Faithful reader, Rum Rogers, was recently out on one of his . . . colorful . . . web surfing voyages when, out of the blue, popped this rather adult looking ad:
Always a man who wants to get to the bottom of things, so to speak, Rum dug a bit deeper, and found that the aforementioned logo, which at least was a somewhat modified version of Ben, was not one of a kind:
We got nothing, other than utter bafflement.
Those of you with better memory than you probably should have, might recall that the Mac version of Escape from Monkey Island (and possibly the PC, too?) came bundled with a set of desktop wallpapers. Mojo reader Andrew, the bon vivant he is, certainly remembered, and he sent us all five of them. Now you can adorn your desktop with some EMI art, too! Download them all right here, or enjoy this preview:
And thanks, Andrew!
Source: Andrew
Bad management killed Telltale Games. The studio's fall gets a write-up over on Game Informer, going in-depth about the post-Walking Dead delirium which saw the studio's two-act implosion last year. It's a good read, partially because its follow-up gives Kevin Bruner, the CEO who arguably steered Telltale into the iceberg, a voice.
Bruner's been on something of a redemption campaign—his Twitter is all nostalgic for the Telltale he helped close by suing, for example—and this does read like a continuation of that. But the portrait of Telltale painted is actually sordid.
Consider nuggets like this, for example, which ignore the very different feel you got playing, say, "They Stole Max's Brain!" (helmed by Mike Stemmle) than you did "The Penal Zone" (Chuck Jordan)...
I think one of the misconceptions is that Telltale was auteur-led, and what I mean is that [the games are envisioned by] myself or by particular individuals. One of the things that I take the most pride in is that for many people at Telltale, it was their first job. And we would give people a lot of responsibility really quickly for better and/or worse. But then team that made The Walking Dead was a different team than the team that made The Wolf Among Us, Borderlands, or Minecraft. The fact that people could come in and really do stellar work, particularly early in their career – I take a lot of pride in that.
...To, well, this:
We tried to create an environment where you really had to do that to survive at Telltale, because we didn’t have these three-year long production cycles. You would have to say, "You know, I need to go home and not work on the game that I care so deeply about and that I want to be the best game ever, because this is the chance I get to work on Batman or this is the chance I get to work on that or the other thing. I know they’re going to record my script in two days and I want it to be as good as it can be."
Managing that was really, really hard because everyone cared really deeply. The simple answer is: "Just take more time." A big studio costs a lot of money every day in order to open the doors. We didn’t have the option of taking more time even though that would have been the perfect thing to give to everybody. Everyone worked really hard because they were really passionate. We wanted to make the best content possible, which I think is what everybody does in the industry. I think the difference with Telltale was how relentless and ceaseless the content was.
As soon as you finished passionately working on an episode and you’re just like "I’m just going to put in a couple extra things to make sure it’s as good as possible," you turn around and there’s another scene that you’re like, "I want that to be good too." It really was ceaseless. We needed people to go home, and we encouraged people to go home, but it’s hard when you care.
Everybody knows you write great existential dialogue when you don't get to go home to see your family.
I think this all lends credence to that description of Bruner as a jealous Eye of Sauron. Ouch.
Read the original article here. Read the follow-up interview here.
Source: Game Informer
Humble Bundle, the pay what you want/some money goes to charity bundle maker, are currently selling every Humongous Games release in a single bundle.
If you fancy seeing what Ron Gilbert (and sometimes Dave Grossman) got up to in the 1990s after they left LucasArts, get the Humongous Entertainment Humble Bundle.
Thanks to reader Call me Squinky for alerting us to this.
Source: Humble Bundle
Telltale imploded a little under seven months ago. Despite the odds, however, some ex-staff was taken on-board with Skybound Games (which consisted of a whopping five members at the time) to release The Walking Dead: The Final Season unto the world.
So how did they do it? Well, Gamespot released an interesting article on that during our (latest but not last) downtime. Good read. Has that annoying thing with auto-playing videos plus ads.
Skybound CEO Ian Howe had an interesting tidbit: "I will give huge credit to the management of Telltale who went out of their way and did everything they could to make this deal happen as quickly as it could. For exactly that reason to help those people out, so that I don't think that should get lost in this."
It's implied that it's Dan Connors and Pete Hawley he's referring to. Or maybe I'm wrong. Either way, give it a go.
Source: Gamespot
Oh, hey, we're back -- your prayers worked!
So, what has been going on? Borderlands 3 has been announced, and while that probably means preciously little around these parts, some might be interested to hear Rhys, the protagonist in TTG's Tales from the Borderlands, is making an appearance in it. Troy Baker, the actor behind the character, might not be, mind you, which is odd. He did a great job in Telltale's episodic take on the franchise.
(And while many of our dozen readers might not have given Tales from the Borderlands a go, you probably should do so. It's a good game. (Although, I'm guessing not available anymore.))
Source: Gaming Bolt