Telltale Games | Code Like It's 198x

In March 2004 LucasArts cancelled Sam & Max: Freelance Police, the sequel to its 1993 adventure, citing “a careful evaluation of current marketplace realities”. Three of the people who had worked there, Dan Connors, Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander, left and started their own company to make the kind of game LucasArts no longer wanted. They called it Telltale, and they planned to sell adventures the way television sells drama: a season at a time, one episode a month, delivered over the internet. Eight years later The Walking Dead made Telltale one of the most talked-about studios in games. Six years after that it was gone.

Fast facts

Founded: 2004, by former LucasArts staff Dan Connors, Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander.
Model: adventure games sold in episodes, mostly as downloads.
Best known for: Sam & Max (from 2006), Tales of Monkey Island (2009), The Walking Dead (2012), The Wolf Among Us (2013).
Closed: September 2018, when it laid off almost all of its staff; the company was then wound up.
Revived: 2019, when LCG Entertainment bought the name and some of the games.

Out of the cancelled sequel

The cancellation left adventure fans angry. Steve Purcell, who created Sam & Max, called the decision “mystifying” and “shortsighted”, and Computer Gaming World wondered whether adventure games had become too great a financial risk for publishers. Australia’s Hyper reported that Connors, Bruner and Molander had “quit the company soon after the game was canned” and set up Telltale Games; Bruner said that seeing a fans’ petition “and how upset people were, we knew we had to start Telltale Games”. All three had LucasArts backgrounds. Bruner had been lead programmer on Grim Fandango, and Connors’s name appears in the testing credits of LucasArts games of the 1990s.

At the end of 2004 Edge described Telltale as “a company dedicated to resurrecting the kind of lively, character-driven adventures associated with the classic LucasArts era”. Connors explained the plan in television terms. Each episode would stand on its own, but storylines would run across a series, like “a well-structured sitcom”, and online distribution would let the company turn episodes round quickly: “We want the players to see the Telltale website, and our distribution partners, as virtual TV channels where they can ‘tune in’ to the latest episodes.”

Bone, Sam & Max and Monkey Island

The first project, announced in 2005, was not Sam & Max but an adaptation of Jeff Smith’s comic Bone, which Edge called “the first videogame realisation” of it. Two Bone episodes appeared, in 2005 and 2006, and Bone: The Great Cow Race was a finalist at the 2007 Independent Games Festival.

Sam & Max followed. The rights to the characters had gone back to Purcell, and in April 2006 Edge reported that “much of the original Freelance Police team” was said to be involved. The first episode, Culture Shock, came out in the autumn of 2006 for $9, with the Turner company’s GameTap service distributing it. Edge found it “a very different Sam & Max, but no impostor”, in real-time 3D instead of the 1993 game’s painted backgrounds, with a comic hit rate “lower than you might have hoped for”. Of a later episode, Situation: Comedy, it said that Telltale had made “a title that will never lose your goodwill”.

Episodes suited downloads, and Telltale sold them wherever it could: on PC, through Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade and through Nintendo’s WiiWare. Tales of Monkey Island, released in five episodes from July to December 2009 and directed by Dave Grossman, brought another LucasArts series to the company. Grossman told Edge that Nintendo had been “really supportive of the episodic model”, and Edge reported that Tales of Monkey Island was Telltale’s best-selling series to date. By 2010 it was also making Back to the Future games.

The Walking Dead

Robert Kirkman, who wrote The Walking Dead comics, first met Telltale in late 2010. The company’s recent work had not gone well: Jurassic Park (2011), for which it had upgraded its own engine, the Telltale Tool, had an “underwhelming” reception, and some wondered, Edge wrote, whether the point-and-click adventure was “dead on its feet”.

The Walking Dead came out in five episodes during 2012. The player is Lee Everett, convicted of a crime of passion and on his way to prison when the dead rise, who becomes the protector of an eight-year-old girl, Clementine. Conversations run against the clock: “a small white timer bar begins to drain”, Edge‘s reviewer wrote, so there is no time to weigh a reply. The hard choices were about who to save and who to feed. “It sounds like a marketing catchphrase,” said Jake Rodkin, one of its two project leads, “but the idea that there is no right or wrong choice was a guiding factor for us from the very beginning.” Telltale collected players’ decisions and showed each player how everyone else had chosen.

The story did not branch as much as it seemed to. Edge’s review warned that playing it twice “spoils the illusion”: a path that seems to fork “loops around the first tree and quickly merges once more with the left-hand path”. It advised one playthrough and called what Telltale had done “remarkable”.

Players agreed. By the spring of 2013 Edge counted more than 80 game of the year awards, a BAFTA for best story and more than 8.5 million downloaded episodes, and Connors used videos of YouTube players weeping at the final episode in a keynote at the DICE conference.

Too many seasons

Success brought licences. By the end of 2013 Telltale had begun The Wolf Among Us, based on the Fables comics, and a second season of The Walking Dead, and had announced games based on Borderlands and HBO’s Game of Thrones. Edge worried that its resources were “being stretched too thin”: the second episode of The Wolf Among Us, promised within one to two months of the first, had slipped into 2014. It also noted that the same tricks were becoming visible, with choices that “turned out to be of little consequence”. Batman, Minecraft: Story Mode and Guardians of the Galaxy followed.

The sales did not keep up. In November 2017 Telltale laid off about a quarter of its staff. On 21 September 2018 it announced a “majority studio closure”: about 225 people lost their jobs that day, and 25 stayed to finish Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix. “We released some of our best content this year and received a tremendous amount of positive feedback,” said its chief executive, Pete Hawley, “but ultimately, that did not translate to sales.” In October the company was handed to a liquidator, Sherwood Partners, through an assignment for the benefit of creditors, a way of winding a company up without going through the bankruptcy courts, and its games began to disappear from download stores. The Walking Dead: The Final Season, left unfinished, was completed with Skybound Games and released in 2019.

