This is how ‘the bird’ wound up in Tales from the Borderlands
It’s sad when game development studios go out of business. It’s downright tragic when it happens so abruptly that employees get left with no severance, benefits running out, and projects cancelled. The silver lining is that when a company shuts down, ex-employees feel free to relate humorous anecdotes about how the sausage was made. We’re seeing that now with Telltale Games. The bitterness and confusion over the sudden closure has calmed a bit, and the survivors are down to reminiscing about their time together. Here, Molly Maloney, a designer on Tales from the Borderlands explained how the scene with a character maniacally flipping off a bunch of monitors came to be.
“When we requested the animation for Rhys turning off Hyperion monitors in Tales from the Borderlands ep 5, the requested anim was worded as ‘Rhys flips off the monitors as he runs by.’ What we got back was so good [we] decided to just go with that.”
Whatever your opinion of Telltale Games’ output, it’s indisputable that their games had an impact on the industry. The Walking Dead: Season One was an emotional revelation, and while the rest of their catalog perhaps never reached those heights again, the studio plugged away at over a dozen games in the same vein. The studio even dipped into publishing indie titles from other developers like 7 Days to Die and Stranded Deep on consoles.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/09/24/this-is-how-the-bird-wound-up-in-tales-from-the-borderlands/