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Former Telltale Creative Director And Skybound Games CEO Talk ‘The Walking Dead: The Final Season’
With the final episode to Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season being released a few weeks back, it’s a bittersweet but ultimately satisfying end to something that we might never have gotten to see had Skybound not jumped in to rescue the series after Telltale went belly up.
Now, in a recent interview with Gamespot, Telltale’s former creative director Kent Mudle and CEO of Skybound Games Ian Howe sat down to talk about Skybound coming in to save the series. One of the surprising aspects of the venture was that at the time, Skybound only had five people working in their games division.
“We were less than a year old and we were still definitely in training wheels”, Ian Howe explained. However, according to him, the team was “literally the lowest maintenance team I’ve ever worked with,” and that they, “literally just came back in and got on with the job.”
Also covered was how important it was to get some of the original staff on board, which they managed to do with just over 40 former Telltale staff. Feeling a sense of camaraderie, the Telltale-turned-Skybound staff formed a team called ‘Still Not Bitten’, and even went back to what was Telltale’s office to finish the series.
“These guys had been let go without any severance and have been through a tough situation,” said Howe. “Thankfully we were able to put together something pretty quickly, and 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.”
As far as the results go, according to Mudle, Episode 4 “makes me extremely emotional”. “Like a lot of it is tough near the end, in that it’s kind of a loving tribute to the people that worked on the game. I still can’t even look at it without getting a little misty-eyed. I’m just so proud of the work everybody did. We all came together to make this beautiful thing and to leave that stretching back into all the years that I worked with all of those people. It’s the end of an era, and it’s sad, but I’m glad we got to at least finish it in style.”
You can check out the rest of the interview here. The Walking Dead: The Final Season is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. You can also snag the entire series on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
The best part about engaging with collaborative genre fiction on the internet is that anyone can get in on the action, with worldwide accessibility often resulting in absurd story beats that wouldn’t be possible if any single person was responsible for the entire narrative. And while Kane Parsons’ Backrooms film is definitely the young filmmaker’s own unique take on the infamous creepypasta, it’s fun to see other creators join the Backrooms sandbox now that the big screen adaptation is getting ready for a record-shattering opening weekend.
As if cleverly timed releases like Puppet Combo’s The Backrooms game weren’t enough (not to mention that Scary Movie poster poking fun at Parsons’ flick), McDonald’s official social media accounts have now released an analog horror video of their own celebrating the liminal terrors of the McRooms – complete with a familiar purple surprise at the end of the footage.
While it’s funny enough to see the world’s most recognizable Fast Food giant engage with internet-borne Found Footage thrills seemingly out of the blue, the video is actually referencing a long-running gag among the Backrooms fandom where creators jokingly talk about there being a fully functional McDonald’s restaurant hidden somewhere in level 0 of the infamous liminal labyrinth.
Now, would it be too much to hope for a moist-carpet-flavored McShake to tie in with the film?
Backrooms is now playing only in theaters from A24.
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