The Future of Video Games Could Look a Lot Like Television
As with some of their previous titles, Telltale Games is releasing The Walking Dead episodically in five segments, each around two to three hours long. Storylines branch out from a common beginning in the backseat of a police car where you first assume the role of the game’s protagonist and player character, Lee Everett.
Soon after, in typical zombie story fashion, chaos ensues. You wake up from a car crash, tapping a button repeatedly to extricate yourself from the tangle of glass and metal. There’s a harrowing sequence where the cop that was escorting you to prison wakes up and tries to gnaw at your leg while you scramble out of your handcuffs and attempt to load a shotgun. You limp your way to a nearby house. Searching for food in the kitchen, you hear the answering machine play the last calls of a desperate mother trying to reach her child. Softly, the girl’s voice crackles through a walkie-talkie. You begin to speak. The two of you take down the undead incarnation of her baby-sitter, and the relationship is sealed. She is your ward, wherever this adventure takes you.
After that, the story is largely up to you. Do you hide in the house until nightfall, or hope that daylight is safer? An old and grizzled farm-owner asks you, a younger black man, where you were going before the attack. Should you tell him the truth and stoke any number of bilious racial sentiments that have most likely survived the apocalypse? And more pressingly, whom should you save when the zombies return—the tech-savvy geek being pulled out of the window by the arms of the undead, or the quick-witted journalist who can handle a gun who’s being dragged out of the room? It’s impossible to say how far these choices will take you right now, but so far the promise remains that The Walking Dead could produce the same serialized dramatic heft of any good TV show.
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