By David Curry on June 18, 2014 at 5:25pm
For eight years, Telltale Games was a small development house working on "CSI" and "Sam & Max" in order to pay the bills alongside contracts from various movie studios. When "The Walking Dead" directors approached Telltale, a unique opportunity spiraled into one of the best selling and highly rated games of 2012.
Telltale continued the success with "The Wolf Among Us," their own take on the Fables comics by Bill Willingham. Now they have two of their biggest projects coming this year, Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones. The Borderlands series will follow some of the interesting characters from the game, but the real interest is "The Game of Thrones" storyline and how Telltale will adapt it to fit their own design.
Details on the game are slim, as Telltale has only revealed small bits of information to date; HBO has had nothing to announce. The story will follow the same path as the book and TV show. There is plenty of Westeros left uncovered, like the Age of Heroes, Age of Valyria, The Seven Kingdoms and The Targaryen Dynasty, but perhaps George R.R. Martin and the executives at HBO didn't want Telltale to start those stories.
The whole point of Telltale Games is choice. "The Walking Dead" and "The Wolf Among Us" work, because they create new characters in the same world. This offers different choices without TV and book readers already knowing the impact on the storyline. Perhaps instead of following a dozen different stories, Telltale Games will focus on one character outside the realm of the books that works within the stories and world.
Following One House Instead of All the Houses
In "Game of Thrones," King Joffrey, Daenerys Targaryen, Ned Stark, and all the other Houses make decisions that impact millions of common folk in the towns and cities. This gives Telltale Games a large branch of story to expand upon. One decision can appease the city, while another can cause rebellion. We are interested to see how much Telltale will move away from the "Game of Thrones" story into a world of their own.
George R.R. Martin's personal assistant, James S. A. Corey, will be working with Telltale Games on the video game. This gives Telltale more room to understand what parts of the story they can delve into and what parts should remain with the HBO brand for future shows when George R.R. Martin hands over his story to another writer.
Multi-Year, Multi-Project Deal
Telltale Games and HBO signed a multi-year, multi-project deal in 2013 for "Game of Thrones," meaning a lot of content will be created and adapted by the two franchises. Telltale is already working on a third season of "The Walking Dead", a second season of "The Wolf Among Us", and "Tales of The Borderlands" to work on. With alll of that, we wonder if delays will start happening.
Season four of "Game of Thrones" just ended, and we expect Telltale to announce their game before the start of the fifth season, set to air in 41 weeks.
Polygon Eurogamer
