Telltale’s “The Walking Dead” was a breakthrough story-based video game that popularized the genre of text-based, story driven adventures. Since the release of the first season of the game, the developers have teamed up with the Batman franchise, Game of Thrones, and is working on a Stranger Things collaboration for the future. But what made Telltale such a success? With the final season of the game that launched them into the spotlight releasing on August 14th, let’s dive into the choices this company made that created a successful revolution in the gaming industry.
Being in control of a character’s fate is something video games don’t normally give you. Usually, once you lose your life in the video game, you’re greeted with a black screen and re-spawn back a few steps in the game, only to face the same fate over and over. With Telltale, they broke that chain. The choices and events in the story actually impacted how your characters developed and made every moment feel personalized. You got to make huge, impactful choices every few minutes, and you’d see those choices play out in real time.
Now, with the final season of The Walking Dead coming, longtime players will be able to upload their previous files to the new game so their choices are recognized. New players, however, will have access to a “Story Builder” on Telltale’s website that allows you to rebuild the story from the ground up. You’ll get to relive every narrative-driven choice you made in order to shape Celmentine, the main protagonist, into one of 32 different personalities for the final season.
Telltale effectively reshaped what it meant for video games to have story in the best way possible. Developers have evolved from cliché narratives to meaningful plots with each new release of a game, and without Telltale, I don’t think any of that would have been possible.
