‘The Expanse’ Returns, As A Telltale Video Game, And A Path Forward For Hollywood Too

(Game image courtesy Telltale Games)

Among the cavalcade of video games arriving this summer came one last week from a familiar franchise, and a familiar publisher, whose story-telling approach also suggests an opportunity for strike-shuttered Hollywood media companies trying to figure out a future less dependent on legacy film and TV.

The game is based on The Expanse, a science-fiction book and short-story series by William S.A. Corey whose first of many installments, Leviathan Wakes, debuted in 2011.

The franchise was built on a deeply imagined future Solar System of fiercely competing Earth, Mars and Outer Belt contingents, breakaway rebel groups, an alien hyperspace gate and a bunch of other stuff built around numerous complex characters, political machinations, and more.

The books soon spawned a TV show, produced by Alcon ALC , that ran on NBCUniversal’s SyFy network for three seasons, building an ardent fan base whose adherents included Amazon AMZN founder Jeff Bezos. When SyFy cancelled the show in 2018, Alcon successfully shopped the show to Amazon Prime Video, where three more seasons ran before the show concluded last year.

Now comes The Expanse: A Telltale Series, a name that gives away the publisher, the much loved, formerly defunct Telltale Games.

Telltale was a storied game studio known for a specific kind of point-and-click game experience that was more about exploration and narrative than explosive, fast-twitch, wall-to-wall action. Before closing suddenly in 2018, the studio made several dozen titles, many based on Hollywood franchises such as The Walking Dead, Law & Order, Back to the Future, Game of Thrones, and CSI.

CEO Jamie Ottilie bought and revived Telltale in 2019 along with co-founder (and Chief Revenue Officer) Brian Waddle, intending to revive the company’s approach to story-driven games that provide an immersive adventure without requiring a juggler’s eye-hand coordination to succeed.

The Expanse: A Telltale Series is built around a prequel, by several years, of the TV series’ events. It explores the earlier career of Belter ship captain Camina Drummer, played by actress Cara Gee in the TV series. Gee, who also voices her character in the game, was distinctive for her tough-as-nails persona and the clipped patois of the asteroid-mining Belters who live millions of miles from Earth in permanent low-G.

In a somewhat unusual approach, Telltale will indeed release four more episodes in the series, one dropping every two weeks through late September. A bonus episode, Archangel, was announced at the recent San Diego Comic-Con and will be available later this fall.

That’s a lot. At the same time, the game covers just a tiny slice of The Expanse’s, uh, expansive creative canvas, creators said.

“The story we’re telling is big for these characters, but it’s not galactic,” said motion-capture producer Dan Ruescher of game studio Deck Nine, which developed the game for Telltale. “The stakes are very personal.”

But even small-stakes stories set in a big narrative universe can be compelling for fans who want to more from a beloved narrative universe, Ottilie told me earlier this summer. Just as importantly, telling that tale didn’t require Telltale to lavish spending on high-end technical tools or require the audience to meet extreme system specifications.

Rather, Ottilie said, many fans just want to live in a story. They don’t need to be hard-core gamers. They just have to be comfortable enough on computers to click their way through an engaging story where their decisions have long-term consequences on the outcome.

In one early example, the player must decide whether Drummer will save the leg of a problematic crew member trapped in a doorway or lose a load of potentially valuable salvaged cargo, which is what her boss wants her to do. The player’s decision will affect the crew member’s future loyalty and much else as the story unfolds.

“It’s just a spider web of complexity,” said Deck Nine lead programmer Tom Marnell. “There are characters that are hard to keep alive. Choices matter.”

Because Drummer’s back story is a relatively little-known corner of The Expanse, Deck Nine and Telltale were able to “paint our own picture” while remaining true to the extensive lore built up over the many books, TV shows, graphic novels and other material from the franchise, Marnell said.

