Last week ETC Silicon Valley had the pleasure of visiting Telltale, Inc. They’re located a few miles north of San Francisco, with offices looking into the bay. Founded in 2004 Telltale now employs 74 people and is renowned for its role in revolutionizing the episodic gaming genre. They are the first company to successfully develop and publish episodic games on a consistent basis. Following this initial success, Telltale published a number of seasons based on renowned IPs, including CSI, Wallace & Gromit, and Monkey Island.

Unfortunately for our readers, when we arrived at Telltale games we were requested to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) so I’ll be unable to discuss any details about the discussions that occurred. Our first speaker was Mr. Andy Vella, an engineer. He spent a great deal of time talking about the schedules and pipelines that allow Telltale to release games on a monthly basis. Telltale games are built on proprietary software and he also explained the advantages of using the software with episodic content.

Next we had the surprise and pleasure of meeting with CEO and Founder Mr. Dan Connors. Before establishing Telltale Games, Mr. Connors worked at LucasArts, having started in the QA division and working his way to producer, director and executive for games such as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, X-Wing: Alliance, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. He talked about economic, storytelling and digital distribution challenges Telltale has faced. Telltale has worked hard to earn the trust of consumers with its ability to output content on a monthly basis.

Telltale Games

Finally we had the opportunity to talk to game designer Mr. Sean Vanaman. He explained how Telltale writes its story and the methods by which their interactions are developed. Along with designing the interactions, Mr. Vanaman also works on dialogue scripts, and he explained how characters in the stories are developed and defined. As a writer there are many constraints laid down by the content’s proprietary intellectual owners, and Mr. Vanaman discussed how they dealt with these issues.

Our visit to Telltale games was fascinating. They shared with us their passion for storytelling and interactive media. Their episodic games and methods for digital distribution are innovative and very exciting.

Today we had the pleasure of visiting the Apple campus in Cupertino, CA! We were given a brief tour by our guide and contact Kelly Nakata, on which we saw the iPhone Application Wall: a massive wall of applications currently released in the store on which the application icons set off a ripple effect every time they are downloaded. We were also treated to lunch at the Apple campus cafeteria.

While we were munching our burritos we had the opportunity to talk with one of the engineers on the iPhone applications team at Apple, Paul Holden. It was a really great opportunity to ask those burning questions that those of us on the iPhone project have been dying to ask someone inside of Apple :) He gave us a lot of insight into what it was like to work at Apple as well as the decisions that went into what applications get developed by Apple and what frameworks are made available to developers. The meeting wrapped up with Kelly giving a presentation about Apple and all of their wonderful products that included many anecdotal stories about how easy Apple products are to use!

The visit to Apple came to a close with a trip to the company store which is the only place you can buy Apple branded clothing.  I’m not sure anyone picked up any Apple branded baseball caps, but some of us picked up some software at a nicely discounted rate.

No pictures allowed inside, so floating heads over the sign instead.