Are Telltale Working On The Walking Dead?

Nothing ever goes wrong with speculative posts! In the drafts folder at the moment we have:

Are Codemasters Planning To Blow Up The Sun?

Is EA Powered By The Deaths Of Puppies?

Was Activision Jack The Ripper?

But let's try this more gentle one for now. It does look likely that amongst the five new projects Telltale will announcing in a month, one will be the comic-turned-TV show.

1Up reports that Telltale intends to declare a further five games they're working on come 17th Feb. Of this, they say, one is,

"based on a just-launched property from the TV and comic book world whose popularity is changing life as some know it."

What else could it be? There's a spate of superheroic television that's just launched, but nothing else fits the bill. NBC's brilliantly awful The Cape is based on a fictional comic book, so it can't be that. ABC's No Ordinary Family superheroes are based on, well, an insipid version of The Incredibles, and the thought of a comic that insufferably twee is beyond credibility. Syfy's pointless remake of Being Human is comicless too. It can really only be Showtime's fun The Walking Dead.

(The Walking Dead is receiving rave reviews from all angles, which strikes me as little peculiar. It's a decent show, and it's filmed beautifully (other than its incessant use of "dusk" filters, that makes it look ridiculous). But it's absolutely bereft of a single original idea in the zombie fiction genre. (I'm told the comic received similar criticism.) When they're defending a shopping center in the first episode, and then facing the rival gang of survivors who turn out to be goodies in the end in another, it's hard not to roll your eyes. Perhaps simply by being the first US zombie TV show (I think I'm right about that - over here we've had Dead Set in recent years (Kieron also suggests EastEnders)) the novelty value alone is enough.)

Does this suggest a change in direction for Telltale? They're currently working on Back To The Future and Jurassic Park, with presumably another season on Sam & Max in the works, and hopefully some more Strong Bad (the Bros. Chaps don't appear to be doing anything else, certainly.) Five new licenses seems a hefty volume, and it's hard to imagine how The Walking Dead could fit neatly into their adventure game mould. (But then the same is true of Jurassic Park, of course.) Slowly strolling away from the screaming hordes of zombies to use the crowbar on the fence doesn't quite capture the spirit.

But maybe it's something else entirely!