 The story of Telltale Games is one of the most interesting cautionary fables in recent years. A small indie studio that created an unexpected hit, Telltale was rocketed into mainstream gaming a lot faster than anyone could have anticipated. But with fame and success comes the pressure to deliver more, to surpass older triumphs, to grow bigger, better, and even more financially lucrative. Ultimately, the studio burned out and has come crashing down. What was once a pinnacle of story-based gaming has now imploded. Along the way, there were challenges, successes, and failures. There were risky management decisions, enthusiastic creative projects, and a crushing despair amongst an increasingly toxic work environment. This is the tale of how a few earnest video game developers made something special, before ultimately frittering it away while chasing greater and greater success. This is the story of the rise and fall of Telltale Games. Once upon a time, long before there was a Telltale Games, there was LucasArts. In 1979, just two years after the release of his superstar smash film Star Wars, George Lucas formed a fledgling game studio. George wanted to explore the storytelling potential of the emerging video game art form and see what could be accomplished by building games around a cinematic narrative. After years of work, George's vision was achieved and LucasArts gained a reputation for pioneering the adventure game art form. But by the start of the new millennium, the popularity of adventure games was on the decline. LucasArts focused more and more on creating action games based on Star Wars and other popular movie franchises, as sales of their original creative works dropped steadily. A lot of the company's creators, who had worked to build up the adventure game genre, were out of work. It was decreed far and wide by many game journalists that the era of adventure games had come to an end, swallowed up by the rapid growth in the popularity of first-person shooters. This left a lot of talented adventure game developers without a home and with a skill set that was drastically underappreciated in the modern climate. Many began looking at forming their own studios in an effort to keep the adventure genre alive. The most famous and successful of these was Tim Schaefer, whose double fine productions ended up creating plenty of big name hits that made people question whether adventure games were dead after all. Telltale Games was founded in the hopes of creating a similar successful studio from the remnants of LucasArts. The three founders of the studio, Troy Mollander, Dan Connors and Kevin Brunner, were all former employees from the House of Lucas and many of their first hires for Telltale came from among the ranks of the old adventure game giant. Their first game, Telltale Texas Hold'em, didn't exactly set the world alight, but it got them started. It was clear that their primary passion was for adventure titles rather than card games and so they began pursuing what really mattered to them. This meant overcoming two major challenges. Firstly, they had to contend with the big concern of the time, the fact that, supposedly, nobody cared about adventure games anymore. This didn't feel right. Surely an entire game genre couldn't shrivel up and die simply because first-person shooters were growing in popularity. There just had to be an audience for the kind of smart, engaging, story-driven experiences that LucasArts had previously been creating. The trio simply needed to find a hook, something that would draw people in. The second problem that Telltale faced was a dire lack of resources. Running a game studio took a lot of money and nobody involved had any capital to offer up to keep the wheels turning. This problem was at least a little easier to solve. The new studio heads were able to secure funding from private investors that believed in their vision. At this time, Dan, who became the studio CEO, stated the investment community is saying Telltale is a unique company with a clearly differentiated proposition, ideally positioned in the fastest-growing segment of the video games industry. He, and everyone else, was enthusiastic about the future. As for the first problem that Telltale faced, the apparent audience apathy towards adventure games, there was an easy fix for this as well, even if it was a bit of a dirty trick. If the studio focused on licensing existing properties, they could use the existing fame and notoriety of familiar faces and characters to help drive success. In addition to the comic strip Bone, the first few Telltale games endeavored to continue the legacy of LucasArts titles. Telltale cut its teeth with new Salmon Max and Monkey Island games, attempting to revive a few franchises that otherwise weren't getting any love. This effort brought in moderate attention, and the studio continued to build up its reputation. While small, the audience for adventure titles did certainly seem to still exist. Telltale found a way to split the cost of development so that they could make their funding stretch further. By releasing games episodically, they could use revenue from early installments in a series to fund later parts of development. So, the earning for a game's first episode could fund development on its second and third installments, and so on. The studio moved on to developing more and more licensed games. While picking up the rights to develop these games wasn't cheap, this practice ensured that there was a big enough audience to keep things moving. Offerings like Back to the Future, The Game, and Jurassic Park, The Game continued to build the company's reputation, even if Telltale still lacked a big hit. This finally came in the form of The Walking Dead, The Game. Telltale had a massive opportunity in its hands with this title. The television show of the same name was rising in popularity, and the comics were similarly enjoying a boost as a result. A good game could help cement the studio as one of the foremost creators of adventure games and story-driven interactive experiences. Taking the helm were Sean Vanneman and Jake Rodkin, who had worked on several previous Telltale games, and who were eager to build up something new. The Walking Dead offered the studio an unprecedented opportunity. Instead of simply building a game around existing characters, Telltale could use the world of The Walking Dead, but create a whole new narrative with new characters that were capable of more growth and that were a lot more disposable. Sean and Jake's vision for the game focused on a choice system in which the player could choose the path of their character through the horrific world of an undead apocalypse. Players could choose how they interacted with survivors they met during their journeys, and crucially, they had to react to certain key moments in the narrative by choosing which of their companions should live or die when attacked by walkers. The first episode of The Walking Dead took the world by storm upon its release, with praises raining down from the heavens. But with the sudden burst of popularity came the need for Telltale to deliver more, and this gave rise to a culture of conflict within the studio. What was once a collaborative process became more and more fraught. Sean and Jake had a specific vision of their game, but not everyone agreed on how it should be made. While The