In your opinion, do you think Telltale was too risk-averse?

Well, we were much more experimental early on. Like, pre-The Walking Dead, where we had things like Poker Night at the Inventory, Homestar Runner, that game had no text in it – all the choices were icon-based choices and it had a lot more puzzles in them. It was a lot more of a traditional point-and-click game. We had a lot more diversity early on.

I think one of the other big influences at Telltale, was, Telltale had investors. Originally we had venture-capital investors, and then Lionsgate, a big public company, invested in it. Then we had this big hit with The Walking Dead. And then everybody wanted more of that because it had a lot of notoriety and it sold a lot. When we would go out to license holders to get bigger and better licenses, it made sense to be more conservative there. You weren’t going to talk to [HBO] and say, “We’re going to run a big new experiment on Game of Thrones.” [Instead, we would say,] “We’re going to do what we did with The Walking Dead for you as well." So there was a lot of pressure from the leadership of the company to pursue bigger and more interesting opportunities and to de-risk those opportunities so the company could continue to grow and become more valuable. Is de-risking the way to become more valuable? It’s certainly subjective. I have had many arguments about what the best path for Telltale forward would or wouldn’t be. But those are the dynamics that were in play. We wanted bigger and more interesting licenses so we had bigger and more interesting market opportunities. And we wanted to make sure that we didn’t – really the most important thing was that we didn’t go backwards. We didn’t want The Walking Dead to be a fluke; or to be a one-hit wonder. That’s why The Wolf Among Us was one of the most important games we ever did, because we were terrified that if it wasn’t good, that would be perceived as a one-hit wonder.

Were you surprised about the closure?

I learned about the closure about eight hours before it actually happened. I was completely taken by surprise at the closure. It was unthinkable to me that the studio would shut down, and I certainly knew that there [weren’t any] circumstances that get us anywhere near that. It was very dramatic, very sudden, and I can’t really speak more [about it]. I’ve since learned about the circumstances that caused the shutdown, and I can’t really speak to them. But they had nothing to do with the studio, with the products that were being built.

You read Steam articles or articles about people saying, “Telltale’s sales were diminishing every year.” Compared against a Game of the Year like The Walking Dead, that’s true, but normalized out that’s not the case and certainly that wasn’t what impacted Telltale at all. It had nothing to do with the studio and the products that the studio was building at the time. I wish I could elaborate more.