The name returns

In August 2019 LCG Entertainment, led by Jamie Ottilie, bought Telltale’s name and technology and the rights to games including The Wolf Among Us and Batman, and began trading as Telltale. Wireframe noted that some former staff had been offered work at the new company, but only as freelancers. It announced The Wolf Among Us 2 at the end of 2019, and released The Expanse: A Telltale Series, developed with Deck Nine, in 2023. That year it also cut staff. After long delays The Wolf Among Us 2 reappeared at Summer Game Fest in June 2026, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, with a release planned for 2027 and a remaster of the first game announced for the end of 2026.

Sources

Computer Gaming World issue 239, June 2004, p. 34: the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police, LucasArts’ statement and Steve Purcell’s reaction.
PC Gamer (US) vol. 11 no. 5 (issue 123), May 2004, news: the cancellation and LucasArts’ reasons.
Hyper issue 134, December 2004, news: Connors, Bruner and Molander leave LucasArts and form Telltale; Bruner on the fans’ petition.
Edge issue 144, Christmas 2004, p. 70: Telltale’s founders, its aims and Connors on episodes, sitcoms and “virtual TV channels”.
Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, p. 33: the founding in 2004 after the cancelled LucasArts sequels; Tales of Monkey Island.
Edge issue 237, February 2012, p. 100: Kevin Bruner as Grim Fandango’s lead programmer and Telltale’s co-founder.
Sega Retro, credits for Zombies Ate My Neighbors (1993) and Herc’s Adventures (1997) (database, secondary): Dan Connors in LucasArts testing and as quality assurance supervisor. https://segaretro.org/Zombies_Ate_My_Neighbors
Edge issue 148, April 2005, p. 28: Bone announced as Telltale’s first project.
Edge issue 175, May 2007, p. 12: Bone: The Great Cow Race among the Independent Games Festival finalists.
Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006, p. 23: the rights to Sam & Max back with Steve Purcell, and Telltale’s new game.
Edge issue 161, April 2006, news: Sam & Max returns in episodes.
Edge issue 169, December 2006, review of Sam & Max: Culture Shock; Edge issue 172, February 2007, review of Sam & Max: Situation: Comedy.
Edge issue 208, December 2009, pp. 65–66: Dave Grossman on WiiWare; Tales of Monkey Island as Telltale’s best-selling series.
Edge issue 218, September 2010, p. 23: Back to the Future.
Edge issue 250, February 2013, pp. 102–104: review of The Walking Dead, season one.
Edge issue 253, May 2013, pp. 126–128, “The making of… The Walking Dead”: Kirkman, Jurassic Park, the Telltale Tool, the nine-month schedule, Rodkin and Vanaman, decision tracking, the awards, BAFTA and download figures, and Connors at DICE.
Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013, p. 115: Telltale advertisement for The Walking Dead, “winner of over 80 game of the year awards”.
Edge issue 263, February 2014, pp. 92–94: review of The Walking Dead season two, the announcements of Borderlands and Game of Thrones, and the concerns over expansion.
Wireframe issue 22, September 2019, p. 14 (Batman); issue 30, January 2020, p. 24 (Minecraft: Story Mode, and the closure after reports of declining profits); issue 46, December 2020, p. 61 (Guardians of the Galaxy).
Wireframe issue 11, April 2019, p. 56: review of The Walking Dead: The Final Season (Telltale Games/Skybound Games) and the closure in the previous autumn.
MCV/Develop, “Telltale lays off majority of staff; 25 employees remain”, 24 September 2018 (web, secondary): the 21 September lay-offs and Pete Hawley’s statement. https://mcvuk.com/business-news/telltale-lays-off-majority-of-staff-25-employees-remain/
Cal Jeffrey, “Telltale Games closes its doors and liquidation has begun”, TechSpot, 15 November 2018 (web, secondary): the November 2017 lay-offs, the assignment for the benefit of creditors and Sherwood Partners. https://www.techspot.com/news/77458-telltale-games-closes-doors-liquidation-has-begun.html
Wireframe issue 22, September 2019, p. 14: LCG Entertainment’s purchase of Telltale’s assets, Batman and The Wolf Among Us, and the freelance terms.
Imogen Donovan, “Telltale Games will be revived by LCG Entertainment”, VideoGamer, 28 August 2019 (web, secondary): what LCG bought; Jamie Ottilie. https://www.videogamer.com/news/telltale-games-will-be-revived-by-lcg-entertainment/
Wikipedia, “Telltale Games” and “Telltale Games (2018–present)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the cancellation of Freelance Police in March 2004; the release dates of Bone, Sam & Max and Tales of Monkey Island, and Dave Grossman as director of Tales; The Expanse (2023) and the 2023 lay-offs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telltale_Games
Alexander Lee, “Telltale Games reintroduces itself through The Wolf Among Us 2 trailer and demo”, GamesBeat, 12 June 2026, and Wesley LeBlanc, “The Wolf Among Us 2 gets 2027 launch window, and a remaster of the first game arrives this holiday”, Game Informer, 5 June 2026 (web, secondary). https://gamesbeat.com/telltale-games-reintroduces-itself-through-the-wolf-among-us-2-trailer-and-demo/ and https://gameinformer.com/sgf-2026/2026/06/05/the-wolf-among-us-2-gets-2027-launch-window-and-a-remaster-of-the-first-game