One of the biggest stories of 2018 was the sudden and abrupt closure of Telltale Games, the studio behind the beloved The Walking Dead adventure games. Studios shut down all the time, but this one was particularly unsettling, as employees were given a day notice, no severance, and health insurance for only a couple of weeks upon being let go. It was surprising since the studio was once on top of the world. A 54-minute documentary by Noclip gives an in-depth look at just what went down during the studio?s final days and caused its demise.
Danny O?Dwyer got a chance to sit with four former Telltale employees, all of which had interesting stories to tell. We?ve heard horror stories of the unhealthy work practices that took place at Telltale, but aside from crunch and long hours, there were also disputes with the executives. The common theme was that the Telltale team was usually butting heads with the higher-ups.
One of the people interviewed was Kent Muddle, a Cinematic Artist. He noted:

The review process where you had to show the game to the executive staff was the worst. That?s when the episodes would blow up. And you would anticipate them blowing up, because often they would blow up in specific ways. The only thing that would be considered good [is that] you knew what it was going to be. So we essentially kept just kind of making the same game over and over again, because we knew it would please the executives and sometimes some of the head marketing people were there,...