Forum:GoTWiki Small Council meeting 4: GoT video game by Telltale

How should we handle the new video game, Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series?

Overview: Past Attempts to make video games for Game of Thrones
There are basically five Game of Thrones-related video games including this one:


 * Battle for the Iron Throne (online game) - just a Facebook app game, I'm not even sure why we made an article for it. It's just a tie-in online gizmo.
 * Game of Thrones Ascent - ...I know little about Ascent other than that it's a popular browser-based game, popular enough that it sustains its own dedicated wiki. I believe that it doesn't have its own internal storyline, but sets of world events - it's an MMORPG set in Westeros and the developers do a good amount of research for it, but I don't think it's "Expanded Universe" exactly...in terms of storyline we need to worry about.  It did win several "Facebook game of the year" awards.
 * Game of Thrones: Seven Kingdoms - another browser game...announced in February 2012, for a 2013 release. The entire project seems to have been abandoned.  There are no updates since SDCC 2012 a few months later.  Their website went down a few weeks ago.  And embarrassingly....Game of Thrones Ascent already beat them to release by coming out in February 2013.

So that's not really "five" games. At the most "four" because Seven Kingdoms was vaporware and a failed project. "Battle for the Iron Throne" was just a basic app game (though the cast and crew liked it), otherwise not really many details. Ascent is updated regularly and remains popular, but to my knowledge, it doesn't really have its own ongoing narrative - just mirroring the TV episodes week by week and letting fan-made alliances make up their own storylines. Which is fun, but doesn't add anything to the "TV continuity canon".

Thus there are really only two video game projects so far with actual "storylines" we need worry about:


 * Game of Thrones (2012 role-playing game) - for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. An RPG game...not very well received.  Made by Cyanide.
 * Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series - coming soon. For PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Telltale Games actually previously made the critically acclaimed The Walking Dead tie-in video game series.

Lastly, while there have been five games based on the buzz about the TV series, another game based purely on the books was released in 2011, called A Game of Thrones: Genesis....also released by Cyanide. And it was also a flop! Or rather, if the 2012 game received "poor" reviews, their 2011 game received "outright terrible" reviews. Why the heck were they rewarded with getting a second chance to make a video game?

In summary, for the past four years only half-assed attempts were made to make video games based on Game of Thrones, just as knee-jerk reactions to Season 1 to cash in on its popularity.

(With the exception of Ascent, which is a well-made browser game...but focused on being a Thrones-themed "play out the storyline" game, not with its own separate storyline. Not "Expanded Universe").

Heck, the 2012 RPG wasn't so much "based on the TV series" as "loosely based on the TV series" -- they grabbed some cast members to voice their characters, true...but they couldn't get Lena Headey to be Cersei, so they made an entirely different Cersei who doesn't even look like Headey. Actually, the only two actors they got to voice their own roles were for Varys and Jeor Mormont. It was an odd mish-mash loosely based on the show, and not well received.

I've seen that happen with so many other TV shows: there's a knee-jerk reaction to the success of their first season to crank out a video game...really crappy video games churned out quickly without trying to set up a years-long schedule. Didn't they realize that if successful, GoT would be on the air for about SEVEN YEARS? Why wasn't there long-term planning? They raced off bad games to make quick cash. So now we're in the awkward phase that Season 4 was just as popular as ever, even more now with building audience size...and we don't really have major video game projects being based on this obviously franchise-able property.

Apparently, the same idea occurred to George R.R. Martin & Co, plus the folks at Telltale Games:

Game of Thrones: A Telltake Games Series
Apparently, Martin & Co were annoyed that Game of Thrones only had video game projects which ranged from at best "mixed" reviews, to overwhelmingly negative.

Telltale Games actually worked on the critically acclaimed episodic tie-in video games for The Walking Dead. So it's a proven format and they're proven developers with a love of strong storytelling. Their leaders are on on-record for the project saying that they hate how a lot of video games focus on movie-quality visuals...while ignoring narrative storytelling, and also worldbuilding and gameplay. If we wanted movie-quality graphics we'd play something else. What about this makes it Game of Thrones? So they're clearly "it-getters". They get it.

Telltale actually approached HBO about this, but HBO was enthusiastic about it.

Basically everyone sat down and acknowledged "Game of Thrones is a great franchise but our past attempts to make video games based on it have been crappy and short-lived" and then went on to say, "Let's reboot our entire effort to make GoT video games, with an in-depth, systemic effort to make a quality product, as an ongoing project."

At first, with bad memories of how half-assed the Cyanide 2012 game was, I wasn't very enthusiastic about it. Now that I've read through it, I'm actually really encouraged by this.....and I think we should do whatever we can to promote this effort to "actually get a Game of Thrones based video game done right". Could this be the first step in getting a critically well-received "Expanded Universe" for the TV show...which doesn't violate continuity? That is, doing what I would have suggested: you can't invent another Great House out of nothing, but like if you made a video game on "The Hundred Years War" in real life, and focused a game on a single local county's experiences in the war. The Great Houses and kings are all accounted for, as are most if not all of the major Houses like the Umbers or Glovers....but there are hundreds of minor Houses (on the level of the Cassels or Pooles) which are a blank slate for filling in details about how the "War of the Five Kings" affects people on the local level. Smaller scale stuff -- the analogy I used was like how a Star Wars spinoff can't focus on inventing entirely new, galaxy-wide wars because this would contradict the movies in the same time period....what they can do is focus on one local planet out of many thousands, and tell local-level stories about how the war is playing out on the ground level. Specifically what they're doing in the new Star Wars: Rebels TV series: focusing on the local rebel movement on a single planet, Lothal, a backwater which isn't as big as inventing a new Corellia from scratch, but a minor planet that just happens to have a TIE fighter factor on it which makes it slightly worth fighting over (but hundreds if not thousands of planets have local-level TIE fighter factories). So Telltale is sort of trying to do with House Forrester what Star Wars: Rebels is doing with the planet Lothal. A ground-level "everyman" narrative.

"I love this plan, and I'm happy to be a part of it" -- Ghosbusters

Why Telltale's is the first video game we are considering as canon for the TV series
Of the four "video games" of any kind based on Game of Thrones, one is just a facebook game not worth mentioning more with no story, while Ascent is good as a game, but doesn't have anything we'd need to incorporate (and it has its own sub-wiki).

So the only two we really have to choose from are the 2012 Cyanide game and the 2014 Telltale game.

I think we've already established that the 2012 Cynanide game is officially not TV canon. Nor do I think anyone will ever put the effort into making an exhaustive sub-wiki of its own or fansites; it was a crappy game, badly mixing and matching elements from the TV show or just their own imaginations, which DID NOT make a strong enough effort to make it duplicate the TV show's visual aesthetics (that and the gameplay was apparently also not good). So we do have an article on this, if anyone is looking in the video games section....but we will include absolutely no information from it on ANY other page. Stuff from that game only gets put on the ONE article for that page itself -- "Varys" material in that non-canon game doesn't go into the "Varys" page. Who are we to decide what's canon and what isn't? Well, the TV writers universally ignored that game. Its events aren't referred to in the show -- and many parts of it outright contradict the show (the Red Keep doesn't even look like it does in the TV show).

In contrast....and as a metaphorical raised middle-finger at how Cyanide's 2012 game 1 - failed miserably, and 2 - due to its failure, derailed ANY attempt to make another Game of Thrones based TV show for over two years.....we will be actively embracing Telltale Games's dedicated attempt to make a quality tie-in game worthy of the Game of Thrones TV series.