3. EPISODE ONE, TAKE TWO

HARRISON PINK

The first episode is getting very, very close to being done. We’d already pitched the full season to Gearbox. Multiple times Gearbox had come down for a couple days to hash out story details. Episode Two was pitched and accepted. I believe each episode had been staffed by a designer and a writer. At least the first three or four. The high-level season story had been figured out and approved.

Then the shake-up happened. And I was asked to design the final episode of Season Two of The Walking Dead. They were like, “You’re going to be off this project and we need someone who knows how to ship The Walking Dead, get this thing over the finish line and really make sure it lands.” So I moved off onto The Walking Dead Season Two, but it really wasn’t my choice, or a choice at all, really.

It was definitely my first experience with the — very true — idiom of, “It was never yours. It’s the company’s game.” That was a tough pill for me to swallow for the first time.

MOLLY MALONEY

We lost our art director and didn’t have one for a while. Dave Bogan took over, and he’s a genius, but he was also managing the department so he had no time. Christian [de los Santos] and I started vetting things for the art department. By about the year mark, [Nick and I] would do all of the intro together and there was a lot of storyboarding of that.

We’d gotten a new depth of field system — depth of field means when something is close and something is far, the far away thing can be blurry — but it had to be hand-authored, so Dave Bogan spent seven hours teaching me and two other dudes how to use it in our proprietary software. I would go through that stupid fucking caravan fight and hand-author the blurriness in the background for each shot. It was crazy.

NICK HERMAN

They brought on another writer, Adam Hines, who had worked on Wolf Among Us. He was one of my favorite writers at the studio, and he was funny.

ADAM HINES

There was a joke I’ll mention that never even made it as far as being written, but that I’ve always loved, where the idea was that Rhys — when he starts to “download” the Loader Bot schematics or whatever — has to customize it. So the player would spend like ten minutes choosing all of these unique components, the weapons it would have, the paint decals, its voice, everything… and then as soon as it’s called down from orbit it explodes on impact and you get stuck with a generic one. I still love that idea!

NICK HERMAN

As I spent more time on the project, I started to get excited about getting to work on a game where I’m laughing when I’m making it. It had been so long. I had started on Sam & Max, and those were fun to make. It was a joy to work on. The Walking Dead, while creatively satisfying, was a miserable development experience because you spend all day trying to figure out what the best way to make someone cry is, or the best way to gross someone out, or put them through the emotional wringer.

MOLLY MALONEY

That PAX demo that [designer] Steve McManus and Adam Hines worked on, I would play it at my desk and the concept artists would gather around and just laugh. “This is funny! This is funny! It’s working!”

ADAM HINES

I left Telltale after turning in what was basically the second draft of the script.

4. EPISODE ONE, TAKE THREE

NICK HERMAN

Pierre showed up [at Telltale] at the very end of season one of The Walking Dead. He didn’t really have a home. Sean Vanaman introduced me to him, and I sort of loosely understood that he was a good guy. Sean said he did good work, so I took that for granted. One day, Pierre came into Dennis and I’s office, and he said, “Hey, you guys seem like you’ve been here for a while. Let me pitch you something.” Pierre pitched us a version of The Wolf Among Us, where it was set in the eighties and steeped in the neon noir vibe, and he’d written this one scene that didn’t ship in the game, but it was evocative and exciting, and we all of course loved Drive, which was pretty recent. “Oh, something like that? Yeah, of course we’re interested in that.” My first interaction with Pierre was he brought this great idea to people he didn’t even really know. And I went, “Okay, I want to work with this guy.”

I really wanted him to be part of Tales. I was hoping he’d be into it.

PIERRE SHORETTE

I hadn’t really written any comedy at the studio, so I was sort of surprised that they thought I was a fit for it. I can make a joke at the watercooler, so maybe that’s all they were using as a gauge. Before I came to Telltale I had two years where all I wrote were romantic comedies. I was well trained for the romantic comedy that is Tales from the Borderlands.

NICK HERMAN

It really wasn’t his thing. [But that] made us look at the franchise and go, “What things do we not like about it, how would we fix that? If we were going to try and sell these games to ourselves, what would we do to make them more appealing?”

ADAM SARASOHN

I really feel like when Pierre came on, he really shifted things up a little bit. More than a little bit. He shifted things up a lot. Into a story that was in a much better place.

