The 'Telltale Games' path to fame

With Telltale Games announcing a big-name partnership with Marvel for a new game series project due 2017, we take a look at the studio's road to stardom.

Now known for a diversity of well-praised adventure games from the last few years, Telltale showed little sign of reaching its current heights over the first five years of its existence.

Founded in 2005, flying a then-idiosyncratic flag for TV-inspired episodic development, and at times perceived as only just scraping through financially, Telltale is now well known and well praised for its adaptations derived from three major creative sources: movies and TV series, comic books and graphic novels, and other studios' video game series.

Telltale's first five years saw the company elaborate on three core series -- comic strip detectives "Sam & Max," crime TV tie-in "CSI" and its own poker games -- before several key jobs brought increasing levels of recognition.

LucasArts' revered "Monkey Island" series, for example, was well resurrected with 2009's "Tales of Monkey Island," and a deal with Universal Pictures brought about 2011's "Back to the Future: The Game," both proving Telltale's unique ability to give prime licensed material a fresh, original and savvy perspective ("Jurassic Park: The Game" generally discounted).

Those two titles marked a transition into the studio's current phase, starting with "The Walking Dead" in 2012. Hailed as a triumph, it leveraged the TV series' fame, referred back to Robert Kirkman's comics, and created a broad community of players who could share and compare their most significant decisions at the end of each episode.

Multiple awards flooded the studio, opening doors to further collaborations of similar prestige.

There was "The Wolf Among Us" which took on modern fairytale comic "Fables," a second season of "TWD," a companion to game franchise "Borderlands," and even a "Game of Thrones" tie-in; two future projects include an adventure game for the "Minecraft" universe and a third "TWD" storyline.

But despite the critical praise and commercial success, some fans have found themselves skewered by a less fortunate Telltale hallmark -- the bugs, glitches, errors and episode-to-episode transfer issues which frustrate the accumulation of player decisions that otherwise make each game so personal and involving.

Those fans will be wondering whether, by the time the Marvel project is ready, Telltale's five-year tear will have been enough to fix up the technology that underpins its own interactive masterpiece theater; this latest high-profile partnership suggests that the resources surely are, or could be, available.