Former Telltale devs launch new studio, hint at a Bandersnatch-like project

Four former senior developers at The Walking Dead studio Telltale Games, including two former creative directors, have formed a new company called Adhoc Games, and will soon reveal an "interactive narrative" project that sounds similar to Black Mirror's Bandersnatch.

Dennis Lenart and Nick Herman, former Telltale creative directors who left the developer in 2017, have co-founded the new studio alongside Pierre Shorette, former director of writing, and Michael Choung, former lead writer, both of whom also left Telltale before it folded last year.

In an interview with Variety, the group said they wanted to focus on "interactive narrative" games, and repeatedly referenced Black Mirror's interactive TV episode Bandersnatch as a point of comparison for their first project. "It seems to have scratched an itch that people didn’t quite know that they had,” Herman said. “That’s really exciting, and what we want to do is to make clear that live-action interactive isn’t a novelty, it’s unexplored territory that can be both creatively and commercially viable."

Shorette added that “making interactive experiences with real actors on the screen is something we’ve always talked about" and that combining film, television and games was "something we’re exploring right now". 

"With streaming platforms in our homes and cell phones in our pockets we’re in this unique time where the barrier to entry to interaction is gone," he said. "So as a group of people whose expertise and experience has come from making interactive narrative that sits in that space between, we feel now is the perfect time to form a studio that focuses on creating content for a new space.” 

While it sounds like it might not be a straight PC release, I'm still interested to see what they come up with. The group says they'll reveal more in the "near future", so stay tuned.