So what lessons can bigger media companies â€" their film and TV productions shut down amid twin actor and writer strikes for what may be months to come â€" extract from Telltale’s project?

The big one: all the studios need to more aggressively explore story-telling beyond films and TV. Netflix NFLX has already begun that process with a two-year-old video game division that’s released a number of mobile games based on its big franchises such as Stranger Things that are free to subscribers.

Netflix executives have termed their game efforts as a way to both learn the industry and build more long-term subscriber engagement in their franchises and the larger Netflix brand. It’s a smart move to figure out the insides of the $180 billion game industry, especially given how much time younger audiences spend there compared to film and TV.

Netflix isn’t the only Hollywood company in the game space. Disney’s LucasArts division has been making Star Wars-based games â€" including great ones such as Battlefront and Knights of the Old Republic â€" for decades.

Disney divisions such as Marvel and other media companies routinely license out some of their intellectual property for games, and sometimes turn games into movies and TV shows, some of which have done very well (others, less so).

This year’s most successful theatrical release was based on an iconic 35-year-old video game franchise. NBCUniversal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide after its spring release. And The Last of Us, built around an award-winning PlayStation adventure game, grabbed 24 Emmy nominations after debuting on HBO/Max this spring. More game-based adaptations are coming fast.

Sony is sending Gran Turismo, a feature built on its most successful game franchise, to theaters on Aug. 11. This weekend, NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service debuted the series Twisted Metal, based on a hugely successful car-combat game series (think Death Race 2000 meets It) that first launched in 1995.

Whatever the quality of those new shows, they’ll both be laboring without benefit of their stars doing promotions, interviews, or appearances on red carpets or talk shows. Surely Gran Turismo would be faster off the starting line if stars Orlando Bloom, David Harbour and Djimon Honsou (plus Ginger Spice!) could promote it, but they can’t under union strike prohibitions.

Which brings us back to creating more games and game-like experiences that aren’t built on old platforms and ways to telling stories.

The studios have long regarded games as mostly an afterthought handled by the consumer products division, a nice licensing check that spiffs up the bottom line. That’s perhaps one reason why those projects aren’t under the same contracts that shut down Hollywood, and also why many adaptations are just terrible.

But now studios need to figure out where they’re going to tell stories in the future, because everything is changing, possibly very quickly.

Disney CEO Bob Iger put it most baldly and publicly earlier this month when he told CNBC that the linear TV business is “broken.” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher basically agreed with Iger’s diagnosis in announcing the actor union’s strike a few hours later, ca lling for a new kind of contract to account for the new ways stories are distributed and experienced, beginning with streaming video.

In the same interview, Iger also hung out the For Sale sign for ABC and other linear networks, while asking for partners to bear the cost of running cable sports giant ESPN.

All of the owners of legacy cable and broadcast operations are pondering their next steps as cord-cutting and streaming wallop ad revenues and fees from cable systems. TV’s long-time cash cows are running dry, a long-term decline that will worsen dramatically if the strikes lurch into the fall season.

The movie business is also struggling, despite the opening 10 days of success for Barbie and Oppenheimer, which together have grossed nearly $1.8 billion so far, according to BoxOfficeMojo.

But the rest of theatrical exhibition is still trailing the pretty good ol’ pre-pandemic days of 2015 to 2019, when annual domestic box office routinely topped $11 billion. Theater chains that survived the pandemic are now facing an ugly fall with no stars to promote their movies and numerous big movies already shifted into next year.

The big media companies are facing fundamental changes to businesses they’ve run for decades. Games such as Telltale’s take on The Expanse suggest a direction they need to pursue more vigorously. Fans want to spend more time in stories and universes they love. Hollywood hasn’t done enough to get better at those new approaches.

This will become even more pressing once the Metaverse, however it may eventually be defined, is fully here. But for now, Hollywood companies need to start learning to tell the stories they tell in immersive new ways that fans will pay to enjoy for years to come. Now is a good time get going on the future.