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Creator / Telltale Games

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TV Tropes will remember that.
"The paths may diverge, but they will end up at the same place."
— Alfred Pennyworth, Batman: The Telltale Series

Based in San Rafael, California and specializing in licensed, episodic adventure games, Telltale Games was formed in 2004 by former LucasArts developers Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander when Sam & Max: Freelance Police was canceled.

At first, they were known for making point-and-click adventure games for relatively obscure IPs with cult followings, such as Bone and Homestar Runner, and series like Sam & Max and Monkey Island that were previously handled by their spiritual parent company.

They often released all sorts of machinimas and mockumentaries in between games to appeal to the fans. The interpretation of Hell seen in Sam & Max was very clearly modelled on their own office. They even published a complete Sam & Max comics treasury (the first in 12 years), Surfin' the Highway, and commissioned a new comic from Steve Purcell.

In 2011, they released Jurassic Park: The Game, which departed from the typical puzzle and exploration-based gameplay of point-and-click adventure games and instead followed a more linear storyline with quicktime events and choices that would alter how the narrative played out. They used this same style for the 2012 release of The Walking Dead: Season One, which proved to be their breakthrough hit: it was released at the height of The Walking Dead's popularity, with a gameplay style further refined from Jurassic Park: The Game, much more emphasis on the "choices matter" aspect, and some extremely high-quality and gut-wrenching writing. The game was critically acclaimed, with many calling it one of the best games of 2012, and single-handedly brought Telltale Games into mainstream attention.

After this, Telltale took the success of The Walking Dead and ran with it. In 2013 they started releasing a second season of Walking Dead adventure game episodes, as well as The Wolf Among Us, based on the Fables comic series, which like The Walking Dead was a narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure game. Their newfound popularity also got them access to some more high profile IPs: in 2014 they released Tales from the Borderlands, a narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure game, as well as Game of Thrones (Telltale), a narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure game. 2015 saw the release of Minecraft: Story Mode, which was a narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure game. 2016 and 2017 saw them take their talents to the Big Two of superhero comic universes with Batman: The Telltale Series and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, both of which were, you guessed it... narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure games.

Telltale Games' downfall came down to oversaturating their market. As you can surmise from those repeated words in the preceding paragraph, the success of that first Walking Dead game led to them pumping out as many games in the same style, which placed a burden on the developers working on the games, oversaturated a genre that Telltale had created and had almost complete control of, and pushed them away from their older style of more straightforward adventure games that, while not pulling in as much as the first Walking Dead, consistently made the studio money. Several of these games were well-received (though a good deal more had mixed reception), but critics agreed that Telltale never managed to recapture the magic of The Walking Dead's first season.

On September 21, 2018, Telltale Games underwent a major downsizing, reducing their numbers to a skeleton crew of 25 working support on Minecraft: Story Mode for Netflix's platforms, resulting in the cancellation of all their announced upcoming projects, and The Walking Dead's final season being finished by Skybound Entertainment, franchise creator Robert Kirkman's production company. By November, however, the remaining Telltale staff were let go, and Telltale entered into assignment proceedings to liquidate all of its assets to creditors, effectively dissolving the entire studio. As a result of the proceedings, some of Telltale's games were pulled from online services such as Steam.

On August 28, 2019, nearly a year after Telltale Games shuttered, LCG Entertainment bought Telltale Games and rebranded themselves as the old company, planning on releasing old and new games alike, starting with the long awaited second season of The Wolf Among Us. On December 2023, the new Telltale Games released their first new title, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, in cooperation with Deck Nine.

Much of the talent involved with the studio prior to the 2018 mass layoff regrouped into three separate studios:

  • AdHoc Studio, founded in 2018 and continuing the old company's narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure game style. They debuted with the game Dispatch in 2025, and are assisting the new Telltale with developing The Wolf Among Us 2.
  • Skunkape Games, founded by developers from the company's early point-and-click years. Skunkape acquired the rights to Telltale's Sam & Max games and Poker Night at the Inventory to remaster and release them on modern consoles.
  • Dramatic Labs, founded in 2021, who made a licensed Star Trek game called Star Trek: Resurgence, a narrative-driven, "choices matter" adventure game.

