With many of its original titles pulled from storefronts, the new Telltale brought them back. Stabilizing the Telltale catalogue was priority one. With his love of Telltale and his experience as a studio lead, Ottilie felt confident he could bring the studio back. It seemed like a great opportunity – good brands and a great game genre and legacy that should continue.” He created a holding company, LCG Entertainment, to formally make the purchase. “After mulling it over for a bit, I decided to try to take it on myself and set about trying to raise some of the funds from my network of industry friends. “I couldn’t get it out of my head,” he continues. It wasn’t a good fit for the company that I was consulting for, which was disappointing.” It looked interesting and it was something we felt worth saving. “So we went through and we did the evaluation. “I started asking around and a colleague mentioned that he knew some of the former team at Telltale and we knew about the public assignment ,” Ottilie says. Ottilie watched Telltale’s shutdown as a game developer and studio consultant, having worked in the industry since the 1990s, leading multiple studios, such as Galaxy Pest Control, Abandon Interactive Entertainment, and more. About a year later, he would be the new CEO of Telltale after buying the company, or what was left of it, in 2019. Following the studio’s closure, he began to look into what went wrong and how the studio could return.
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It was also a massive shock to an industry already weary of crunch and the lack of safety nets for employees.īy the time Telltale shut down, Ottilie’s interest had grown into a full appreciation – he was truly a fan of the studio’s work. It was brutal, coming as a surprise to most everyone there.
The company began its shutdown in September 2018. Overburdened with work leading to widespread crunch in a market oversaturated with the Telltale name, the final blow to the studio came when investors from AMC, Lionsgate, and Smilegate pulled funding. And from there, the Telltale of old was born – a studio seemingly destined to create excellent stories in pre-existing universes such as The Walking Dead, and later Game of Thrones and Batman.įor some time, Telltale’s signature formula worked well. Ottilie enjoyed the studio’s first handful of games, but his interest reached new heights following the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, the game that most agree put the studio on the map. But then, Telltale Games was formed – roughly a decade after the golden age of adventure games – built from the ashes of LucasArts by a number of former employees, piquing Ottilie’s interest immediately. When titles like The Secret of Monkey Island became rarer, so too did Jamie Ottilie’s time with the adventure genre, and, like many, he moved on to other increasingly popular types of games.