In 2007 Valve’s Gabe Newell explained the appeal of making games like television. Producing a series in instalments would let developers take more risks, he told Edge, because “if you fail, you’ve just failed for a week rather than four years.” Valve had already released Half-Life 2: Episode One, the first of three planned follow-ups to its 2004 shooter. The third was never made.
That gap between promise and delivery runs through the history of episodic games. Selling a game in parts, on a schedule, promised players a lower price, a story to follow over months and something to talk about between instalments. It promised developers money while they were still working and a chance to change course. It also bound them to deadlines that big games rarely meet.
Fast facts
- The idea: release a game in instalments over months, each sold separately or as a “season”.
- Before it: shareware episodes, sold together once the first had been tried.
- Early attempts: Capcom’s Eldorado Gate (Dreamcast, Japan, from 2000); Valve’s Half-Life 2 episodes (2006–07); Ritual’s SiN Episodes (2006).
- Best known for it: Telltale Games, from Sam & Max (2006) to The Walking Dead (2012).
- Later examples: Life is Strange (2015); Hitman (2016).
Shareware’s episodes
The word came from shareware. Apogee and id Software split their games into episodes, gave the first away and sold the rest. In 1993 Apogee’s advertisements in Computer Gaming World offered the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D, “Escape from Wolfenstein”, for $4 shipping or as a free download; “Episodes two through six are sold separately”. The episodes were finished before the first was given away, though. A player who liked the free one could order all the rest at once. Nothing arrived on a schedule.
Chapters every two months
One of the first games planned to come out over time was Japanese. In May 2000 Edge previewed Capcom’s Eldorado Gate, a role-playing game for the Dreamcast with character designs by Yoshitaka Amano. Capcom would release seven chapters, one every two months, at ¥2,800 each, and planned two more sets of seven to finish the story in 2004. Yoshiki Okamoto had written the first six chapters and would write the seventh only after he had seen players’ reactions. Edge called it “an early realisation of a future form of videogaming”, but did not expect it to reach Britain in that form: “the western marketing and retail machine is simply not up to the task.” The chapters did appear in Japan; Brazil’s Super GamePower listed the second for December 2000 and the third for the following February.
Television’s schedule
The idea came back in the West once games could be sold online. In 2004 Telltale, founded by former LucasArts staff, told Edge it would sell adventures in episodes, each standing alone but with storylines running across a series like “a well-structured sitcom”, and would treat its website and partners as “virtual TV channels where they can ‘tune in’ to the latest episodes”.
Valve used Steam to try the same thing with a shooter. In October 2005 Newell told Computer Gaming World that Valve planned an episode “about once every three months”, with “seasonal box sets” in the shops afterwards, and compared the plan to television. Half-Life 2: Episode One, once called Aftermath, came out in 2006, a six-hour game at £20 in the shops. Edge liked it but found it a “peculiar way to start a trilogy”. Episode Two followed in 2007, packaged with Portal and Team Fortress 2 in The Orange Box.
Valve also sold other developers’ episodes. Ritual Entertainment’s SiN Episodes: Emergence came out on Steam in May 2006, the first part of a planned series. Edge gave it six out of ten and wrote that “Sin Episodes promised us part one of an epic, but we’re in danger of getting a generic formula refined over several iterations”. No second episode was released. In 2007 Ritual was bought by MumboJumbo, a maker of casual games.
Publishers were warier. Remedy’s Alan Wake was at first meant to appear on Xbox Live Arcade as two-hour episodes, one a week for ten weeks, but Microsoft decided otherwise, and Edge reported that “the publisher’s conservatism eventually trumped innovation”. The game came out whole in 2010, though it kept the cliffhangers and “previously on” recaps of a television series.
Telltale’s seasons
Telltale made episodes its business. Its first Sam & Max episode, Culture Shock, came out in the autumn of 2006 for $9, the start of a season planned at one episode a month. Tales of Monkey Island came in five episodes from July to December 2009.
The Walking Dead, in five episodes during 2012, showed what a season could do for a story. Players made hard choices about who to save, and Telltale collected their decisions and showed each player how everyone else had chosen. By the spring of 2013 Edge counted more than 8.5 million episodes downloaded and more than 80 game of the year awards. Dontnod’s Life is Strange followed the same pattern in 2015, five episodes from January to October; Wireframe later thought the episodic release was “part of the original Life Is Strange game’s charm”. IO Interactive released Hitman (2016) one location at a time, and Wireframe judged that “an episodic approach to Hitman worked in its favour”.
The schedule problem
Keeping to a timetable proved hard. By early 2014 Edge worried that Telltale was “being stretched too thin”: the second episode of The Wolf Among Us, promised within one to two months of the first, had slipped into the new year. Telltale grew quickly on licensed series, and in September 2018 laid off almost all of its staff, leaving The Walking Dead: The Final Season to be finished by Skybound Games. The Telltale entry tells that story.
Valve explained its own retreat in 2020, after the release of Half-Life: Alyx. The level designer Dario Casali told IGN, as Wireframe reported, that the team kept adding more to each episode “and then we realised these episodes are turning more into sequels”. After Episode Two, he said, “Maybe this episodes thing, it was a good concept, but we’re not executing [it] terribly well as far as getting things out quickly enough.” There was no Episode Three.
Sources
- Edge issue 172, February 2007, pp. 50–52: interview with Gabe Newell (“you’ve just failed for a week rather than four years”; Episode One’s uptake).
- Apogee Software advertisement, Computer Gaming World issue 105, April 1993: Wolfenstein 3D, Episode One for $4 or as a download, “Episodes two through six are sold separately”.
- Edge issue 84, May 2000, p. 33: Eldorado Gate (seven chapters, every two months, ¥2,800, Okamoto’s scripts, the series to end in 2004, Edge’s comments).
- Super GamePower issue 81, December 2000: Japanese release list (Eldorado Gate Part 2 on 12 December, Part 3 in February).
- Edge issue 144, Christmas 2004, p. 70: Telltale’s plans, Dan Connors on sitcoms and “virtual TV channels”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 255, October 2005, pp. 60–71: cover story on Valve (Aftermath, SiN Episodes on Steam, Newell on an episode “about once every three months” and seasonal box sets).
- Edge issue 164, July 2006: review of SiN Episodes: Emergence (six out of ten).
- Edge issue 165, August 2006, p. 80: review of Half-Life 2: Episode One (six hours, £20 at retail, “a peculiar way to start a trilogy”).
- Edge issue 236, January 2012, pp. 156–157: the making of Alan Wake (the planned weekly episodes, Microsoft’s decision, the TV-style structure).
- Edge issue 253, May 2013, pp. 126–128: the making of The Walking Dead (downloads and awards).
- Edge issue 263, February 2014, pp. 92–94: Telltale “stretched too thin” and the delayed Wolf Among Us episode.
- Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, p. 20: Life is Strange’s episodic release.
- Adam Barnes, review of Hitman 2, Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, p. 56: the episodic Hitman.
- Wireframe issue 36, April 2020, p. 15: Dario Casali, quoted from IGN, on why there was no Episode 3.
- For Telltale’s history, its Sam & Max and Monkey Island release dates and its closure, see the Telltale entry and its sources; for Episode Two and The Orange Box, the Valve entry; for Life is Strange’s release dates, the Life is Strange entry.
- Wikipedia, “SiN Episodes” (web, secondary): the release on 10 May 2006, only one episode released, Ritual’s purchase by MumboJumbo in 2007 (citing GameDaily, 24 January 2007). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiN_Episodes