Telltale's Dan Connors on XBLA, Wallace & Gromit - Part 2

Bringing something to the 360 has a couple notable challenges for you guys. The first one I wanted to ask you about was the interface. Obviously adventure games are geared towards using a mouse. On the Wii you had the Wiimote, which was also kind of really natural, but on the 360 you're going to be using a gamepad, so how are you guys tackling that challenge?

"For us, pointing and clicking has always felt like you're one step removed from the gameplay."

Well that's been something that was a major thing for the studio to go after here. We are incredibly excited about the results for Wallace & Gromit. For us, pointing and clicking has always felt like you're one step removed from the gameplay. You lose a little bit of the immersion that you get from actually controlling the players. So being able to rethink how you play a story-based game, a puzzle-based game, using a gamepad has been a great, great opportunity for us to solve some of those immersion issues and accessibility issues.

There's a lot of people say: "Well, I don't play adventure games," and not even try. I think with Wallace & Gromit, we've got something that people can sit down and drive Wallace around and drive Gromit around and interact with the world in a whole new way that just feels completely different and it is a little bit more accessible and a little bit more immersive. We also went after the interface in a way that reflected the way a modern gamer thinks about gaming. Really what we want to do, we believe that the adventure genre has really been the best genre for telling stories and games ever since it started and that's why it's still around. But we do want to evolve it and we do want to expose it to more people and we don't want it to be a block for new people who are interested in games but don't know what an adventure game entails. We want to make it so that an average gamer can sit down and play Wallace & Gromit and enjoy the story and feel like they're playing their other games as well, not something that is a unique type of experience based on a control system.

So in terms of this new control system, it that something that you guys would back port if you were to bring over earlier Telltale releases like Sam & Max or Strong Bad?

That's a good question. I don't think so. I think those games are built around the control system and it's so at the core of the entire game from a presentation standpoint, from a gameplay stand point. So to go in and do that, it changes the product completely. I don't see us doing that, but I do see us taking what we've learned from an interface standpoint now that we've done the Wii point-and-click remote, the PC point-and-click, and the XBLA controller. We've got a nice wide breadth of what works and what doesn't work for what we're trying to do and it's only going to help our products going forward. Some of the products might make sense to be just pure point-and-click and that's the best way to play them and others might work better with the Wallace & Gromit control system.

One of the requirements of the XBLA platform hthat I'm curious how you're going to address, because of the title's story-based nature, are the demos. Every game has to have a demo available for it. Is that something that you have an idea of how you're going to do? Anything special or just a small slice of the game?

I think we've pretty traditionally have been doing our demos of just the beginning of the game and when you get to a certain point it ends and then you can move on from there. That hasn't always shown the user the best of what was in the game. So we have really thought about the demo and the Wallace & Gromit demo that we're working on is more like an interactive trailer than a traditional "here's a little chunk of the game. Play it and then you'll be able to move on from there." It's more like: "here is some of the best action in the game and some of the best segments of the game that give you a real flavor for what's going to happen if you buy it." Really pushing it further to show off more parts of the game and give the user a good feel of what the whole game is going to to be versus the very first room and the very first puzzle which I think doesn't really do justice to what the product is.


How about something like the leaderboards? What kind of goals or achievements would you want to highlight there since every game needs to have some kind of leaderboard functionality?

I think there's a lot of fun stuff to uncover in the game. There's a lot of different parts of the game that you can solve. I think motivating people – giving people extra motivation to work their way through a puzzle – is a good thing. A lot of people didn't finish Sam & Max. Even if they loved it, they played for three or four hours, but some puzzle might have hung them up and they just gave up. I think with achievements and leaderboards being able to reward people for that progress on another level – on kind of a points level – is a good language for a lot of games. It really gives them an extra level of tenacity. I think it add to the game product. So we're doing a lot of relating it to important parts of the game and important puzzles in the game and, of course, different items around the world that you can find that reward you for diligence. If you played Strong Bad we really went after a rewards extended play mode. It won't be as dramatic as that, but there are different things that you can do.

Obviously Wallace & Gromit is an existing IP. Sam & Max is an existing IP. Bone is. Strong Bad is. Any plans for you guys to do original IPs in the future?

"We still put a lot of value in working with great storytellers and telling great stories ..."

Well, in the future, we plan to be around for a long time and right now we are really starting on getting the channel set up, getting the engine moved to the different platforms, getting a real distribution channel that allows us to self publish, and once we have that kind of reach, and hopefully a type of brand recognition for Telltale that allows us to sell enough units to make it profitable, I think that's a huge goal for us and a real important step for us. All that being said, we have always claimed to be the storytelling game company and there are so many great stories out there and whenever we bring a franchise in, and bring all the talent that comes behind that franchise, like Aardman, or like Steve Purcell, or like the Chapman brothers, or like Jeff Smith, that really adds to our ability. We are bringing great storytellers into our world and hopefully that's showing in our product. So, going on and doing original property certainly has its value in a lot of different ways, but we still put a lot of value in working with great storytellers and telling great stories as well. And working with great characters that have stories already written.

Lastly, sort of unrelated, I just wanted to get your thoughts on it, I don't know if you saw LucasArts' new Indiana Jones game on Wii is going to come bundled with a copy of Fate of Atlantis. It just seems almost like adventure games are back in vogue in a way, obviously due in part to Telltale.

You know I didn't even notice it, I saw the announcement which kind of surprised me because I had heard all kinds of different things about Indiana and didn't realize that there was a product so close and then I didn't even see that they were including Fate. That's interesting and we are proud, for any role we might have had in getting people seeing the value in these franchises. I do think that there's a modernization that Telltale has done to the genre that people still kind of look at as kind of traditional, but if you play the old one versus playing a Telltale game right now we have certainly put a lot of effort into modernizing it. So it will be interesting to see how people respond to the classics.

Yeah, I'm not really sure how a younger gamer is going to respond if they've played Telltale games or they've played Penny Arcade Adventures, going back and playing something like Fate. But it's pretty exciting for those of us who grew up on those games.

Yeah, and playing it on the Wii and on the console, I'm sure Hal never thought that would happen, or George never thought that twenty years from ... is it twenty years now?

It's got to be close to twenty, maybe fifteen? Let's find out ... 1992, so sixteen plus years.

Yeah, sixteen years later coming back and after the story being written up, being dead for so long, it's still around.

Thanks a lot for your time, Dan!

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