With a name like Game of Thrones, HBO's wildly addictive historical fantasy show seems almost deliberately primed for a video game adaptation. Conflict, betrayal, revenge and politics all come together in a plot that spans thousands of miles and includes a massive cast of characters with strange names, and now that story is being brought to interactive life by Telltale Games, the studio that produced the critically acclaimed episodic game based on The Walking Dead.
Game of Thrones' narrative lends itself very well to Telltale's Walking Dead style of storytelling and gameplay; like The Walking Dead, characters in Game of Thrones are often faced with impossible decisions and are forced to choose the one that they hope will prove the least disastrous. It's a format that will hopefully end up working better than the existing RPG based on Game of Thrones, which left critics and gamers alike feeling generally rather underwhelmed.
In a new press release regarding the development of the game, Telltale co-founder and CEO Dan Connors confirms that Game of Thrones will indeed burden the player with the weight of exhausting responsibilities, meaning that the sucker punch of character's deaths will be all the more painful thanks to the knowledge that you might have been able to stop it. Complex political plots, battle strategies, romance... the potential for terrible decisions is endless. Says Connors:
"Working with HBO to develop a new game series based on Game of Thrones is a natural fit for our studio. This partnership will create an experience that will captivate the huge, global Game of Thrones audience. It will put them in control of the epic stories of warfare, intrigue, violence and revenge that we know and love."
Interestingly, the announcement also reveals that the partnership between HBO Global Licensing and Telltale Games is multi-year and multi-title, meaning that if Game of Thrones proves to be a success then other HBO shows like, for example, The Wire or The Sopranos could get their own Telltale adaptations. No disrespect meant to the PS2 title The Sopranos: Road to Respect, but perhaps there's some room for improvement.
It will be interesting to learn exactly how Telltale intends to approach Game of Thrones. Will it be like The Walking Dead, with an almost entirely new cast of characters, or will it feature all the familiar faces from the show? Similarly, should it be told from a single character's perspective or jump between characters? At least while we wait for answers there's still The Wolf Among Us and season 2 of The Walking Dead to look forward to.
Game of Thrones is targeted to premiere digitally on home consoles, PC/Mac and mobile devices in 2014.
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Source: PR Newswire