Games and game series by Telltale Games include:

This article adapts to the changes you make. The trope list is tailored by how you edit.

  • Acclaimed Flop: Most of Telltale Games' library was essentially this - many games were loved and enjoyed, but weren't money-makers outside of Minecraft: Story Mode, The Walking Dead Season 1, and publishing the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of 7 Days to Die.
  • Author Catchphrase: Starting with The Walking Dead, two messages are prevalent in their choice-and-consequence games: The first thing you usually see at the beginning is "This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play," and during gameplay, "X will remember that" usually pops up after major dialogue decisions.
  • Breakthrough Hit: Two: the Sam & Max revival was the company's first episodic gaming success. The Walking Dead won tons of awards and gave them recognition among the mainstream gaming press.
  • Executive Meddling: After the success of The Walking Dead, it was mandated that all later games followed the style it had set up.
  • Expanded Universe: Most of their games are sequels or parts of a greater whole to the original work in some way.
  • In Spite of a Nail: Despite the games often acting like nearly every choice the player makes will have some lasting effect on the narrative, in reality, only a handful of them will impact the plot, and the story will almost always follow the same, linear beats regardless of the decisions made.
  • Morton's Fork: Unfortunately enough to get its own page.
  • No Dub for You: No game since Sam & Max has been dubbed in French, there's only a subtitled version.
  • Optional Character Scene: Variously in their games, depending on the choices made, each character has several different scenes.
  • Painted CGI: Many of their titles that are based on comics books (like the The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us) feature 3D models with bold outlines and painted textures, mimicking the style of their source material.
  • Production Posse: Roger L. Jackson, Dave Fennoy, Adam Harrington and Andrew Chaikin pop up a lot, among others. Notably averted in Game of Thrones, though, which features an entirely new slate of voice actors for Telltale, including actors from the HBO series.
  • Rereleased for Free: Around the time The Walking Dead: Season 1 finished its run, the first episode became free. The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, and Game of Thrones (Telltale) followed suit, although around the end of their runs.
  • Revisiting the Roots: They've experimented with much more dramatic or dynamic story-telling for quite a while and state that they intend for Poker Night 2 (featuring Ash Williams, Brock Samson, Claptrap, and Sam as players, while GLaDOS deals) to be much more humorous.
    Dan Connors: It's great to revisit our roots after the success of The Walking Dead. People might not know that we have a strong history of humor in our games, and players are going to find a lot of laughs in Poker Night 2, Poker Night 2 is another example of our ability to work with phenomenal partners and bring great characters to life in the gaming universe.
  • Running Gag: The drink Banang has popped up in some form or another throughout their games.
  • Sadistic Choice: Every time there's a point-and-click game, this trope is inevitably played straight and, at times, exaggerated.
  • Strictly Formula: While their episodic adventure games were already developing this reputation beforehand, the runaway success of The Walking Dead: Season One and the company's wish to make lightning strike twice led to this becoming a deliberate part of their development strategy according to internal documents released when the company folded in 2018.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Telltale Games wanted👁 Image
      to do Scott Pilgrim, but series author Bryan Lee O'Malley rejected the offer, not because of a dispute between him and Telltale, but because he believed that Scott couldn't work out as an Adventure Game. One may wonder what would have happened if we had gotten this over a multiplayer beat-em-up game.
    • They announced plans to do a new King's Quest game and gave it a fair amount of press, but rights complications prevented it from being made.
    • Telltale announced in 2018 they were going to develop a second season of The Wolf Among Us, an Evil Dead game that would have featured Bruce Campbell and a Stranger Things game. With their September layoffs, those games were cancelled. LCG Entertainment's August 2019 buyout of Telltale eventually lead to the resumption of the second season of The Wolf Among Us.

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