Interview: Telltale Games' Dave Grossman

Perhaps the best way to begin an anxiously anticipated interview is not to babble at your source about just how anxious you are and how much you can’t wait to get home. But that’s precisely what I did to Dave Grossman, who worked closely on THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND at LucasArts way back when and is now design director at Telltale Games.

The company is almost halfway through TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND, the five-episode follow-up to SAM & MAX, STRONG BAD’S COOL GAME FOR ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE and WALLACE & GROMIT. Setting aside my exceptional professionalism for a moment, I’ll say briefly that all of them are tremendous, often guffaw-inducing adventure games and that anybody with a mouse should play them.

I can’t quite recommend the WiiWare versions (for technological handicaps  detailed below), but the requirements for the PC versions are so modest that pretty much any computer with a video card should be able to run them smoothly.

Without further ado, here’s my fully transcribed interview with Grossman from PAX on Friday.

GAMEOSAURUS: Did you get a chance to see Ron (Gilbert)’s keynote?

DAVE GROSSMAN: I did. I got a chance to look at it before he gave it. He actually sent it to me for comment a few weeks ago, I guess. I thought it was really good. It was a very charming look into Ron, you know?

When he got into the Grumpy Gamer persona, I guess in the second half, he was talking about Secret of Monkey Island, seven people, $135,000.

Yeah.

How many people are working on the Tales episodes?

You know, it’s hard to say because the team kind of grows and shrinks as it needs to. At the maximum size, I think we probably got like 20-plus on it, because we’re working extra fast. We’re actually plucking people who ordinarily would be working on something else and dropping them on there when we need the backup. A typical size for one of our teams is probably between 15 and 20 people.

In orders of magnitude, how much bigger is this, now that you’ve got a 3-D engine and blocking and things like that to work out, versus the 1990 games.

(ed.: Dave presses me to make sense of my question. I fumble helplessly, and he eventually helps me settle on man hours as a metric.)

So let’s see, Secret of Monkey Island, he said it was seven people? I’m not sure I actually believe that, but it seemed like that sometimes. There were a few artists actually on it. It took us about a year to make that. For a season, which is probably a comparable amount of gameplay and a similar amount of dialogue and all that, we usually use a varying team size. It starts out as only a couple of people, but then it kind of ramps up. We get into production, and it ramps up quickly to a team twice the size, but it only takes us about six months to get to the end of the season. So it’s actually probably pretty comparable, now that I do all that math in my head. It’s probably not that different in terms gameplay size or the amount of effort. Of course, everybody makes more money now, so dollar figures vary.

When (Gilbert) was doing that compare-and-contrast stuff (during his keynote), as soon as he started talking about the industry today, smokestacks popped up behind him on the PowerPoint. Are you more comfortable with the way things are working today at Telltale versus LucasArts 20 years ago? Or is there more responsibility to juggle? Is it overwhelming sometimes? The way he presented it, everything’s pushed out of the factory. With the timeline you guys are working on now, and more sophisticated graphical assets and things like that, is that a bigger responsibility, or are you okay with it today?

A bigger responsibility? Personally, I have a bigger responsibility now because I have to pay attention to not just one series, but all of them. In terms of how we produce them, part of the way that we set up the studio was, we wanted to do episodic game production, and we developed all of our production methods and tools with that in mind, to make that as easy as possible. It’s tricky, but it’s actually more about planning than it is about crunching. I don’t feel like we’re doing the games a disservice at all by producing them that way. They come out pretty good.

Okay, so I played through LAUNCH OF THE SCREAMING NARWHAL, and I fired up SIEGE OF SPINNER CAY. I’m not terribly far, still in the teaser, so to speak.

Did you do the cool swordfight part at the beginning?

Yes! Very cool. But I have to confess, during this process … I consider myself fairly savvy, but I did end up on YouTube or GameFAQs once or twice, and then I eventually noticed that at Telltale, you have walkthroughs to most of the series — I think every one except Strong Bad — right there on the site. I’m wondering, are the games developed with that in mind? Are the puzzles created that way?

