E for All Interview: Dan Connors, CEO Telltale Games, Talks Sam & Max

by Andrew Podolsky on October 19, 2007 at 6:57 pm

Dan Connors is the CEO of Telltale Games, makers of the Sam & Max episodes

The Sam and Max episodes have proven that regular episodic gaming can work, and that there’s still room for comedic adventure games in the market. Telltale Games sells their episodic games through their website, and their games are also available on Gametap. We spoke to Telltale’s CEO Dan Connors about the Sam and Max community and what makes Sam and Max work as episodic comedy.

Q: Episode One of Sam and Max Season Two comes out in November. How far along is the rest of the series?
A: Episode Two is very close,Three we’re about to drop voice in, and Four the design is done. Five we’re about halfway through the design.

Q: Are you involved in the fan community, the people who are anticipating the next season?
A: Yeah!

Q: What are their impressions of Ice Station Santa based on what’s been released?
A: People seem to be really excited about it. We’ve definitely got people living at our site now who are anticipating the next release, which was always a big goal for us. Last season was all about “how do you release a bunch of episodes, how does one episode link to another,” now we’re in this “how do seasons relate to each other?”

What we’ve always set out to do is create an experience where there’s a Sam and Max world online that you can come back to and be part of every month. Our dream is that that continues to blur between game releases and other Sam and Max web experiences and Telltale web experiences.

Q: When you say other Sam and Max experiences, do you mean the online community?
A: Yeah, like community, and ways to connect the community to the game, and take advantage of the fact that it is an online product. There’s no limits to what you can do. Well, obviously there’s limits, but there’s so many things to try. And it’s not like right now we’re under somebody’s thumb, kind of telling us what we can and can’t do.

We’re really interested in seeing what people are interested in, and what they’re responding to, what they’re really liking about it and what they don’t, so the community shows you that kind of stuff. Which is cool, when you have a community they tell you what they like. It seems like they’re liking what they see, because really it’s just going to be more Sam and Max and even crazier, wilder situations.

Andrew explains to Dan that yellow paper is easier on the eyes

Q: How have people responded to the adventure game aspect? Have you ever thought of taking those characters and putting them in a different type of game?
A: Well, we want to evolve adventure games to something that is much easier to use for everybody. Sam and Max is a little bit of a double edged sword. It was an adventure game, there are a lot of people who want it to stay an adventure game. And those people are the ones we can count on no matter what to come back and enjoy the experience. So if you think about who the consumer for Sam and Max is going to be, the adventure game makes a lot of sense.

Now using that mechanic and taking the best things about Sam and Max– the fact that they’re outrageously funny, the characters are a riot, the situations are a riot, so running around with a gun shooting at all of them wouldn’t necessarily deliver that. But the adventure game mechanics can be evolved in a way that the world is more alive and more active.

What we’re really thinking of now is the passive nature of an adventure game. You walk into a space, and you have to make something happen. You have to click on something to happen. What we want is the world to be more proactive towards you and come at you. If you walk into a room in a first person shooter, people don’t stand around waiting for you to do something. You’d get your ass blown off, and you move.

So that’s a driven experience, and that’s really how we want to evolve Telltale Games in general. Now, dramatically doing that to the Sam and Max audience that we have, love, and allow us to be funny and creative and come up with great characters, it’s a very sensitive thing. It’s not something we’re going to just drop on them.

Q: So would you be open to a spin-off series that is more action-oriented, or in a different genre?
A: No matter what genre we do, it’s still going to be about the characters and the story. If we do something like The Flint Paper Capers, I see it being closer to a CSI type of experience than a Max Payne type experience.

One of our mottos early was, in a Telltale game, if you’re going to shoot someone, you’re going to have a good reason. So vision-wise, the company’s vision is still to get to that point where there’s real connection between the player and the AI characters in the world. The Sims and Railroad Tycoon are both types of games we look at for inspiration. Even Façade and the more experimental stuff.

