Telltale Games has lurched back from the dead under new management. LCG Entertainment has purchased assets from Telltale and is pressing ahead with new games based on already-established Telltale titles like The Wolf Among Us and Batman, as well as confirming plans to work on new licenses.
Jamie Ottilie of Galaxy Pest Control and and Brian Waddle of Havok are in charge over at LCG.
“There are some other expired licenses that we’re looking at,” Ottilie told Polygon after the new deal came to light. “We’re still evaluating, but we definitely want to continue some of the stories.”
Said stories will not include those from The Walking Dead, which is now back at Skybound, or any continuance of work on Stranger Things, which Netflix yoinked back after Telltale collapsed last year.
“This is a viable business that went away due to market conditions and some scale choices (Telltale’s previous management made),” he said. “I like games that tell stories and I think our industry should have a company that specialises in narrative-driven games.”
Telltale’s new recipe has plenty of cooks on hand. Athlon Games will be in charge of distribution, and adding cash to the acquisition were industry vets Chris Kingsley (Rebellion) and Tobias Sjögren (Starbreeze), among others.
“We’re going to stay small over the next six months and we will work for more of a distributed development pipeline than Telltale was known for,” Ottilie revealed. “We’ll focus on tools, technology and design in-house. Some things like animation and motion capture will be done with the right partnerships externally.”
Ottilie says Telltale’s murky history will serve as a stark reminder of what could happen if the project is badly managed.
“They brought me some of my favourite stories to play and they did an amazing job building a company. It’s unfortunate the way that it ended. Certainly we’re working very hard not to make similar mistakes.”
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