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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.
“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.
