If Telltale Games’ excellent adventure series - Sam & Max, Strongbad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, and most recently Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures - have you nostalgic for the golden age of LucasArts adventure games, there’s a very good reason. Telltale Inc. CEO Dan Connors and Design Director Dave Grossman both started at Lucasarts, working on Day of the Tentacle and The Curse of Monkey Island, no less.

Aside from resurrecting a genre near and dear to PC gamers everywhere, Telltale has also successfully pioneered episodic gaming. Since many other companies have tried and met with minimal success (or failed entirely), everyone’s left to wonder - how can Telltale do what so many companies can’t? I was able to sit down with Dan Connors and Dave Grossman at GDC 2009 and ask them myself.

Telltale - you guys are the only ones who can really do the episodic thing. Valve may not have been the first company to come up with the idea, but they were the first to really try it, to get a product out there under that umbrella. It’s been about two years since Episode Two, and their episodes are about two years apart - which is better than six - but still. What’s the difference? How come you guys can make it work and other companies can’t seem to?

DC: One of the hugest things is that Telltale - from the very get-go - started with the aim of doing it. I think with valve, they have a whole business around the large AAA products. When they tried to convert that into a quicker release schedule, it just didn’t work to just cut the larger games into three parts, however they were trying to do it. It seems like to me - and I don’t know enough about it, what they did internally - but they probably took a lot of the processes they were using for their regular games and decided they would just cut things short.

Let’s just make it all smaller, then everything will get shorter.

DC: Yeah, and I think that’s not an easy thing to do in the industry. At Telltale, it’s been something we’ve done from day one with everyone that’s come in. We know it’s the goal, we design for it, we make a production plan around it, everything’s built to executing on it. That’s probably the key.

DG: I do think that the fact that that’s all we do is helpful. I usually list a couple of factors. Talent: we hire good people, so at the beginning we already know they’re good. We built up our own homegrown technologies to help us develop fast. And we really get the planning and productions so that they can be going on top of each other, so we’ve got people moving really intelligently between episodes and games, and very good at making a plan and then... not sticking to it when emergencies happen, but changing them so we can still stay on schedule.

You said that you guys had built your process from the ground up around this rapid release schedule and episodic gaming. Can you list a few examples that differ from the normal monolithic release structure that’s different about your process?

DC: I think the biggest thing - to Dave’s point number three - the tools allow for really rapid iteration on products. The key to making a good game with consistent quality is in the number of iterations you’re able to do before you ship. Our tools are almost like a 3D director, so you’re in there and you can make a change. If Dave sees something and says ’No, there needs to be a sound effect there,’ that change can be made instantaneously. Dave could probably do it in half a second.

DG: You can edit the game while you’re playing it.

DC: That makes a huge difference. I’ve been in production processes where if you wanted a change in animation, it was a three week process. If you’re on a monolithic team, you look at the animation and say ’God, that arm looks awful. I need to change that.’ And then the assistant producer comes over and says ’Well, let’s submit a change request.’ And then, ’well I gotta go, I’ll fill out the change request tomorrow.’ Then it goes to a guy and he schedules it out and says ’well, it’s in the next schedule, let me get it over to the animator,’ and you know... four days later and the arm’s fixed. With us, it’s like ’ok that looks broken, go.’

Seems like that’d only be possible with a small team - would you say that’s a part of it?

DC: Small team, and tools that allow for it, and processes that are built to facilitate a small team. It’s definitely a different mindset.