The Walking Dead
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By agreeing, you consent to the placing of cookies on your computer or device in accordance with Vox Media's Privacy Policy. I AGREE By Megan Farokhmanesh @Megan_Nicolett Mar 20, 2018, 9:00am EDT Illustrations by Alex Castro n 2012, on a light-drenched stage amid screams and cheers, Star Trek actress Zoe Saldana announced Spike Video Game Awards’ game of the year: The Walking Dead. The win was a huge coup for its relatively small developer, Telltale Games. Its emotional, storytelling-focused take on the popular zombie franchise beat out hugely popular games like Dishonored and Mass Effect 3 that required hundreds of developers and cost tens of millions of dollars to make. The Telltale Games team, including co-founders Kevin Bruner and Dan Connors, and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, made their way onstage to accept the award. Kirkman accepted the large, black statue from Saldana with both hands and handed it off to Connors and Bruner. Bruner, in turn, gestured two others onstage: Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, the project leads and co-creators of the game, thanking them for creating the game’s heroes. Neither of them was named onstage for their work in creating the studio’s biggest creative success. Shortly before two women in sparkly outfits ushered everyone offstage, Vanaman abruptly pulled the statue from Bruner’s hand in a moment that appeared unplanned and said, “We work with the most talented people on the planet.” At the time, Telltale was a studio of under 100 people, small by mainstream studio standards where headcounts can range from hundreds to thousands. And in an industry where storytelling often takes a back seat to “fun” gameplay, the win established Telltale as a successful developer that valued storytelling and character development above all else. Over the next several months, awards for The Walking Dead continued to pile up — a pivotal and defining moment for a studio that had been in a challenging financial situation just a year before. The company began hiring at a breakneck speed, tripling its headcount over just a few years. Soon, it would capture the attention of some of Hollywood’s most well-loved franchises, delivering spinoff games like Batman, Game of Thrones, and Guardians of the Galaxy that focused on narrative and emotional investment instead of action or bombastic set pieces. But the studio’s meteoric rise would not last. In November 2017, the company announced that it was laying off 90 developers, roughly a quarter of its staff. For some at Telltale, the news was a shock. For others, the inevitable outcome of what sources familiar with the company describe as years of a culture that promoted constant overwork, toxic management, and creative stagnation. (The Verge spoke to more than a dozen current and former developers at Telltale for this story, many of whom requested anonymity for fear of retribution from current and prospective employers.) Although some of the problems were specific to Telltale and its management, many of the developer’s troubles were emblematic of the unsustainable and erratic development practices that plague the video game industry at large. These conditions almost always hit one group the hardest: developers, or the people who actually make the games. Layoffs are a pervasive fact of life, even at successful studios where developers are often hired en masse to help hit tight deadlines and then fired to cut costs after the game ships or is canceled. With the next deadline, the cycle begins anew. Overwork, job insecurity, and profound burnout are omnipresent concerns; more than three- quarters of developers report working under “crunch” conditions, which can mean working up to 20 hours a day and more than 100 hours a week. These practices can have a significant and debilitating cost to employees, one that often feels baked into video game development culture. The story of Telltale — its rise, decline, and potential reformation — is not just the story of the missteps of one studio. It’s a shocking window into the $36 billion video game industry (which is now so large and lucrative that it rivals the film industry), and how its worst practices can grind down and burn out even the most devoted and valuable employees. elltale emerged from the ashes of the adventure game genre, which was once synonymous with PC gaming. In popular titles like King’s Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst, creativity, imagination, and puzzle-solving skills were the most important toolset to have. Adventure game developers Sierra and LucasArts were kings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by the late ‘90s, their popularity declined in favor of shooters and 3D games. Telltale Games’ founders — Bruner, Connors, and Troy Molander — were all former LucasArts employees, and by the time they created Telltale in 2004 and resurrected once-popular LucasArts properties like Sam & Max and Monkey Island, adventure games were widely considered “dead and buried.” To make this style of gaming mainstream (and profitable) again, the co-founders decided to focus on improving interactive storytelling and deepen the role-playing that came along with it. In 2007, Telltale raised more than $6 million in venture capital funding, investments that inevitably came with strings — namely a burden to prove growth and success to a board of members outside of the direct studio. Just like in film, licensed properties offer a safer alternative to pursuing the costly business of building out original IPs. So rather than putting its resources into creating original worlds, Telltale turned to established worlds and the fanbases that love them — franchises like Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, and of course, The Walking Dead. Coming off the heels of 2011’s Jurassic Park: The Game, which was described by critics as “subpar” and “a disappointment,” The Walking Dead was the studio’s most exciting project yet: a perfect storm of in-house creative talent, mainstream name recognition, and storytelling that took advantage of Telltale’s narrative strengths. Instead of a typical adventure game where players wander around and solve puzzles, The Walking Dead focused on the paternal relationship between the hero, Lee, and a young girl named Clementine, whom he rescues and protects. It had a cinematic feel that set it apart from other Telltale games, with riveting writing, powerful voice acting performances, and high emotional stakes. It pushed players to make tough moral choices with no easy answers: two members of your small band of survivors are on the edge of death. You can only save one. Who gets to live, and who will you abandon? Your choices transform the way the story unfolds. Internally, multiple sources pointed to a specific locus for the success of The Walking Dead: lead developers Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman. Vanaman wrote several of the game’s episodic chapters, and Vanaman and Rodkin directed the first chapter and guided the overall first season together. If Telltale’s financial woes had one positive creative impact on The Walking Dead, it’s that the poor reception for Jurassic Park meant the studio had little time to slow or halt development. The game had to come out, which gave the Walking Dead creative team leverage to ignore or skirt around feedback from upper management that they vehemently disagreed with. Rodkin and Vanaman developed a reputation as personalities strong enough to challenge the founders on creative decisions, and pushed over and over again to create the game the way that they wanted, says a source familiar with the project. “They won, and it ended up being this huge success.” When Telltale released the first episode of The Walking Dead in April 2012, even some of the people who worked on the game were surprised by how positive the audience reaction was. By January 2013, the game had sold more than 8.5 million copies — or episodes — raking in more than $40 million in sales. In October 2013, the company claimed to have sold more than 21 million different episodes individually across all of its platforms. Telltale started to expand, signing partnerships with Gearbox Software, HBO, and Mojang and transitioning from a small studio to a midlevel company with multiple licensed properties. The culture of the company changed dramatically as a result. Former employees describe Telltale in its early days as a small, tight-knit group with a strong sense of camaraderie. New hires trickled in slowly. Upper management had been much less involved in the day-to- day, and developers were given more freedom to do their jobs as they saw best. But the success of The Walking Dead spurred the company to expand rapidly: in order to suit both its growing ambitions and keep investors happy, it became a company that many long- standing employees no longer recognized. “We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people,” says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley, who worked at the studio from 2008 to 2015. “You walk around the office, and you don’t really recognize anybody anymore.” Sources say the culture of the studio never properly adapted from its indie mentality to one more appropriate for its larger size. Tribal knowledge persisted over clearly documented processes, and a lack of communication among employees bred confusion. “Very rarely people were writing things down on a wiki or a confluence page or any sort of documentation,” says a former employee. “People were shifting so often that you would hear a version of a story that was actually weeks old, and the person telling you has no idea because that’s the last thing they heard.” Then, of course, there were the personnel shifts.