Telltale loves "unrelenting" demands of episodic Sam & Max

via Eurogamer


Telltale Games' Kevin Bruner admits that the schedule for Sam & Max episodes was "unrelenting", but says he wouldn't have it any other way.

Telltale recently confirmed that it plans to "air" a second season of Sam & Max, and co-founder and chief technology officer Bruner told our sister site GamesIndustry.biz that the developer is "very committed" to the episodic format.

"Once you get over the production challenges of making a game a month then it's a really attractive model," Bruner said in an interview published today.

"I've made a lot of traditional games and I much prefer to work this way than spending two years making one game and when it comes out, if you've screwed something up then you don't get a chance to fix it."

A lot of the challenges Telltale faces are unique to the burgeoning episodic format, of which it's seen as something of a pioneer. Bruner mentions that because of tight scheduling, the fourth Sam & Max episode was the first opportunity for Telltale to "course-correct" and respond to feedback in design terms.

Another challenge was safeguarding the series' integrity by pricing it competitively - the difficulty being what to compare itself to in pricing terms. "We believe that games are too expensive right now so we sell each episode at USD 9 each or you can buy the whole season, which is the equivalent of a retail product, for USD 35," Bruner explains. "We think that our games are priced correctly but a lot of episodic games and games in general are priced too highly."