TellTale Games may be working on the second season of The Walking Dead right now, but it’s got a hectic 2014 ahead with new games based on Borderlands and Game of Thrones. The studio has explained how both deals happened, and what they’ll involved in a new interview.
Speaking with Polygon, Steve Allison, senior vice president of publishing at Telltale Games recalled how the Borderlands deal came about with Gearbox.
He explained, “We were backstage at the [2012] Spike VGAs and Gearbox was sitting at table one and we were sitting at table two — we were there for The Walking Dead. We got to talking a little bit, and I don’t remember when it became, ‘we should do this thing,’ but it happened over a few cocktails.”
“We could have easily left it and chalked it up to too much tequila,” he added, “but we followed up when we got home, and they remembered the conversation. The Borderlands universe has so much story potential, all those great characters. There’s a narrative there in Borderlands 2 but it serves a certain purpose, and we can serve a difference purpose with it for fans of the franchise.”
The Borderlands partnership is not a shooter, but another adventure title that TellTale has become celebrated for. It’ll be interesting to see how it handles the weird and wacky character of the Gearbox universe. More sober however, is the Game of Thrones HBO game TellTale is working on. Allison confirmed that it was the game studio that approached HBO to pitch the concept.
During an internal meeting at TellTale, Allison and his team, “Looked at things we wanted to work on and the most important things are what are we passionate about. After that we ask, is there enough of an audience at the end of day that would play this thing?
“We want franchises that are really difficult to translate into traditional gaming, we don’t want to make another Walking Dead first-person shooter. What works with the franchises we have it the characters, the story and drama and the relationships. We look for franchises that are huge and have all those elements.”