PIERRE SHORETTE

What ultimately kind of unlocked it in terms of [the game being] a fun sort of romp was kind of two things. Early on we talked about Firefly, just because it’s sort of a space western and Borderlands has that vibe. But eventually the easiest [comparison] to start from, something that feels like it has stakes but it still feels fun and it’s funny, was Guardians [of the Galaxy]. Once we started there, people could actually go, “Oh, I understand.” And while Guardians’ tone does not directly map to Borderlands, it feels like a tone that could fit in a corner of Borderlands.

NICK HERMAN

Nothing we did is original original. Everything we’re doing, we’re pulling from things we like. The more obscure they are the easier it is to make it your own. Guardians coming out at the same time as Tales from the Borderlands, we were freaking out, like — we should have just been a Guardians game. This franchise just exploded and we have a similar vibe on accident. Obviously now Telltale’s doing a Guardians game.

ADAM SARASOHN

The first version of the game started with Rhys and Vaughn on Pandora. They had landed, and they say, “This is who we are and this is why we’re here.” Pierre added the opening scene on Hyperion, where we met Rhys and his friends interacting with Vasquez. Basically, you are controlling Rhys getting screwed over first-hand and that gave you a connection to that character in a much better way than when he was on Pandora talking about having in the past being screwed. That was a big linchpin. He’s a guy who wears a suit and tie, he’s very corporate, he’s a fish out of water, we needed to get you to relate to him, and that opening scene was what turned it around.

NICK HERMAN

[Pierre and I] had a shared language, a lot of the same references, a lot of the same music. Initially we wanted the opening of The Wolf Among Us, the title sequence that I directed, we wanted the soundtrack to be the Chromatics. We had a Chromatics track that worked really well. It was Kill for Love, which was off of the Chromatics’ new album at the time.

We got really lucky, since Borderlands had this precedent of intro sequences [with music]. In Wolf, we were looking for an excuse to use licensed music, and we were sort of not allowed to do that. But here there was really no argument as to why we shouldn’t.

ADAM SARASOHN

Jungle was the third or fourth song we put in that title sequence that stuck.

PIERRE SHORETTE

They had actually paid for a different song. It was a perfectly credible choice. It felt like it was in line with what [Borderlands] had done before, the same tone. It was kind of bluesy, guitar-y. That was the original track, and — I hated it. I just hated it.

NICK HERMAN

Episode One had about three tracks that we had actually purchased, and had the rights to. We’d start with one and go “That’s the one,” and we bought the rights, and a week later we’d go “Oh, crap, that’s not right, we need a new track,” buy another one, “Oh, crap, that’s not right.” We made a lot of mistakes on Episode One.

With Jungle, Busy Earnin’, it was an album that had just come out, and we were about a week and a half away from shipping. Pierre heard the album and he sent me the track. I was like, “We’re going to change the track again? I don’t know, man. We’re costing people a lot of money, there’s a lot of emotional stress that people go through every time we make one of these changes.” But he played the track and I was laughing. Laughing, like, this is so crazy, this is so different from anything that we’ve been talking about. I realized how perfect it was.

PIERRE SHORETTE

We had to convince a lot of people, because they had just spent a lot of money on a song, and they had spent a lot of money on that song six months earlier so they thought that was a done-and-dusted conversation. I think everyone was into the previous song just because they heard it so much. But the reality is they heard the song twenty, thirty times. We needed something that you hear [once] and it feels like, “This is different.” Because you’re going to hear it once, playing through the game.

NICK HERMAN

It started to set the tone for the episode, which in turn set the tone for the series.

PIERRE SHORETTE

It also thematically made sense. I think that’s ultimately what my big pitch to people was: “Dude, it’s about getting money. How can you argue with this?” But that’s not really what mattered. That’s the argument you make, the intellectual argument for it, but really, no, it’s the energy. They could have been mumbling and it wouldn’t have mattered. It feels like it hits and when the horns kick in, it feels like: Let’s go.

MOLLY MALONEY

There was a tiny writer’s room at the time. I sat a recorder on the table and Nick would pitch what he thought could be the musical sequence.

NICK HERMAN

One of the things that I liked about Molly was that she was the first person to tell me if she thought something was dumb.

MOLLY MALONEY

I would be like, “That’s stupid. What are you thinking?”

NICK HERMAN

There’s definitely some fights we got into about things.

MOLLY MALONEY

We would go back and forth, finally agree on something that we both liked, and then I took it home. I would spend all night listening to these recordings and try to make these storyboards as fast as possible, because we had no time. The cinematic artists wouldn’t always do them completely as I had done them, but that was probably for the best, because whatever I was cooking up at four a.m. on my 19th cup of coffee wasn’t terribly genius.

ADAM SARASOHN

I remember looking at it and saying, “This is amazing, but you know, we’re committing at this point to doing something like this for every single episode.” And [Nick] smiled, and he was like, “Yes, we are!”

