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**Jake** · 02/21/2008, 07:17 pm

another classic entry in "just one guy's opinion..."

The idea of doing an all black and white noir episode has been thrown around since the day it was announced that Telltale was doing a Sam & Max game (the night before Boneville shipped)... probably before that (but I wasn't there before that so I wouldn't know). It may have been discussed even earlier than that! So, if we do enough of these, it'll probably happen, right? Who knows.

That said, I think we've done some things that people weren't expecting with the series. For instance, I think Reality 2.0 definitely pushed beyond people's expectations of where the series could go stylistically. I think last season was a lot of just sort of feeling out what the real boundaries were for a Sam & Max episode - I feel like people took a semi-educated guess at setting them with Culture Shock, and then kept poking at them throughout the hear, hitting a good point with Lincoln Must Die and then getting a bit daring with Reality 2.0. Season Two, from where I'm sitting as an occasionally-involved observer, is about pushing the storytelling you can pull off, both in a single episode, and long-form season-wide plotting. Last year was a string of hypnosis cases which slowly spiraled out from the street and nearby shady businesses to slightly more exotic locales, but Season Two has been about trying to basically see how far you can go, how disparate you can make things from one moment to the next, how much twisting and non-sequitur can you cram into 3 hours before it pops. These, to me, are some of the core questions about how games of this length on this schedule can work, and they're probably important things to figure out before going entirely nuts with the window dressing.

Of course, sweet window dressing is nice too, and while I know we haven't (yet) done anything as crazy as Reality 2.0 or an Episode Noir or something this year, I think we've definitely been pushing the envelope on visuals in our episodes.

02/21/2008, 07:17 pm	#15
Jake Telltale Team Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: San Francisco, CA Posts: 5,843	another classic entry in "just one guy's opinion..." The idea of doing an all black and white noir episode has been thrown around since the day it was announced that Telltale was doing a Sam & Max game (the night before Boneville shipped)... probably before that (but I wasn't there before that so I wouldn't know). It may have been discussed even earlier than that! So, if we do enough of these, it'll probably happen, right? Who knows. That said, I think we've done some things that people weren't expecting with the series. For instance, I think Reality 2.0 definitely pushed beyond people's expectations of where the series could go stylistically. I think last season was a lot of just sort of feeling out what the real boundaries were for a Sam & Max episode - I feel like people took a semi-educated guess at setting them with Culture Shock, and then kept poking at them throughout the hear, hitting a good point with Lincoln Must Die and then getting a bit daring with Reality 2.0. Season Two, from where I'm sitting as an occasionally-involved observer, is about pushing the storytelling you can pull off, both in a single episode, and long-form season-wide plotting. Last year was a string of hypnosis cases which slowly spiraled out from the street and nearby shady businesses to slightly more exotic locales, but Season Two has been about trying to basically see how far you can go, how disparate you can make things from one moment to the next, how much twisting and non-sequitur can you cram into 3 hours before it pops. These, to me, are some of the core questions about how games of this length on this schedule can work, and they're probably important things to figure out before going entirely nuts with the window dressing. Of course, sweet window dressing is nice too, and while I know we haven't (yet) done anything as crazy as Reality 2.0 or an Episode Noir or something this year, I think we've definitely been pushing the envelope on visuals in our episodes. Last edited by Jake; 02/22/2008 at 08:13 am.