Telltale Games

Telltale beats itself silly
Posted by Jake	January 8, 2007
So the new year has come and gone, and this blog page has become pretty neglected. Hi there! How's it going? Anyway, every new year all the big gaming sites like to look around their office, dig through their old reviews and game databases, dust off their favorites, and give them awards. The games of the year, the best of a particular genre, and classics like the game with the most long-winded title* all get their day in the sun. * Fortunately CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: 3 Dimensions of Murder dodged this particular bullet. How is Telltale itself stacking up? Pretty well! Sam & Max: Culture Shock took home GameSpot's "Funniest Game of 2006," and IGN's "Best Adventure Game of 2006," narrowly beating out our own CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder for that one! It's a good day when you lose an award to yourself. In addition to CSI's nomination for best adventure game, Telltale itself was also a finalist for IGN's Best Developer award. Culture Shock also made the New York Times' best games of '06 list, and is appearing in top games of 2006 lists in many magazines around the world (most of which I can't read). So, a good year for lauding. Want to help the laud-fest march right through Q1 2007? Telltale titles are also up for nominations for Best of 2006 Readers Choice awards at IGN, Gamespot, and 1up. Look around for Sam & Max and CSI 3 and get voting! Now, though, it's time for the awards that really matter: the ones we give ourselves. Yes, that's right, it's time for... An email went around the office asking what items or events in 2006 were most deserving a textual pat on the back. Strangely, most of the suggestions were about our trusty office (set to be demolished - hopefully via huge white-hot fireball - this Summer). Let's take a look... There's more to this entry! Keep Reading »
Tagged Around the Office, CSI, Events, Press, Sam & Max	Digg this entry Send this to a friend 13 Comments

Secret CSI project revealed!

Posted by emily

December 12, 2006

Okay, after the success of CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder and the relative quiet about what's been going on in the other half of the office (you know, the half that isn't working on Sam & Max), it's not such a stretch to think that we have been developing a new CSI game for the last several months. But now that it's been announced, we can shout it to the world. We're making a new CSI game! (And aren't you impressed by our collective ability to keep a secret?)

The new game follows the same format as the earlier CSI games--five cases, first-person perspective, lots of forensic tools to use in the field and analysis to do in the lab, and of course, appearances by your favorite members of the CSI Las Vegas cast. We've continued to improve the engine and as a result this game looks pretty amazing, as you can see with your very own eyes in these just-released graphics:

CSI: Hard Evidence will be in stores in spring 2007. That's only a few months away. And considering that time has been barreling by at an alarmingly fast pace, that's really only like fifteen minutes from now.

Tagged Around the Office, CSI, Game Media

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Immersed in the World of CSI

Posted by greg

March 15, 2006

A few words from the writer & designer of CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder.
-by Greg Land

In our rapid-fire 20-minute meeting with Anthony Zuiker, the infectious and passionate creator of the CSI franchise, one sentence pierced my forehead, swirled around in my brain, and lodged itself the back of my skull. He said: "This game should make people want to play with the lights off, and draw them to edge of their seats."

Those words summed up our goals better than any of us ever had. Isn't that exactly what we all want from a new CSI game? The feeling of total immersion in that world? The feeling of working alongside the master Investigator, Gil Grissom? The feeling of "being" a CSI?

As a designer, much of my job is to work with the team to translate great ideas into specific objectives for us. Draw them to the edge of their seats?" Sure! No problem! (Translation: "Oh, crud!") What exactly does that phrase mean to a programmer? To an artist? To all of us? How do we make that happen?

How about this: Bring us closer to the characters we love. Closer to the evidence. Deeper into the dark atmosphere. Deeper into the events of the crime. Make it look more like the show.

