At one point, it almost looked like we wouldn’t see a proper finish for Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series., as the company closed up shop before the final two chapters could release. However, Skybound Entertainment brought it back from the, ahem, dead. As a result, fans got to see Clementine’s saga through to the end—and it benefited the developers more than you might think.
As reported by GamesIndustry International, Skybound CEO Dan Murray had kind words for the series at a recent Reboot Develop panel. He explained how The Walking Dead was able to grow beyond its usual reach of entertainment, demonstrated by a Wheel of Awesome slide. It indicated how a series could expand beyond one audience with the help of video games, TV and more.
“What started as a comic book became a television show, and then really it was the video game for us at Skybound, the Telltale Walking Dead game, that fuelled this company,” he explained. “If it hadn’t been for the video game, Skybound wouldn’t really look like this today. It really was that initial product we built in the video game space that informed everything we’ve done since then.”
Murray added, “There’s a lot of backend philosophies of how, for us, the purpose of why this [the Wheel of Awesome] exists has less to do with how many things we can build and more to do with how we can connect content creators to an audience. And a lot of it is built with methodologies coming from the gaming space around backend services to do that.”
Telltale’s The Walking Dead series was able to expand upon the lore even beyond what Skybound initially saw with it. “With the Telltale game, it’s an entirely new universe, an entirely different storyline with new characters. There’s some connective tissue… [but] we believe it’s better to treat each medium as primary, meaning the video game should just stand on its own.”
And the true potential was seen following the conclusion of its first season. “What happened was we found an entirely new audience that had never seen the TV show, had never read the comics, they just found Telltale’s Walking Dead,” Murray said. “And that just woke us up to the fact that we don’t need to connect the dots. We can do that later when the audience is already invested in that medium itself.”
The full story can be found here. It’ll be interesting to see where Skybound takes the saga from here, particularly after the abrupt cancellation of Starbreeze’s troubled The Walking Dead game.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season is available now for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
