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When Telltale’s The Walking Dead made its debut in April of 2012, it immediately caused
a seismic shift in both Telltale and the gaming industry itself. It changed how the company
created games and, in general, how the adventure game genre was viewed. A lot of time had passed
since the heyday of classic adventure titles like The Secret of Monkey Island and King’s
Quest, and sadly, many saw the genre as outdated and no longer profitable. The Walking Dead
changed that, all while establishing Telltale as a storytelling powerhouse. When talking
about the development of the game, Dan Connors, the co-founder of Telltale gave us some insight
into what made it feel so unique. According to him, the initial idea to include branching
dialogue was inspired by the Mass Effect series, but he also believed that his team had the
opportunity to improve on it saying “Traditional dialogue trees don’t present a believable
rhythm to a conversation and make it a task to exhaust dialogs. Moving away to a more
natural dialogue system was huge for us.” The team also knew that the gameplay alone
would not amount to much unless it was backed up by great writing. For this, Telltale didn’t
look to other games when trying develop their characters and story, instead they took their
cues from television, citing Mad Men, Game of Thrones and of course, The Walking Dead
show and comic book as things they looked to emulate while writing. They also got help
from Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman, who liked the company immediately, saying
that he respected how they emphasized “Decision-making and consequences rather than ammunition gathering
or jumping over things”. Of course, all of that wouldn’t have mattered without protagonists
worth becoming invested in, thankfully though, Clementine and Lee proved to be just as compelling
as the characters in the comics and TV franchise. Since the release of the first Walking Dead
games, fans and critics have often cited the game’s player character Lee Everett as one
of the major reasons for its success. Some even going so far as to say he’s a better
character than Rick Grimes himself. It may be surprising to learn then that the creation
of Lee didn’t start until, well, after a lot of other things in the game had been written.
According to game designer and writer Sean Vanaman, Lee Everett wasn’t even Telltale’s
initial idea for a main character. Originally, the team planned for Clementine to come from
a single-parent home where Clementine’s brother took care of her due to her mother
being unable to. In this version of the game, Clementine’s brother would have been the
lead, but Vanaman decided that he didn’t want the characters to have a pre-existing
relationship, instead he wanted the leads to get to know each other as the player was
getting to know them aswell. This inspired them to create Lee as a substitute for Clementine’s
older sibling. And that decision led to a few other changes as well, including to Clementine's
race. At first the character was going to be caucasian, but the team changed this because
they wanted her to look like she could potentially be Lee’s daughter.
Speaking of Clementine, you may be surprised to learn that even though she’s now a popular
and beloved character, Telltale was very nervous about her during development, knowing just
how easy it is get a kid character wrong. According to Vanaman “Getting people internally
excited about it was really challenging.... There’s no kid I can point to in a video
game and say, ‘It’s going to be just like that person, don’t worry about it.’”
Eventually though, he managed to get the company onboard. “People recognized the hurdle set
forth by deciding there’s going to be this little girl that’s going to be a key feature
of the game, but people kept saying yes anyway.” And it paid off, resulting in what may be
the best child character in video game history. Vanaman wasn’t the only person to have a
big impact on the creation of Clementine, just as important was the game’s art director
Derek Sakai. In fact, the character’s look was almost entirely inspired by his five year
old daughter. According to Sakai, she has “a crazy sense of fashion that oddly translates
well into the world of The Walking Dead. My daughter won’t accept advice from anyone
when it comes to her outfits. For example, she’ll combine her favorite dress with her
older brother’s baseball cap and then refuse any shoes at all, Clementine doesn’t have
parents to tell her what to wear, so her outfits needed to reflect a child’s idea of appropriate
clothing.” And with that, Clementine’s signature baseball hat was born. Vanaman has
also said that he turned to Sakai a lot while writing the character, trying to get advice
from someone with children about how Clementine would talk. This actually led to the character
speaking a lot less, because according to Sakai “The less my kids talk, the smarter
I think they are.” Even after all the hard work the team put
in writing the characters, they knew that creating a believable bond between them was
absolutely essential to the game’s success. Melissa Hutchison, the voice of Clementine,
says that she was especially nervous about this: “The whole backbone of the story is
the relationship between Lee and Clementine, and the choices Lee makes in order to protect
Clementine. If Clementine came off as annoying, people would be trying to find the button
that sends her straight into a herd of walkers.” Thankfully, the strength of the writing and
performances made sure that didn’t happen. So because this was our first ever Walking
Dead episode, we don’t have a comment showcase this week, if you’d like to see more though,
you can always like, subscribe and share this video and your comment could be featured in
a future episode of the show! We do still have a trivia question for you
though. Last week we asked you a Mass Effect question and most of you got it, it was B)
The Rachni Wars. This week’s question may be a bit harder though: early on in the first
Walking Dead game, Lee and Clementines encounter of Kenny, Katja and Duck, a family who tells
them they are from what American city?