This summer, Telltale, the studio behind critically acclaimed titles like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, released it’s first game since its rebirth. Developed in concert with Deck Nine, the studio behind Life Is Strange: True Colors, the new game is a story set in the universe of S. A. Corey’s The Expanse, an epic hard science-fiction political thriller series popularly adapted into a six-season TV show critically acclaimed by enjoyers of grimy space noir everywhere.
The series is a perfect place for Telltale to work its magic, given the studio’s breakthrough success adapting The Walking Dead and later working in the Game of Thrones universe. Gamers are more than eager to see a return to the pedigree of Telltale’s seminal performance in the 2010s.
“The Expanse was something that resonated with Telltale and Deck Nine,” Jamie Ottilie, CEO of Telltale tells WIRED. “The Expanse is a universe with great world-building and deep characters—the perfect setup for a Telltale game.”
Wait, What Happened to Telltale in 2018?The studio’s difficulties in 2018 shocked and mystified fans. Its success had drawn tens of millions of dollars into Telltale’s coffers, from multiple Hollywood and major TV studios like Lionsgate and AMC, to produce the future of hybrid entertainment. Somehow, that resulted in an emergency bankruptcy, wherein Clementine’s voice actor was emergency-evacuated into a parking lot mid-recording-session for the final season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
For a while, this confusing money oopsie appeared to be the end of the studio, until it was brought back from the dead by a hitherto unknown company, LCG Entertainment, which was founded specifically to acquire and become Telltale anew.
A lot of people post-2018 blinked and thought they’d woken up in a different timeline, but no, this was just your usual overnight erasure of a legendary game developer followed by the brand being legally assumed by a new company formed just as quickly, like some sort of extraterrestrial cloning exercise.
If Game Informer is to be believed, as much as half of the former studio’s staff were working at the reanimated Telltale at the end of 2022.
Rebuilding a Fan-Favorite StudioTelltale’s Expanse takes place a few years before the first season of the show, centering on Camina Drummer, a smouldering firebrand working aboard a salvage vessel before she came to Tycho Station to become head of security under Fred Johnson, fleeing the radical influence of Anderson Dawes.
The game aims to portray the events that led to Camina’s hardened exterior and uncompromising discipline, working on the assumption that you already know about her, the Belt, and essentially most of the background lore of The Expanse.
