"Secret Writing Project X"
Posted by jake February 9, 2007
Last month, eagle-eyed players may have noticed an extra name scroll by in the "Written By" area of Situation: Comedy's closing credits. One "Jeff Lester," to be precise. More recently, those same players (and human-eyed players as well) may have noticed that in The Mole, The Mob, and The Meatball, Jeff's name got a lot bigger, and muscled its way from the closing credits to the opening ones. Who the heck is this guy?

Starting with episode two, Dave and Brendan decided that it was time to get a few more hands on deck in the dialog department. While those two guys, Steve Purcell, and the rest of the Telltale design squad still hash out the scenarios, the plot, the puzzles, and write a good portion of the dialog, these games have a lot of talking. For instance, Sam and Max combined have well over a thousand lines per episode (sometimes getting close to two thousand), which is a heap of dialog to write every month!

In the search for more writers, Jeff fell into our lap by way of being thrown there by his longtime friend, Telltale animator Tim Reardon. As for the results, I think that everyone will agree that we couldn't be happier with the writing of episodes two and three. My favorite part, though, is that (though I didn't know it at the time) Jeff is a lifelong Sam & Max fan. Apparently this is a man who has spent the last twenty years in love with the comics, citing the Epic Color Collection as one of his favorite books of all time. Clearly an awesome guy!

Jeff has written up a bit about his experience working on episodes two and three in his blog - wherein he's been referring to the gig as "Secret Writing Project X" for the last few months. All are encouraged to give it a read and send him a good word for his excellent contribution to the games!
Tagged Game Design, Sam & Max Digg this entry Send this to a friend 7 Comments
Congrats Jeff!

Meh I wish I could write for a funny game. I do write occasional uncredited stuff for websites, though, which is good enough for me. Hehe.

I'm looking at Secret Project X. Woo.
Comment by Jim February 10, 2007, 2:58 am
Congratulations, sounds like a dream gig.
Comment by Django February 10, 2007, 3:33 am
Jeff, you're doing an awesome job! Thank you :) and thank you TellTale, as usual :D
Comment by elsenator February 10, 2007, 10:21 am
Jeff's doing a very nice job.. its extremely hard to write as sam and max.. he clearly knows what he's doing
Comment by Hero1 February 10, 2007, 2:55 pm
I thought the writing got a little better in Sam and Max Episodes II and III, and I wouldn't be surprised if this Jeff character is partially responsible.

But what bugs me is that I would have liked to take a shot at a gig with Telltale, and I don't remember there ever being a job posting. Ah well.
Comment by Oilers99 February 10, 2007, 7:52 pm
Thanks for the kind words and the link, Jake!

And thanks to everyone for your comments (particularly El Senator who posted here and on my blog). As a huge fan of Sam & Max, it truly was a dream gig and I tried my hardest to catch some of what makes the dialogue between Sam & Max so wonderful.

Of course, now, like everyone else, I just have to wait on the edge of my chair to see what TTG has in store for us with Episode 4! I can't wait!!
Comment by Jeff February 12, 2007, 5:02 pm
I wish I could get my mitts on the original comics. Does anyone know if the comic collection is going to get republished based on the extra awareness that the game has created? I've seen it very occasionally second hand but I really don't want to pay 500 quid for a dog-eared copy which I have to pick up myself from a small bookshop with unreasonable opening hours located somewhere in the arctic circle... (OK. That may be a slightly over dramatized example, but you get the point.)
Comment by Duckling February 15, 2007, 11:37 am
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