Forum Overview :: The Walking Dead
 
Creative decline goes back to nutty CEO by skip 03/21/2018, 1:23pm PDT
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry

Ignore the headlines about toxic culture. It's really a video game soap opera.

The game had to come out, which gave the Walking Dead creative team leverage to ignore or skirt around feedback from upper management that they vehemently disagreed with. Rodkin and Vanaman developed a reputation as personalities strong enough to challenge the founders on creative decisions, and pushed over and over again to create the game the way that they wanted”


Say what you want about the game, but it was successful. And then their CEO had an attack of ego.

“That’s when things got really bad,” says a former employee. “I think a lot of the insecurity came from The Walking Dead.” The game’s success had significantly raised the profiles of Rodkin and Vanaman and earned them widespread praise. “I think that that really irked [Bruner] a lot,” says the source. “He felt that… he deserved that. It was his project, or it was his company. He should have gotten all that love.”


Imagine being as crazy as the lady from Sunset Boulevard.

Some say Bruner’s behavior led Rodkin and Vanaman to ultimately leave after the wildly successful first season of The Walking Dead. “They were tired of fighting with [Bruner],” says a source with direct knowledge. They jumped into indie development and founded their own studio called Campo Santo, where they released the award-winning game Firewatch. One source points to Campo Santo’s success, along with Night School Studios and its supernatural thriller Oxenfree — co-created by former Telltale veteran Adam Hines — as a catalyst for Bruner’s tightening grip.


The article's best parts are where he goes diva on everyone because the true creatives of his company left and his company is creatively stagnant.

“There was a dark period of time where if you were in charge of a project, you are not getting any interviews,” one source says. “He’s going to be the one on the panel. He’s going to be the one doing the interviews. He’s going to be the one in the magazine.”


“All Telltale productions were truly team efforts and I thought it was important that they be presented that way,” he says. “Developing any game is an enormously complicated endeavor with many people working together to make it happen. This is particularly true when you make a five-episode series, with five sets of leads (writing, design, art, chore, etc.).”


And to show that's a team effort, only I'm allowed to give interviews.

“I remember hearing one of my bosses say, ‘I love that we can just shout at each other and curse at each other in a meeting. It’s totally great,’” says one former employee. “I [didn’t] feel that way at all. It sucks. I don’t want to work every day where I have to yell at people and scream to have my voice heard… I think a lot of people burned out that way.”


With Bruner gone, some of the stifling pressure improved. Last-minute changes became rarer, crunch began to ease up. People within the studio began to feel as though they had more creative freedom, as well as ownership and power over the projects they worked on.
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The lowest rated Telltale games on GoG are Minecraft and GoT by skip 12/25/2015, 3:55pm PST NEW
    Minecraft "story mode", not Minecraft NT by laudablepuss 12/25/2015, 9:09pm PST NEW
    Walking Dead really was the beginning of the end for them by fabio 12/25/2015, 9:42pm PST NEW
    Creative decline goes back to nutty CEO by skip 03/21/2018, 1:23pm PDT NEW
        Re: Creative decline goes back to nutty CEO by Mysterio Lollerson 03/24/2018, 9:28am PDT NEW
 
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