No! No, I feel like if you have to resort to a walkthrough, then we haven’t done our jobs as well as we should have. We have a hint system that’s built in that we’ve been working on, making it better and better with each series. You can tell me whether we’re actually accomplishing that, but it’s actually trying to gauge your progress.

Actually, it’s going to start trying to be more intelligent about figuring out what you’re actually working on. It basically tries to change the narrative, and we do that in pretty simple ways. You know, somebody will just kind of say something to you, or something like that. But it’s basically just trying to make sure that the pacing is staying correct, with the upshot being that you don’t get too frustrated because you’re not learning anything new, you’re not making any progress. If you do wind up in a situation where the puzzle is just not making sense to you, other characters in the game are going to start trying to help you out until it does.

Do you have any say on that end of it, with the whole walkthrough thing on the site? Are you comfortable with the fact that every dialogue choice that you make to get to the end of the episode is basically pasted up there?

Yeah, that’s fine with me. I don’t think people are going to go look at that stuff right away. I think that they’re going to try to enjoy the game the way we meant it to be enjoyed, and if they get a little stuck, it’s fine if they look at it. Whatever works for people, you know? We’re in the entertainment business. We want to make sure we are entertaining people, so whatever they like, that’s what we’ll do.

In my research, I read a couple interviews with you, and people mostly focus on the challenges of the episodic development cycle, working I guess week-to-week, more or less. Even if you did want to bring part of the third episode today, would you be able to, or are you still in the midst of creating it as we speak?

Oh, yeah. No, it’s not quite done. We really do work on things up to the minute. In fact, in one of these episodes recently, (Telltale co-founder, co-director) Kevin Bruner suggested we take a photograph of the day’s newspaper and put it in the game to prove that we were in fact working on it on the day before it launched.

That’s not an exaggeration? It’ll happen that way, the day before you launch?

Yep! Yeah, we’re still fixing stuff. We’ve generally stopped creating new content shortly before then and are just knocking out bugs up until the very last minute.

In TV writing, with some shows, when they’re working on a schedule like that, say Trey Parker and Matt Stone see something funny that Martha Stewart did. It might be on “South Park” three days later. Are you guys ever tempted to work in stuff like that? Maybe not ripped-from-the-headlines kind of stuff, but things that have happened in between A and B that you weren’t originally planning for?

Yeah, yeah actually. I don’t even want to say what it is, but there is something that I’m angling to work into one of the upcoming episodes of Monkey Island, something that happened since the series began.

It kind of depends on what it is and what stage we are at in the game, but we’re pretty free to change small details up until the very last minute. We do like doing that.

So it does happen, but you’re not going to … It’s fair to say that it does happen and it has happened?

Yeah. A little earlier in our history as a company, we would take the feedback we got from the fans about the early episodes and change the approach a little bit even before the end of that season. It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re not liking what we’re doing with the tag dialogue, so let’s change the approach and kind of fix that.’ It’s very good. Working as fast as we do it and making as many games with a quick turnaround like that, it makes the whole connection with the audience a lot more immediate.

You’ve said that you guys are pretty comfortable and pretty good at this point at the point-and-click format. But one can’t help but notice that there’s a run button in Tales. Does that portend something broader for what you guys are working on in the future? Will Sam be jumping in the next season of Sam & Max?

Sam could run in the second season. If you double-click, he’ll run. Actually, it’s interesting. His run speed, I believe, is tailored to your view of the environment. The big one is the street outside their building — he’ll run. Other ones, he’ll just walk a little faster.

Generally speaking, are you guys ever thinking of moving to more conventional platforming controls?

We’re already doing a little of that. With the last couple of series — Wallace & Gromit and Monkey Island — we’ve been doing direct control for the character, although it’s still kind of pointing and clicking for object interactions. We put in the direct control to try and get that immediate feeling for immersion with the character.

Is that part of porting them to consoles, or is that just something you wanted to do?

That is something that we wanted to do anyway, which is why we do it also on the PC. The other big reason for that is that we like to move the cameras around a lot and kind of frame shots in close. We like the characters on screen to be bigger in our games than they are in most other people’s games. That’s inherently at odds with a clicking kind of scheme, and it works actually really well with a dragging-the-character-around scheme. Partly we did that just to give ourselves a lot more freedom to do a lot more cool and impressive cinematic stuff.

