Interview: Dan Connors, CEO Telltale Games

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Telltale Games Dan Connors about his current job, downloadable content and his time with Lucasarts amongst other things.  Read those words right here on this page.

Dan, first of all let me just thank you on behalf of the team at OneLastContinue for taking the time to talk to us today, we understand that you’re a busy man and we won’t keep you long.

Dan: No problem.

First of all, whilst you were working as a tester for Lucasarts ‘Star Wars X-Wing/B-Wing’ back in 1993 did it ever cross your mind that you’d be working as CEO of your own games company a decade later?

Dan: I would have to say no, I think I was just enjoying the process of figuring out how games were built.

And how does it actually feel now as CEO of your own games company?

Dan: Well I think after you’ve been around for as long as I have, you’ve seen the industry change in a lot of ways, at some point you just feel like you have to take it on yourself and figure out a way to make things work.   So we (Telltale Games) saw a great opportunity with digital distribution in order to build the type of games that we thought people would really love and we said we were going to do it.   And so far we’ve been successful, so it’s quite rewarding.

I’ve actually got a couple of questions on digital distribution but I’ll get to those in a little bit.  First of all would you mind if I discuss working at LucasArts with you for a couple of moments. What do you perceive as the differences with the two companies Telltale Games and LucasArts with regards to studio culture and the working atmosphere given that many of your staff have actually worked for both companies?

Dan: Well I think size is obviously a big difference; Telltale has seventy two people and when I left Lucasarts it was at around four hundred and fifty and I think it’s bigger than that now.  But when I started with Lucasarts I think it was around eighty two people and it felt very much the same as it does here.  I think the biggest difference is they have the whole Lucasfilm infrastructure around them to help support with a lot of things out there in the world.  We’re definitely a smaller company out there than Lucasarts and handling all the different elements that a singular company needs to handle, so it makes us a little more diverse in what we need to do, we don’t have as much a cushion around us to help us.

Would that be part of the reason why the first game produced by Telltale Games was a simple Texas Hold’Em card game?

Dan: Well that was something we did very early on to start building our technology and our tools.  We actually built it from the ground up and built an e-commerce site in order to support it, so it was a big step in launching Telltale and getting something live.  We believed in building the company that it didn’t make any sense to just invest everything we had into one thing and hope everything would be alright, but instead make small investments and bring products to market to see what works and what doesn’t, and then adjust and evolve and iterate quickly.

One of my colleagues, Simon Williams, wanted me to ask you how you made the jump from your original poker game to your first licensed game Bones?

Dan: We immediately started out knowing that we wanted to build licensed properties, so we did them kind of concurrently, we started the process of talking to the license holder in order to do Bones; and then also at the same time we wanted to work on our tools and systems, and Texas Hold’Em was the way to do that.  So we did both things at the same time, and it was all part of a strategy building on the tools.  A lot of that technology was used in making of Bones and it was a way to move forward without actually having the franchise locked up while we did all that business.

You were talking there about how originally you wanted to move on to licensed properties, so I believe part of the decision to create Telltale Games itself was to do with the cancellation of the Sam and Max series back at LA originally?  Or would that be a misconception that I’ve heard over the years?

Dan: A lot of the vision of Telltale was to create a new type of content that was perfectly suited for digital distribution and new consumers that were going to come into this space.  So working with Sam & Max was part of that process, it made a lot of sense to go with it (and in doing so) put a lot of wind in the company’s sails.  Delivering the product to an audience that really wanted it, as well as creating a great product that gave us a lot of credibility, Sam & Max was critical to our success but we didn’t build Telltale just for those games.  The company was to build great story games, and create a new model for our game distribution.

I’ve noticed as well that Telltale actually self-publish all of their games with the exception of the CSI franchise which is handled by Ubisoft, can you explain the reasoning behind that?

Dan: Yeah we want to build a company that can sustain itself, and by going out and being the publish we generate an ongoing revenue stream from each of our products instead of getting paid everything up front.  Then when the work’s done, the product’s over, there are no more payments.  Instead when you’re the publisher it flips around and you create more recurring revenue, and with recurring revenues you can build a company, invest the way you feel you should, and make the types of decisions that Telltale made and built the company that we did.

And that’s also one of the great things about digital distribution.  That the product can actually become available at any time without having to physically recreate assets such as discs or packaging and thus driving down costs.  I’ve noticed that Microsoft have recently launched their new games on demand service, do you feel that this is at all a threat to the episodic games format?

