Adventure studio thinks Timelord 'would be really good for us'
Telltale CEO Dan Connors has told Develop that the firm would love to make a Doctor Who adventure game.
The licence, he tells us, is frequently requested by fans: "It crops up around the studio a lot, but we also get e-mails all the time asking us to make a Doctor Who series. It's a real favourite with people out there. Just the other day we got an e-mail from someone who said that we make games using all their favourite licences, bar Doctor Who."
Although the UK is one of Telltale's biggest markets, along with the US and Germany, Connors says he hopes the company's latest series, Wallace and Gromit, will make a name for them in the UK and help with negotiations.
"Maybe if we can get a channel into the UK with Wallace and Gromit we could talk business with the BBC, that would be really good for us," he added. "We’ve got some work to do to understand the economics – it’s a different country, it’s a different way of doing business. If we can get the lid off there we’d love to do a ton of product there, because it’s always been a great market for our Sam and Max stuff.”
It's not just Doctor Who that the firm is interested in, though. Although Telltale's episodic model is sufficiently polished - after all, it's the only company to actually make the episodic idea work on a frequent time-scale - Connors hopes to refine the model further to bring the cost down, and therefore enable the studio to try some crazy, risky licences.
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“If we could get the cost down to a decent price-per-show model, we could do wild, off-the-wall shows to just test it. It’s just about optimising the business model, managing the development cost and hitting the gameplay experience. So if we wanted to see if people were interested in some spoof of Legally Blonde or something, we could just try it out.”
More from Connors – including how the Californian studio set out to capture the Britishness of a licence like Wallace and Gromit, and his thoughts on why Telltale has succeeded in the episodic format while others have failed – can be found in the next issue of Develop, out next week.
In other news, I'd like to make a Doctor Who game too.
No, I'd like to make a Doctor Who game!
I think the point is the implication that if anyone were to make a good Doctor Who game, given the Wallace and Sman & max games, it would be Telltale.
Historically, Doctor Who games have not been successful because they've always concentrated on the Doctor.
Now... having a game where in one level, you're a Dalek and in another level, you're a cyberman etc... all aimed at destroying (regenerating) the doctor and escaping companions (except for some like Adric who you can kill).
That would be fun.
The ultimate aim of the game could be to take out the high council - or ... to regenerate the doctor past 13 lives.
I'd like to make a Doctor Who game - and so would my wife!
I would like to make a Doctor Who game where it is about the Doctor going to different planets through time and space travelling in a little blue British police phone box known as the TARDIS, stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. As the nine hundred year old time lord explores dimensions in space and time and battles off his enemies and meets new companions in this adventure of the story line, the time lord known as the Doctor from his home planet Gallifray can regenerate twelve times and has thirteen forms of a new body. I would also like to form a game for each doctor he regenerates into, so….. So far there would be eleven.
I have always thought that Doctor Who is perfect for gaming. The Doctor Who Universe is so infinate and draws such a large demographic, that if you were to get the basics and structure of a game, correct, then this could be on a par with any television / film tie-in, if not greater. It would be such a money spinner. It just needs the correct understanding of the show, what makes it so appealing to 10 year olds and 40 year olds at the same time. And to keep it's eccentricity. Please please someone have the courage to invest the money, to get it off the ground and make it brilliant.
