We speak to Telltale Games' CEO Dan Connors about the return of Monkey Island and future projects

Tales Of Monkey Island is now in full swing, and the second episode has just been released. Are you pleased with the reaction to the project?
I’m really, really happy about the episodic nature of the game so far. The team has totally nailed it. The people I’ve been talking to who’ve played Episode 1 were really anticipating this. They really wanted to see what happens next, and that’s a huge thing for us in terms of getting to true episodic content. And the people who’ve played the second episode felt it answered all their questions and now can’t wait for the third. For me, that’s the best I could hope for. We managed to do it, and the good news is that we managed to do it on the franchise that has the most exposure for us. Monkey Island really took off this summer. I was surprised at how big the resurgence was.

Guybrush's return has proved a big hit for Telltale.

At what point did you find out about the plans to give the original Monkey Island a makeover?
The news came out when we were talking about whether we were gonna do it. They let us know that was part of the plan as well, and the hope was that it would help rise all boats. It seems like it has. Tales kind of took off out of E3 since it was the first one coming out, and we were surprised at how big that was. And to then have LucasArts follow up with its special edition and have that do as well as it did just spoke volumes for how many people still fondly remember the franchise.

As a company that specialises in adventure games it must be a dream project for the team.
It’s a dream project because we do franchises, too, you know. We’re not just adventure games, but we do believe that adventure games are the best way to execute franchises, and Monkey Island is great source material. I was saying to someone the other day that I thought Guybrush Threepwood is the quintessential game character. The people that play videogames – especially that videogamer from 1990 that knew how to muscle their way through DOS and firs a game up – they all were Guybrush, you know? He’s just the most likeable character you can imagine, and he really comes out of the game world.

To tell that story, and have all that back story on those characters, which is already kind of a soap opera in its way, and a pirate epic… for an episodic game the franchise itself is just great to work with.

Development of Tales must have overlapped with Wallace & Gromit. How did you juggle those responsibilities?
At the time, our internal studio was working on the CSI project – which is coming out with Ubisoft – and we were closing Wallace & Gromit and launching Monkey Island, all at the same time. Our studio has grown to around 45 people, and it’s just a scheduling thing. We’re at a point with the growth of the studio where we’re looking to have three to four franchises in production at any one time, and if we continue to have success we’ll grow more teams from there. We really want to make ‘monthly’ a true thing, so that every month there’s something from Telltale, and we’re pretty close now.

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