Toonstruck, Telltale, and Ken Williams
Recently I was chatting with friends about this article: Toonstruck (or, A Case Study in the Death of Adventure Games)
It’s an interesting retrospective, especially for people like my friends and me who grew up on Sierra and LucasArts adventure games but lacked the perspective to understand the genre’s decline in the mid-to-late 90’s. It pins at least part of the downfall on an adherence to a vision of games as interactive cinema, as championed by Sierra’s Ken Williams. Toonstruck in particular was an overoptimistic overinvestment in this vision that went way past deadline and over budget (though this write-up also makes it sound pretty fun and makes me want to finally get it off my backlog and play it).
In our conversation, my friend asked me, “With some distance, what do you think about Telltale’s attempt at a revival?” I turned out to have a lot to say about this.