The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us aren't Telltale Games' only projects, we learned today at E3. Following a demo of The Walking Dead: 400 Days , Telltale Founder and President Kevin Bruner told me that more than one new license announcement will be coming from the studio later this year.
PCG: I'm curious if you can speak about Telltale's growth right now. You guys moved into a new building recently...
Kevin Bruner, President: Yes, we have a massive new worldwide headquarters. [laughs]
The old Autodesk building, is that right?
Bruner:. Yeah.
Are you at a stage where you're aggressively pursuing new licenses? Are new licenses pursuing you?
Bruner: Both. One of the things we've always done in our history is licensed games. And we take a lot of pride in being what we think is the best licensed game company in the industry. Over the years we keep working on bigger and kind of more popular licenses, but we've always had the opportunity to work on things that we just love. We've got this long list of things that we love that might've been out of reach before, and certainly on the heels of the success of Walking Dead, people understand what we try to do a lot better, and people want to see if we can do a similar experience with other licenses.
So we've had both, we've had the opportunity to talk to some people we've wanted to talk to for a very long time, and we've also had some people approach us that were just, amazing, that we never would have imagined would've had wanted to talk to us eight years ago.
So I think we're going to be making some more license announcements coming up this year, but I think there's going to be some things that people are like, “Amazing, I can't wait for Telltale to do it,” and definitely some things where they'll be like “That's awesome, I would never have thought of a Telltale game about that ,” but it's going to be crazy cool.
The ones I hear come up the most consistently in comment threads are Breaking Bad and Mad Men.
Bruner: Yeah, we consider ourselves, like, scripted drama of games, and that stuff comes up around us as well. We would love to do Mad Men, and basically all this high-class, scripted television that's out there right now, we're rabid consumers of all of it. It's super inspirational to what we do, and the opportunity to make things like that are interactive would be awesome.
But we're also gamers, right? And there's gaming worlds that we know and love, there's books that we know and love, so I think the scripted television is the things that people would think are more organic. We're not doing Breaking Bad, but if we came out with a Breaking Bad game, everyone would be like “Hooray, Telltale's doing Breaking Bad!” But I think there's some outside-the-box stuff coming as well, worlds that people want more insight into and want to spend more time with or want to do something new in.