We actually now have more than one way to do that. We do WASD keys for people who are used to do that from other kinds of games, and we also have a driving-with-the-mouse mode for people who would rather kind of lean back and only have one hand on the table, and give it a kind of relaxed flick.

Have you played the WiiWare ports of episodes 1 and 2 of Tales?

Yeah. We’re kind developing them simultaneously, so they’re not exactly ports.

It’s pretty incredible that they get squeezed down the way they do.

I maintain that we get more content onto the WiiWare than anybody.

A lot of the humor is in the editing. Like right after the teaser in the first episode of Tales, (Guybrush) does that thing where (his hand) slaps himself, and then it cuts immediately to the title card, and there’s humor in that.

Mm-hmm.

But with the WiiWare version, it takes a while to spin up (between shots) and things like that.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. (ed.: I include these only to demonstrate that Dave appears to have been agreeing with me to this point. That changes momentarily)

Are you concerned that you lose some of that (editing humor), just with some of the sacrifices you make to get it on the Wii?

That’s just the basic fact of life. Sometimes you have screen loads. We get those on the PC, too.

Yeah, but they’re not as dramatic.

Sometimes it’s good to be thinking about those all the time, so that you can hopefully pause it at an opportune moment rather than at an inopportune one.

My experience with that goes all the way back to DAY OF THE TENTACLE. The animation that caused us to include MANIAC MANSION in that game as a bonus — it was the first one that we had ever done that was over 64k, and we discovered that the system actually can’t load an animation over 64k. It’s breaking everything. That’s the point at which Ron (Gilbert) said, ‘You know, the original game, the whole thing was less than 64k. One animation? Geez.’

So the ultimate solution to that was not to change the system, but to cut the animation in half so that it was two, and there was a pause in the middle while (the game) loaded the other one. Fortunately, it was this animation where the Founding Fathers are leaping kind of full-screen out of a window and then hovering in mid-air for a second, cartoony fashion, and then falling to the ground. So, rather than just split it down the middle, we picked this spot where they actually kind of hover in mid-air and then fall down, and I think people don’t really notice that load. It’s always good to cover stuff.

That was a long answer for a simple question.

So when it is possible to mask it, you guys do?

Yeah, we always have it in our mind, like, ‘Oh, okay, so we’re going to cut here, but we’re going to cut to something where we have to load, so let’s think about what that will mean dramatically and try not to ruin anything.

Boilerplate what’s-next kind of question. There’s a third season of Sam & Max coming?

Yeah, we’re working on the design for that now.

Umm, are there any plans ….

No!

… for more Wallace & Gromit and Strong Bad, or are those pretty much one-offs?

Can’t say one way or another.

Along those lines, and this came up back when the Secret of Monkey Island upgrade came out. The Tentacle Easter Egg, people were reading a lot into that then, and then it kind of died down. I’m just wondering at this point if you guys are prepared to announce anything further on that front. Anything Day of the Tentacle or Maniac Mansion-related.

No. Nope. But thanks for asking.

I mean, I’m sure if you were prepared to trot out an announcement for something like that, you would do it for our blog that gets three posts per week and no comments.

I’ve decided to save that just for you.

Awesome. So awesome.

We did the “Tales of Monkey Island” announcement at E3 with just kind of everybody who we had interviews with. Like, come here, we’ve got something to tell you.

We went on to talk a little about our favorite games on the show floor and what we’re looking forward to through the rest of the year. Grossman, shockingly, is looking forward to his own games, Tim Schafer’s BRUTAL LEGEND and Ron Gilbert’s DEATHSPANK.

Full disclosure: So am I. The combat demo of Brutal Legend on the show floor looked a little wonky, but every other part of the game I’ve seen so far — including buckets upon buckets of attitude — is very exciting. I know less about DeathSpank, but the PAX demo looked like a funny blend of hack-and-slash and inventory management. More or less up my alley, in other words.

Huge thanks to Grossman for taking 18 minutes to talk to my stuttering, over-rehearsed self, and big ups to the Telltale PR guys for making this happen. They stood to gain nothing from letting me interview this fairly important person, and they did it anyway.