Former Telltale developers have started Adhoc Studios

It’s still a little hard to believe that Telltale fell apart last year. Despite the fact that there was so much evidence of its impending doom, the closure was still a shock to many.

In the aftermath, many companies would come to the aid of Telltale’s projects. Skybound games are publishing the final season of the Walking Dead, and many developers have found new places to work. Some of these have recently banded together to create a new games studio: Adhoc Studios.

According to Variety, four members of Telltale’s alumni have formed the studio. Some had moved on to other positions, working under Ubisoft for some time. However, the type of games they wanted to make required flexibility and risk-taking. Both of which can be hard sells in the big AAA companies.

“Having to pitch something that ultimately fifty people need to understand and approve means a lot of the more adventurous or risky ideas often die early on for a bunch of different reasons.” Dennis Lenart, former Telltale creative director, now Adhoc’s CTO, told Variety.

So what has Adhoc got in store for us? Well, at the time of publication there isn’t any information about upcoming titles yet. We do know that we will be seeing interactive fiction, akin to Telltale works. In fact, it seems likely that this may be a studio entering into the emerging interactive movie genre.  They definitely have the skills to pull such a project off.

“People are holding their favorite television shows and films in their hands, so what we’ve understood to be purely audio/visual experiences are now also haptic by default,” says Adhoc Studio’s CEO, Michael Choung. “That should be good news for all creators since it offers them another dimension with which to tell stories, but it should be of particular interest to game devs since it’s basically what we already do. We don’t think of our audience as viewers, but as players. Players with agency that can manipulate what we put in front of them. So there’s a real opportunity here to be among the early innovators and we feel like with our partnership, which we’ll announce in the near future, we’ll be able to make real contributions to the form.”

Interactive films have been a point of interest since the recent release of Netflix’s interactive film: Black Mirror Bandersnatch. As has been discussed, there is a lot of potential for this medium to take off in the near future. Either way, Adhoc Studios seems primed to create some amazing experiences in the foreseeable future.