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Tagged CSI, Game Design, Game Media

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Wattles and Gibbets and Clappers, Oh My!
Posted by dave	February 22, 2006
When you work in an office where people are developing a game about crime scene investigation, you hear a lot of interesting language. People around here are always discussing the mechanics of stuffing a body into a crate, the difference between a stabbing wound and a slashing wound, the fact that it's "spatter" and not "splatter" - sentences which take on a peculiar poetic quality if you imagine them out of context. They use a lot of unusual vocabulary, words your spell-checker doesn't know like "Ninhydrin" and "Luminol" and "Leucocrystal Violet." It can be difficult to understand. And it's not just the CSI stuff, either. I also hear plenty of game company jargon that wouldn't make sense to most people. There is talk of "teching objects" and "baking lightmaps" and "exchange visibility," phrases which make use of familiar words but which offer little clue for the outsider as to their meaning. A lot of professions are like this. Try hanging around medical doctors sometime and listen to the things they say to each other. A translator is required. These people are speaking a different language. Or rather, a different dialect. We're used to thinking of dialects as being caused by geographic separation, ie, people in Mississippi don't speak English the same way that people in Wisconsin do. But as our occupations become increasingly specialized and require more and more words to describe concepts that are useless to people in other fields, they give rise to PROFESSIONAL dialects -- the doctors and financial analysts and computer game designers in my town may all speak English, but they do so in dramatically different ways. And it can be quite difficult for people speaking different dialects to understand one another, as any American who's tried to ask for directions in London, or in Mississippi, can tell you. At this point I am growing convinced that any attempt to communicate effectively with another person is ultimately doomed to failure. Meanwhile, as new words are coined to describe exotic diseases and technologies, some of the old words drift OUT of use by the modern suburban masses, and thus become somewhat dialectal themselves. And this is kind of a shame, because a word like, say, "wattle" has a pleasingly quaint sound which will never be achieved by something like "Leucocrystal." Why have I been droning on like this about words? Because as we've been working on Bone 2: The Great Cow Race, a story which occurs in a rustic, old-timey setting, a number of great words have come up that you might not hear very often any more, depending on where you live and what you do. My hope is that by providing them with a little media exposure, here in this international forum, I might give these words a bit of a shot in the arm, or perhaps even provide them with new meaning to carry them into the future. With that in mind, welcome to The Great Cow Race Vocabulary Challenge and Poll (pick your favorite meanings for each of the following Cow Race related words) yoke a) a device for attaching two animals together at the neck b) a joke which is not funny c) a female nerd d) the mental leap a player has to make in order to solve an adventure game puzzle wattle a) the dangly bit under a chicken's chin b) the tuft of hair between a cow's horns c) the stuffing inside a seat cushion d) indecipherable comments in computer code gibbet a) what they hang you from when they hang you b) an automobile more than twenty years old c) the part of a chicken nobody wants d) the little handle attached to an object in a 3-D modeling program clapper a) the dangly bit in the middle of a bell b) the part of a toilet that doesn't work right c) someone who chides people for spending too much time watching television d) a somewhat derogatory term for a producer toque a) one of those goofy hats that chefs inexplicably wear b) a farm implement used to aerate the soil c) a laced Medieval shoe made from a single piece of leather d) the mental condition of a programmer after working forty-eight hours on potato chips and Red Bull Me, I like knowing what things mean, but I mostly just enjoy saying the words out loud. Yoke! Toque! Wattle! Gibbet! Clapper! It's a mantra of retro linguistic fashion for the new millennium, and I'd like to hear it chanted in the streets. They just don't make 'em like they used to. If you care about the "right" answers, that is, what the traditionally accepted meanings are for the words in the challenge, then "a" is correct for all five. But bear in mind that meaning is negotiable as language evolves, and correct is not always best. The historical definitions preclude the construction of a great game-development sentence like "The jokes are yokes and the yokes are jokes, the clapper keeps fiddling the gibbets, and our lead lonker's gone into toque trying to noodle through all the wattle." Now, for extra credit, a question Dave Bogan asked me which I was unable to answer: What is a wattle FOR?
Tagged Bone, CSI, Deep Thoughts, Game Design	Digg this entry Send this to a friend 8 Comments

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