Walking Dead went on to receive phenomenal critical and commercial acclaim, its star creators decided that they were done working with Telltale. Sean and Jake felt that they didn't want to keep making licensed games based on someone else's intellectual property. They also no longer wanted to deal with the increasingly tense office politics within Telltale. Following the completion of their work on the first season of The Walking Dead, Sean and Jake left the company and teamed up with a veteran EA developer, Jane Ng and artist Oli Moss to create Campo Santo, a rival studio that would focus on the more personal original title, Firewatch. Meanwhile, the success of The Walking Dead was having huge ramifications within Telltale. Eager to capitalise on the studio's rising star, the higher-ups began greenlighting more and more licensed games. This meant hiring a lot of new employees over a short period of time, as a small indie studio exploded into a mid-sized development machine that kept churning out titles. Dan Connor was replaced as the company's CEO. Instead, Kevin Brunner, another of the studio's founders, took charge. Kevin seemed like an excellent fit. He was a programmer at heart, and he'd had a hand in building the inner workings of a lot of the framework for Telltale's formula. He'd created much of the code for early games like Texas Hold'em. During work on The Walking Dead, it had been Kevin's idea to make the weight of decisions stand out by informing the player that other characters would remember their key choices. But the loss of Sean and Jake felt like a major betrayal for the studio. Kevin feared that allowing the pair to enjoy some of the spotlight during the creation of The Walking Dead Season 1 had ended up damaging the company, as the pair had now established a rival competitor. In order to avoid similar betrayals, Kevin constantly rotated employees around different projects, not allowing a single senior creator to stay working on any one game for too long. The result was a homogenous, generally high quality batch of games that were distinctly Telltale without feeling like the work of any one person. With so many games to make and so much work to do, the employees at Telltale began feeling overworked. The studio's growth hadn't been enough to match up to the sheer size and scope of what the company was hoping to achieve. This created a particular burden for the studio's visual creators, who were often kept in the dark about big changes to stories. They'd find weeks of work thrown out, simply because they hadn't been given the latest script for a game. While almost all games experienced a crunch period immediately before launch, Telltale's employees found themselves trapped in a perpetual, ongoing struggle to keep up with mounting pressure. Taking holiday time felt irresponsible, as it left other employees to pick up the slack, and six day working weeks became the norm. At first, employees took some comfort from inspirational emails sent around by Kevin, who tried to keep the teams motivated during a period of intense work. But as this similar sentiment was expressed over and over again over months and months, it became clear that this wasn't an exceptional circumstance. Everyone at Telltale was stuck working like this indefinitely. Inevitably, developers started to experience burnout. Many began jumping ship, hoping for greener pastures. Those who remained continued to struggle as working conditions became more aggressive. Senior planning meetings became rowdy, angry affairs, with senior staff members bickering over the direction that games took. One developer overheard their boss say, I love, but we can just shout at each other and curse at each other in a meeting. It's totally great. This sentiment was not shared by the workers in the trenches. Getting yelled at was doing nothing to help productivity. Many blamed Kevin for this work culture, feeling that he was deliberately hogging the limelight. If there was an interview to be given or an award to be accepted, Kevin was eager to put himself forward, overshadowing the work of other creators. Higher up the company, there were even bigger arguments afoot. Kevin was feuding with investors and board members who all wanted to see greater and greater growth. They weren't interested in allowing their employees room to breathe, and instead wanted to see more success from the company. One day, Kevin headed out of the building, a small backpack on his arm. He never returned. He'd even left all of his possessions in his office, but an email that he sent out revealed that he was no longer a part of the company. Telltale's board of directors reshuffled things again. A new CEO came to the company, fresh from work at Zynga. This move made plenty of employees nervous, as Zynga had a reputation for some pretty shady business practices. One morning, 70 employees received an email calling them into a big meeting. There, they were informed that their employment was to be terminated. Telltale tried to make this as easy as possible. The employees would be paid up for the rest of the year, and there would be job fairs to try and get them new work. But it was clear that the studio was in trouble. Its rapid growth was ultimately unsustainable. Things went quiet for a few months. But less than a year later, over 200 more employees were laid off. They didn't receive the same parting benefits that the first batch enjoyed. The era of Telltale was over. After massive success and a meteoric rise, the studio had crashed and burned. Everything was aflame. The studio was no more. But... There were survivors from the ordeal, and a lot of positives had come from Telltale's impact on the industry. Sean and Jake's fire watch went on to critical and commercial acclaim. Even as the studio worked on its second title, In the Valley of Gods, Campo Santo was purchased by Valve, who were eager to build up more narrative-focused gaming experiences. Another studio founded by ex Telltale employees, Night School Studios, created Oxenfree, a similarly story-driven title that wowed players. Telltale's legacy remains strong. The studio behind The Walking Dead achieved its purpose by kicking off a renaissance of story-driven adventure games and walking simulators. It's directly thanks to Telltale's success that there are now more narrative-based games than ever. Titles like Life is Strange and Gone Home exist because the studio created a culture that supports games that are about more than shooting and fighting. Telltale games proved that video games can be about more than violence, that story-driven experiences have an eager audience, and that adventure titles are most certainly not dead. And as for their demise? The moral here is that you should breathe. It's easy to get swept up in the excitement and enthusiasm of creating something you care about, of seeing numbers rise and of building up a passion project. But don't let yourself get overwhelmed by this pressure. Allow yourself breaks and work at a pace that you're comfortable with. Don't fret if your special project takes months or years to complete. Don't feel guilty for putting it to one side where necessary and giving yourself time to relax. As you do this, your creative endeavors will benefit as a result. You too can create something that you're truly proud of without sacrificing the rest of your life to do so.