Dan: No I just think it’s part of digital distribution and it allows for a lot of different things; it’s a whole new future basically.  People are just starting to get their games digitally, and as publishers and developers work on experiences for them that take advantage of the fact that they’re digitally distributed you’ll see more and more evolution.  I think where we’ll eventually land in that there are going to be a lot of different ways customers can get serviced as well as get their games.  Whether it’s buying them all as games on demand instead of retail, or being engaged in something like a Telltale series which runs over six months, or something that integrates Facebook and Twitter and who knows what else, the opportunities are limitless at this point.

Pretty interesting thoughts.  But there’s also another side to that where recently at Gamescom Peter Molyneux announced that Fable 2 was going to be split into an episodic format.  Do you feel that that’s almost jumping on the bandwagon as it were, and that other developers and publishers are beginning to embrace the format which Telltale, quite frankly, have made their own?

Dan: Yeah I’m glad that they are and if they go in and start working with Microsoft to deliver something episodically it’s going to push Microsoft in order to continue to improve it’s infrastructure for supporting episodic games; and (in turn) that’s good for us as a company.  Being the only one makes it harder when you’re working with partners to say this is what we need to do to be episodic because you’re the only one motivating on that front.  So the more people that are doing it and creating a business out of it, then the bigger the business will get in general will be good for us.

Speaking of Microsoft, have you ever experienced any problems working with the Xbox LIVE platform in order to deliver your product to consumers?  As you say there hasn’t actually been anything truly episodic on the service before and I’m just wondering if there have been any sort of teething problems with regards to that?

Dan:  Telltale need to get used to their system and they need to get used to what we do, and what our priorities are.  Certainly there’s always going to be teething stuff but they offer a lot for publishers as far as support of provided services such as avatars and it’s really sophisticated. We’re happy to be working with them in order to take advantage of those things and improve our end-user experience in general.  But it does need a lot more work, and they’re responsible for what goes up on the channel so we have to bend to what they need.

On the flipside have Sony made any approaches to Telltale with regards to bringing Sam & Max or Wallace & Gromit to the PlayStation Network?

Dan: Yeah I think we’re about to have our content out there and we’d love to be on PlayStation Network so we just have to figure out our production plan for getting it over there.  It certainly seems like PlayStation Network has really grown and that Sony have done a great job with it; and I think our titles would really work well on the service.  Really for us it’s just that we’ve been hard at work getting our product on the Wii and getting Xbox 360 up and running, and now we need to focus on PlayStation 3.

I know with the announcement of the PS3 slimline model that there’s a possibility of a further audience which could become available in the near future.   So far though Telltale have only made games which are family orientated such as Wallace & Gromit.  What are your thoughts with regards to making titles for the mature audience; do you have any plans to tackle this genre in the future?

Dan:  I think next year you’re going to see Telltale bring itself out a bit more in that we’ve been doing CSI for years now and that content is certainly a lot more adult than what we’re doing with the likes of Sam & Max.  We certainly believe that from a cinematic and storytelling standpoint Telltale’s really well suited for drama and I think we’re going to see more diversified products coming out of Telltale over the next twelve to eighteen months.

Would it be fair to compare the style of an episodic Telltale series to the way a regular television series is made?  Are these episodes planned out from the start and then from there it’s just a case of getting from point A to point B?

Dan:  It’s actually a little better than that because when we are building it and then get our first product out there the games are then live and being played by the audience.  What people are experiencing then gets back to us either through our forums, through letters or we see the reviews.   And all of that kind of gets stuck in the development team’s head and then we make decisions based on that new information, so whether overtly or subconscious it certainly has an impact.

So basically Telltale appreciates and listens to it’s audience whereas some other developers would churn out the same games regardless of what the fans actually want.

Dan:  We have an opportunity, because of how we work to be in a feedback loop with our audience.  So one of the things that episodic distribution provides for us has really helped the games and products in general so we’re really happy about that.

One further question, it’s a hypothetical, ten years from now question if I may?  Where do you see Telltale’s place in this industry at that point, given with the emergence of digital distribution as a major source of revenue for all leading publishers, as well as minor ones of course, when surely at some point the physical media formats will cease to be as relevant as they are today.   How do you feel this will effect Telltale releases when all products will become downloadable over the internet?

Dan:  Well I think that Telltale right now has positioned itself as a brand that is associated with downloadable, so as downloadable grows that’ll mean it’ll grow with us.   I think right now if I say Telltale you think episodic and downloadable, and you think about a lot of different things that are part of the emerging market place.  Our goal is to be the leading online publisher in ten years, not just on interactive content but of all kinds of entertainment.  We see this as a jumping off point to do great things as the company continues to evolve, and also to really understand how to exploit or take advantage of the shift to digital distribution of all types of entertainment.

Simon Williams heavily contributed to the organization of this interview.