Walking Dead Media Shambles To Life

Telltale Games’ adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead saw a burst of new media today, almost all of it featuring necrotic corpses.

In case you missed the memo, The Walking Dead is sort of a big deal. Initially a gory, dark, monochrome comic book series, the zombie-centric property caught the eye of executives at AMC who felt that shambling corpses would make an excellent contrast to Jon Hamm being charmingly sexist. Thus the comic was adapted into a television series, which as far as I can tell, is pulling down crazy ratings, despite the arguably stupid creative liberties the show has taken with the comic storyline.

But this article isn’t the place for me to complain about the Walking Dead TV series. This article is a place for me to show you all the new images that emerged from the in-development Walking Dead videogame earlier today.

As per usual, you can find the full lineup in the gallery below, but I want to draw special attention to the second screenshot (which can also be seen in relatively tiny form at top-right). Wanna know why? Because the more I look at that image, the more I’m impressed by how well Telltale’s artists were able to stylize the world’s aesthetics, while still making it easily recognizable as a descendant of the comic’s Tony Moore/Charlie Adlard artwork.

Of course, there’s also a part of me that remembers Telltale’s disappointing Jurassic Park videogame. Honestly I enjoyed that title, but to do so I had to consider it a “vaguely interactive long-form cutscene” instead of an actual game. I have no idea what Telltale plans to do with The Walking Dead, gameplay-wise, but if it has any hope of avoiding a critical savaging, the firm is going to have to drastically depart from its efforts on Jurassic Park.

Which, now that I mention it, serves as a nice segue into the other piece of Walking Dead media to emerge this morning: The first episode of “Playing Dead,” a Telltale-produced web series that takes viewers behind the scenes of the game’s development. Presumably this is an effort to offer as transparent a development cycle as fans could possibly hope for, and that’s admirable.

Have a look:

And if this isn’t enough to make you cautiously optimistic about the title, Robert Kirkman himself had the following to say about the game:

Collaborating with Telltale on The Walking Dead continues to be a fantastic process. They understand the world and the characters that I created and what it takes to make a game out of them. What’s really exciting is that they’re telling a new story with new characters, so you’ll get to see the same world Rick Grimes did, but now from a different point of view. Playing Dead is going to be an awesome way for fans to learn about the game and how it was made. It makes sense that Telltale are talking to people in this unique way because The Walking Dead is going to be a unique zombie game.

Speaking as a fan who’s been collecting Walking Dead trades since its debut, I wish Telltale the best of luck in not disappointing me horribly. Given what a petulant, entitled jerk I am, that won’t be easy.