Disclosure: The organizers of Gamelab paid my way to Barcelona. Our coverage remains objective.Telltale Games has always focused on interactive storytelling in its games, and it came into its own with the episodic release The Walking Dead, which is now in its third season. The San Rafael, Calif.-based company makes slow-paced games with a lot of story, player choice, and fast-reaction button mashing. For a while, such games were an oddity. But with the spectacular success of The Walking Dead in 2012, that all changed.“The critical years, if you look at it, are from Back to the Future to Poker to Jurassic Park to Walking Dead. That was when we transitioned,” Connors said. Telltale has taken its formula of creating episodic games and is now broadening out with titles such as Game of Thrones, Batman, Minecraft: Story Mode, Tales from the Borderlands, and The Wolf Among Us. Season Three of The Walking Dead is coming soon.
Connors, who was CEO of the company until early 2015, gave a talk at the Gamelab event in Barcelona. I interviewed him there. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. Connors is still working on Telltale games, even without the CEO title.
Dan Connors, cofounder of Telltale Games, at Gamelab 2016.
GamesBeat: E3 had me thinking about story in a couple of ways. The new God of War is presenting this complex father-son story in a series that was traditionally lighter in that area. Doom had an intricate story layered in different ways over a pure action-shooter game. I wonder if you see some patterns in game storytelling as a whole, where the industry is moving in your direction?
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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