Q: Why did you choose to put Episode 4 for free on Gametap?
A: Because we think it’s a great episode. It’s topical. It’s going to be on our site in a couple of weeks too, as kind of a hey, here comes the new season, check out the best of last season. So we’re going to make it available to as many people as possible, and we know free is a great enticer. Right now, from a market standpoint, the first episode sells the most by far. People come in and they start on the first episode. Shouldn’t shock us or anything.

Q: But you don’t consider that to be the very best?
A: I don’t think anybody in the studio considers that to be the very best. It’s funny because it’s the best reviewed, and it won adventure game of the year, but that was just because it didn’t suck. I think more people can relate to [episode 4], swing on by and check it out, get introduced to Telltale Games, and say hey, this is pretty cool.

Q: Will making episode 4 available encourage people to review the rest of the series, or do you want to push them forward into season 2?
A: Our hope is it’s going to be something that gets people interested to go buy season 2. By four we hit our stride, and we weren’t stressed out about finishing it and wrapping it up. It was just sort of the perfect set of circumstances.

Q: Any plans to go back and refine the first season?
A: I think the first season is going to stay as it is, and if people want to start from the beginning, that’s great. We’re still incredibly proud of it. And it’s going to be part of the evolution of the series no matter what. Like you watch the first season of the Sopranos, and they weren’t exactly in their stride, but you look back at it later.

Dan is proud of the first season and its part in the evolution of the series

We took everything we learned from the first one and put it in from the ground up into Season 2. From the arc of the story, as far as type of puzzles people liked and didn’t like, as far as what the frustrations were for people. Everything we learned in Season one, we’re starting Season two with.

And then it was funny watching the production team kind of get their groove again, in the design and everything else, and watch the story flesh out. I think by three or four again this season it’s going to be kind of the best stuff. One is also outrageouslly funny, especially since it’s a Christmas spec ial. Having the ability to do that is something we’ve always wanted to do with episodic games.

Q: Where would you like to see the characters end up eventually? Are Sybil Pandemik and Abe Lincoln’s Giant Stone Head going to have little half giant headed babies?
A: You know, the sky’s the limit. You can see what the beauty of Sam and Max is. It’s like, you set up some ridiculous situation and ridiculous ideas come out of it. If there were six little Lincoln baby heads and they had a biting problem, and they were biting Max in the ankles, whatever… anything can happen. And that’s the beauty.

Q: What can you tell us about the new character, the waitress at Stinky’s diner?
A: Her grandfather originally owned it… and there’s definitely something fishy going on there. You still have a lot to find out about it, because the designers always kill me for giving away their secrets.

The waitress at Stinky’s is the granddaughter of the original owner,
and her story will be explained in Season Two.

Q: What are you doing to evolve the technology of the adventure game?
A: We’re doing a lot. We’re really focusing on understanding where the player is in the world. The engine is checking in with the player, saying have you done this before, how many times have you clicked on this. With that feedback, we then can tell the characters how to respond to that player. So it comes back to that bringing the player back to the world alive.

If I’m standing in the store not looking at anything, Bosco will say “What’s wrong with you?” and he should really recognize it. Understanding the player’s intent can be tricky because you never know when they’re going to go out back and have a smoke or whatever, but there are certainly things you can pull from it. Help direct the player, but don’t direct them when they don’t want to be directed.

If someone just wants to play a game that’s not just running around shooting, they want to get introduced to Sam and Max, they want to laugh their ass off, they don’t want to get frustrated. So we need to give them a directed experience. Immediately their first instinct is to not want to solve a problem. So we’ve got to recognize that and immediately make them feel like they are solving problems but they’re being helped enough. All those nuances.

So you’ve got the game telling you you’ve done this, that, and the other thing. We’re incubating that right now. And a lot of the other stuff is about the production proccess. Five episodes in six months is not easy. And we got better at doing it in the last one. By the end we were good at doing it and of course the designers made things three times more complicated. So it still took just as long. So they pushed, we optimized, they push, we optimized.

You’ll see our characters will be acting better this year, added animations, better use of animations. Just everyone has more animations to choose from and we’re selecting them better, and there’s better blending between them. Holistically, everything’s less rough. It’s going to be a good season.

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