Telltale Bringing ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Fables’ Games to Life

Fans of zombies and storybook characters rejoice! Videogame maker Telltale Games has acquired the rights to Image Comics's The Walking Dead as well as Vertigo's Fables. For weeks now, rumors of a proper TWD video game have been circulating the blogosphere, but the addition of Fables comes as something of a surprise.
Best known for the celebrated Monkey Island, Telltale Games is no stranger to larger entertainment properties, including Jurassic Park and the much-hyped Back to the Future game. Still, they've nurtured more obscure properties such as the beloved Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, which most modern historians agree is the best game title ever released thus far by mankind.

Just because Telltale has good taste in licensing doesn't necessarily mean they make the best games. Certainly Monkey Island is gold, but others, like Strong Bad can trend... more in the bronze range.

Telltale has produced a comic-related video game in the past, Bone, and worked closely with Grickle cartoonist Graham Annable on the devilishly clever Puzzle Agent. So the company isn't blind to creative input, a risk The Walking Dead and Fables may have had with certain other developers. Telltale's also proven its worth producing unique game experiences amid broader gaming trends (you won't likely see space marines in these titles), so these comic properties should be in creative hands, at least.

For a company with mostly children's/all-ages titles, will Telltale produce a TWD game that resembles, I can only hope, Scorsese directing Dead Rising 2? And what of Fables? Will the game keep the same adult themes of the comic? In either case, Fables most certainly lends itself best to the RPG format, and I suspect TWD will be similar, only with a strong first-person-shooter mode.

Let's hope Telltale gets it right, because of the scores of comic book video game titles that have been unleashed upon gamerkind, only a handful have lived up to their source material.

[Via Kotaku]