Tales from the Borderlands was “Perceived as a Failure” According to the Developer

Tales from the Borderlands is one of Telltale’s greatest series, beloved by many, but it was not financially successful according to a developer who worked on the game. Near the end of production, it was even being worked on by a “skeleton crew”  who worked voluntarily while the rest were put on other projects.

In an interview as part of The Campo Santo Quarterly Review, Nick Herman, a game director on Tales from the Borderlands, spoke about its troubled development and how it did not perform as well as Telltale had hoped.

“Tales was my life for two years, and internally it was perceived as a failure,” he said. “Critically it was a huge success, but from a sales and production standpoint, it wasn’t awesome.” Herman also mentioned that while Tales wasn’t necessarily losing money, it just wasn’t on the same level as The Walking Dead for the company.

“About halfway through, we made a deal with the studio that if they let us go on, we would give up like 95 per cent of our staff as long as they let us maintain a skeleton crew,” Herman said. “We had at least one person from every department working on the game. But that’s a very small team for an episode.”

It’s a shame that production ran into such problems when fans constantly talk about how much they loved the series. Even after the longer than usual wait between Episodes 1 and 2, the rest of Tales from the Borderlands released in approximately two-month intervals, and showed no signs that it was hurt by the shedding of its development team.

Telltale has already stated that fans shouldn’t expect another season of Tales from the Borderlands and that the next entry in the Borderlands series will be released from Gearbox. But if The Wolf Among Us situation has taught us anything, it’s that games can certainly rise from their graves with enough support. Now go out and buy Tales from the Borderlands.