“So you’ll see us announcing new IP, developing our own IP, announcing new partnerships. We want to be as much of the tip of the spear of that as we can,” Bruner says. “It feels like we’re in this really exciting time where storytelling is evolving really, really aggressively. Really, that’s what Telltale is about: The stories. It’s not a question of picking one audience over another, but rather, catering to everyone that likes a well-told story. That level of ubiquity helps to ensure that no potential fans are left behind.
Episodic releases like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us aren’t unpopular on gaming consoles, but the full experience that they offer ports very easily to more mainstream platforms like mobile devices. They would never go out and buy a game console.”īruner doesn’t see it as leaving gamers behind, and the results so far support that assertion.
“Tablets are real interesting because there’s a lot of people who would never say that they’re gamers, but they stream Netflix on their smart TV and they’ll play Tiger Woods golf on their tablet. And that was a big thing of moving to these platforms, places where people are consuming stories. “So the games industry is huge and video games are huge, but storytelling at large – television, films, novels - is way bigger than games. “One out of 10 people know what you’re talking about,” he says. Bruner rightly points out that, in the scenario above, mentioning a game, even an established one like Mordor, would not elicit nearly as much recognition. Take one of the most popular examples from 2014, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The same thing doesn’t often happen with video games. “You walk down the street and say ‘Game of Thrones,’ and everyone’s like, ‘I’ve heard of it, I’ve read the books, I’ve watched the TV show.’” “Games are huge, right? But they’re not mass market huge, where all the great stories and the great storytellers work,” Bruner says. But there’s still this notion that they’re second-class citizens within the public consciousness. Video games as a medium generate incalculable amounts of money, certainly more than most, if not all, other forms of entertainment. Ubiquity is crucial to Telltale’s core business, which is to tell stories for as wide an audience as possible. To hear Bruner tell it, this is all part of the grand master plan. No longer second-class citizens Telltale CEO Kevin Bruner There may be a smart toaster somewhere in China that hasn’t yet hosted a Telltale story, but that’s about it as far as unsupported platforms go. The studio’s “usual” business these days feels like a non-stop parade of critical accolades and near-ubiquitous cross-platform releases. Leading the charge is all-consuming and taxing, so I guess I’m tagging in for the next 10 years and then we’ll see what happens.”īruner says Telltale’s new normal is really just “business as usual,” but that’s a modest description from the soft-spoken exec.
“We just had our 10-year anniversary and there’s a huge amount of opportunity-slash-work in front of us. So it’s more like he’s tagged out and I’ve tagged in,” Bruner explains. “Dan and I founded the studio together, and have been running the studio together for the past 10 years. As Bruner describes it to Digital Trends, it’s not so much a new job as it is a new title. One of those founders, Dan Connors, recently set aside his CEO position to make way for co-founder Kevin Bruner to take the reins. It’s been just north of 10 years since veterans of the golden age at LucasArts founded the studio.
Telltale Games is at the dawn of a new era. Fitbit Versa 3Ī scene from Episode 2 of Telltale's Game of Thrones series.Once you’ve landed a deal to tell Game of Thrones stories, where do you go from there?