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It’s a traumatic thing to lose a job and we didn’t want to necessarily put people back through that. “We were conscious that that could have been not something you want to put people through. “One of the things we did was negotiating with the original landlord for some space,” he said, adding that they made sure the team was okay with working in the building where they once had jobs. Howe and his team of four set to work finding financing for the project and figuring out how quickly they could put people back to work. “So there was a major financial undertaking, a major structural undertaking and then a major responsibility to the people.” “Rather than take advantage of that, we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to embrace that spirit and we’re going to help these guys finish this story with almost whatever it takes from our side. “What came back from that was just this intense passion to finish the game, to do almost whatever it took,” he said. Their response, Howe said, was life-affirming. We really only want you guys to do it, but we don’t know how long this is going to take and we don’t know what the long term looks like.’” “We went up and said, ‘We would like you guys to come back and finish the game. Howe said he walked the group through what it was that Skybound was attempting to do and that he wanted to be completely transparent about the fact that there was no promise of a job waiting for them after the game wrapped. “We were basically saying, ‘Here’s what we’re trying to do.’ It was before we’d resolved all the legal issues.” So Howe hopped on a flight and flew to San Rafael, Calif., where Telltale was based, to hold a sort of town hall meeting with the 50 or so developers who had been working on “The Walking Dead: The Final Season.” “We decided that we wanted to be completely transparent with the team.” “To have a team of five people suddenly have this fall in our lap as a major project that needed completing and with a sizable development team, that was a big, big undertaking for us. “There was five of us,” Ian Howe, CEO of Skybound Games, told Variety in a recent interview. It was a Hail Mary both for a small group of the soon-to-be-unemployed developers at Telltale and Skybound Games, which wasn’t really designed to develop games internally. Weeks later, Skybound Games, the gaming arm of Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment production company, announced it was taking over production of the last two episodes to ensure that the series’ finale would be published. And Lionsgate was cited, one employee said, during the meeting Friday morning as one of several things that led to the decision to lay off the company’s staff.Īs the company quickly fell apart, a former employee filed a lawsuit on behalf of all of those let go, saying that Telltale Games violated state and federal labor laws with the mass layoff because it didn’t give proper notice. Lionsgate had also recently notified the board that it had decided to stop funding Telltale so it could refocus on its core business. Two days after that interview with Variety, with just two of the planned four episodes of the game published, Telltale Games’ suddenly laid off nearly all of its 274 employees with no notice, no severance, and barely a week’s worth of health care, just a day after two potential investors walked away from funding talks.īoth AMC and Smilegate were in discussions to invest in Telltale Games, a deal that management had been working on to essentially save the company, sources told Variety at the time. Skybound’s Howe hopped on a flight and flew to San Rafael to hold an emergency town hall meeting Combined, “The Walking Dead’s” three major seasons of video games and two spinoffs resulted in more than 50 million episodes sold worldwide. The work on “The Walking Dead” at Telltale Games didn’t just help to create a beloved, interactive take on the comic book it essentially reinvigorated a long-dormant type of narratively driven game.

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Speaking with Variety in September, Telltale designer Mark Darin and Mudle both talked enthusiastically about the game and how it managed to both embrace the character and tone of “The Walking Dead” comic book while also breaking free of the powerful gravity of its storytelling to forge its own tales and beloved characters. Telltale Games was so sure of its finale take for “ The Walking Dead ” and the conclusion of protagonist Clementine’s tale that it took the unusual step of announcing all of the release dates for the episodic game’s final arc well before the games were done. We were always going to come back to doing another one - for it felt like, forever - for the eight years or so I was there.” “I worked on a bunch of other titles, but that’s the game that everyone knows Telltale for, that’s what it is.

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