline in reception leads us to ask: what happened?
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In order to answer this question, we can start by looking at the reviews for Telltale’s games. IGN’s review of The Walking Dead: The Game as “Flawed, but unforgettable” (). The review also notes that the game shares its goals in a format that hasn’t been explored by many video games before it, namely as a “choose your own adventure” () as opposed to the traditional adventure game. The article describes the game’s award-winning writing and emotional plot. However, in the review for the latest episode of The Walking Dead game adaption as of this essay being written (The Walking Dead: The Final Season, episode 2), the reviewer described the experience as “overly formulaic and dull” (), describing the writing as “lack[ing] focus” on characters besides its protagonists and having “nonsensical outcomes” (). Reviewers wouldn’t be the only ones critiquing Telltale in this way. Many gamers would criticize Telltale’s tendency to stick to their formula, resulting in repetitive gameplay. After a while of being established and becoming much more well known, it wouldn’t be uncommon for people to react to the company’s announcements with “it’s just another Telltale” game.
The company’s reception from gamers wasn’t the only thing that lead to their downfall. Many things were happening inside of the company that perhaps showed through in the quality of their games while quietly setting up the company for failure. As the company’s success grew, so did their number of employees. Throughout their existence, Telltale’s hired talents increased their numbers from 160 to 250 in an effort to create more games in less time. With this large increase in company size, the company needed to restructure itself in an effort to stay alive. This led to the acting CEO and founder Dan Connors’s resignation and replacement by co-founder Kevin Bruner. A former quality control employee would later call this change in management “the beginning of the end” (). While Telltale had so far built up their game catalogue on adaptions of already existing franchises, Bruner wanted to go into a new direction to create new, original franchises for the company.
In February of 2015, Telltale partnered with films producer Lionsgate with a forty million dollar investment with the plans of making “The Super Show”, which was planned to be a new form of entertainment that was “part videogame, part television show”(). With more and more projects being planned, the company found itself in a perpetual state of crunch time. The more intellectual properties Bruner announced Telltale to be working with, the more hours employees would have to spend working on projects. Employees were reportedly working constantly to meet the schedules of their managers, often working fourteen to eighteen hours days. It wouldn’t be unusual for workers to come in everyday of the week in attempts to finish projects on schedule. The exhaustion and burn-out lead to toxic working environments. Former employees today still recount the constant crunch time that lead to their failing moral.
While employees were being overworked, Bruner continued to demand more and more games to be completed. This eventually led to games (and “The Super Show”) missing their release dates, being delayed or casted aside altogether. When games did come out, their quality reflected the burn-out of the people working on them. Key employees, such as Sean Vanaman (lead writer of The Walking Dead adaption) and Jake Rodkin (co-project leader and co-writer of The Walking Dead) left the company in an effort to get away from the toxicity and pursue future career achievements.
In order to keep up with the workload demand, the company began rotating employees in and out of different projects during the development process. This misstep only lead to further delays of titles, causing projects to cost much more to develop than originally planned for. The simple planning of more projects than their schedule could fit was only the base of the poor time management problems of Telltale. An anonymous employee now reports that “The Upper management would often ask teams to rewrite, redesign, recast, and reanimate up until the very last minute without properly adjusting the schedule” (D’Argenio). Emily Buck, lead designer for The Walking Dead: The Final Season Episode 2, has come forward to describe how the company would handle those who felt overworked. . ‘If you fought it too hard, you would be taken off a project, replaced, or even let go, and that happened to people on a number of occasions’, she’s stated ().
With poor reception of their games and fan’s reluctance to keep waiting for unreliable delay release dates, the company began to receive less and less money. This lead to employees being paid far less than the gaming industry’s standards. Many employees began leaving to advance their careers past Telltale’s harsh environment and Bruner’s questionable management.
As a leader, Kevin Bruner offered little to encourage his employees. He’s been described as relentless. It wasn’t unusual for him to shut down ideas he didn’t personally approve of while belittling developers in the company. When he was decided on a creative idea for a company project, he’d stay set on it, refusing to compromise or negotiate his perspectives. Other higher ups in the company followed his lead, and their managerial decisions showed in the games being developed. This egocentric thought process alienated the higher-ups of the company from the fans they were meant to be developing for, leading to questionable directions in the games they were meant to be creating.
One such game we can see this taking effect in is the The Guardians of the Galaxy adaption. Fans of the franchise would normally agree that the light-hearted, comical, yet heartfelt tone of the movie adaption is what drew them to the franchise in the first place. However, Emily Buck also reports that the higher ups wanted to take a darker turn on the franchise. “Our executive team insisted that what was popular about Guardians of the Galaxy, was darkness and violence, and sadness”, she explains (). This dedicated mindset would no doubt have a hand in the underwhelming reception of the game from Guardians of the Galaxy fans. It truly is a misunderstanding of a franchise that would lead to a strong detachment, and therefore misconception, of Telltale’s fan base.
These same higher ups were also very set on the company’s formula, rejecting any new ideas their employees had to offer them. While employees knew the structure of their games was growing stale, Bruner insisted otherwise. He and his board of directors favored their award-winning formula as opposed to any form of innovation. While he thought the Telltale formula would forever be fresh and considered innovation in itself, the gaming industry as a whole continued to move forward without him.
Seeing the company’s decline, investors and upper management decided to fire Bruner and replace him with Pete Hawley. However, the damage had already been done. With a dwindling fan base, little income, and low company morale, it would take far more than a change in management to save Telltale from its demise. Telltale officially filed for Bankruptcy on November 21, 2018. Hawley had to fire 225 employees without severance, leaving only a few employees left to “fulfill obligations”.
The company informed their fan base by posting an official statement on their twitter. This left the gaming community in shock with many questions. The biggest question of them all seemed to be “What will happen to The Walking Dead”? By the time they had announced their bankruptcy, Telltale had only delivered two episodes of the promised four of the final season. The company remained quiet for some time about the manner. However, they returned to stay communicative with their fan base once they had confirmed themselves to be working with another company to finish the final season. On October 6th, 2018, Skybound Games announced they had reached a deal with Telltale that would allow them to complete the story fans had been asking them to.
Over estimating the staying power of a game development formula, Telltale drove themselves into the ground through misjudging financial incomes and mistreating their employees. As a company, JADES Software will need to aim away from this. It will be important to strive for innovation in our games to keep them from getting stale. Instead of alienating ourselves from our fans, we’ll need to communicate with them in order to fully understand what they want from us as game developers. While making this effort will be important, it will also be important for us to not overestimate our income and over plan projects that we won’t be able to pay for. This will allow us to manage our time more wisely, letting work be finished by our teams in a reasonable setting and manner.
Telltale was once a giant in the gaming industry. Though its initial innovations gave it much success and allowed it to win many awards, management and toxicity lead the company to an unavoidable demise. Despite being named No. 1 overall publisher for quality content in 2014 by Metacritic, Telltale’s stale formula drove fans away while killing the company’s income. Today it stands as an example of what can happen when fame and praise goes to a company’s head. It would be wise for future developers to keep its story in mind to avoid repeating their mistakes.