NICK HERMAN

I was looking at the episodes like, “This might be a bunch of cool music videos that I get to work on.” At the time, I couldn’t say that out loud because doing the first one was already a huge undertaking and people didn’t know if it was going to work.

PIERRE SHORETTE

This is probably dramatic, but I weirdly think the entire series might feel different if we started with the old song. Because we would have wanted to match some of the vibe, and stick with what Borderlands had done before.

ADAM SARASOHN

That was a lot of what our relationship was like. Them coming to me with worthwhile stuff they wanted to do, and me trying to find a way to make it happen.

NICK HERMAN

[What] I remember being a huge problem was [on] Episode One, like literally three days before we weren’t allowed to touch the project anymore, Pierre comes to me — I think Guardians of the Galaxy had just come out. There’s a moment in the first episode where your friend Loader Bot can explode, and it’s based on a player choice. Pierre comes to me and says, “I don’t think we should let Loader Bot die.” I’m just like, “Well, okay. We’re 36, 48 hours away from this thing going live, what are you talking about? That choice is there.” And he said, “I think we might be blowing up our Groot.”

PIERRE SHORETTE

I actually think what it boiled down to was everyone loved the guy. And we’re struggling to figure out if anyone likes anyone, so it was like why are we getting rid of the one character we know everyone loves? I think that’s a sentence that was said a few times.

NICK HERMAN

Our relationship is normally Pierre coming to me with a thing that I hate to agree with, and then having to go and deal with the production realities of that and talking to the team. I think I ended up doing the work on that. Basically, what happens is at the end he comes down from the sky and lands in front of you whether or not you blew him up, and what the tweak was, is that for the next three episodes he hates you if you blew him up, or refers to you as his father and loves you and appreciates you.

PIERRE SHORETTE

Philosophically, that feels better for me, because you have to live with it.

NICK HERMAN

All the producers, everyone was telling us no, and I think I just had to sneak the content in and apologize later. That reputation became a problem. Because that ended up being how we got a lot of content in the game. Doing it and then apologizing.

ERIN YVETTE

I think it took just shy of a year to get that first episode out the door?

MOLLY MALONEY

Maybe a year and a half?

ADAM SARASOHN

When we got there — I wouldn’t even say I was happy. I was just relieved.

LAURA BAILEY

[Nick and Pierre] were sure the game was going to be terrible. Every time I talked to them, “Oh man, we know we’re doing a horrible job.” No, you guys are amazing, are you kidding? Every time [an] episode would come out and it’d be amazing, I’d be like, “You guys are so stupid. It’s so good.” “Yeah, this one was good but the next one is going to be terrible.”

JOHN BERNHELM

I really dug the first episode. That was surprising to me, because I was skeptical, and I probably only played it mainly because I knew I was applying to Telltale. I was really looking forward to Game of Thrones, at the time.

ADAM SARASOHN

It wasn’t until Episode One came out and did as well as it did that the trust [with Gearbox] went from “Mostly we trust you” to “Okay, we entirely trust you with our IP.”

MOLLY MALONEY

People liked it! It was such a relief.

ADAM SARASOHN

One of the flaws of Borderlands, which I recognize to this day, is that the cadence of our episodes was kind of all over. We took a lot of time between Episodes One and Two and Three, and then we got much better. But I wanted it to have that more time, because I didn’t want to come out with an episode that was a 70. We were always shooting for 90s, every single episode.

[But] if there’s three months between Episodes One and Two, you’re going to lose a large portion of your audience, who forgets about your game.

ANTHONY BURCH

I think it turns out that that Venn diagram of people who like games about shooting millions of things and people who like games about talking to people is probably a slimmer slice than we all would have hoped.

NICK HERMAN

People expected if they were on a project with Nick and Pierre — or Nick and/or Pierre — that there was going to be a lot of drama. That we were going to fight for stuff. It’s not going to be an easy project.

MOLLY MALONEY

Nick has a very strong personality.

NICK HERMAN

We were passionate about the things we were working on. I got the feeling that Borderlands became a place where they were like, “We’ll let them play over there on that island. We don’t have a lot of expectations at this point.” It was kind of great, because it ended up allowing us to do the things we wanted to do. After shipping Episode One, and we saw that they weren’t going to break us up again like they did on Wolf and throw us onto other projects, we were like: Well, now that we’re here, do we want to start taking this seriously? Because there’s a lot of potential now.

It was a franchise and a tone and a team that I really enjoyed working on and with. It felt like this could be one of the greatest games the studio makes.