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‘The Walking Dead’ Developer Telltale Games Has Laid Off Almost All Of Its Staff and Faces Closure
Telltale Games, the developer of the popular episodic game series of The Walking Dead has laid off 225 of its staff.
The layoffs are set to leave the company with just 25 active staff, presumably just to finish the final season of The Walking Dead. It puts the second season of The Wolf Among Us and a Stranger Things series in doubt.
Telltale blew up in 2012 when its inaugural season of The Walking Dead received rave reviews and made a star of its protagonist Lee and his young ward Clementine. It then went on to make games based on Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Minecraft, and Batman.
It’s the second set of layoffs in a year, and given the amount being let go this time, it’s almost certainly looking like the end for Telltale when The Walking Dead: The Final Season wraps up in December.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but it was a cheerful illustrator from England who helped to define the terrifying war-torn imagery that inspired what we now know as Grimdark (a hybrid genre combining horror with sci-fi/fantasy).
Unfortunately for fans of Warhammer 40,000, Trench Crusade and countless other sources of Grimdark thrills, veteran artist John Blanche passed away this week after struggling with health issues for the past few years.
While the artist retired back in 2023, he leaves us with an enormous legacy of iconic artwork that continues to inspire gamers and storytellers around the world to this very day.
The news is especially gloomy as it was only last year that Daniel Lowman and Napoleon Dynamite himself Jon Heder released The Grim & the Dark: The Search for John Blanche, a documentary following Heder’s exploration of the Grimdark genre culminating in a heartwarming encounter with Blanche in his own home.
Below is one of my favorite pieces by Blanche, his highly influential depiction of Warhammer 40k’s God-Emperor of Mankind on his Golden Throne.
We send our deepest condolences to John Blanche’s family, friends, and fans.
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