GOG announce a last call for Telltale Games leaving on May 27th
A grand and tragic tale
The sad saga of Telltale's fall is due one last tragic chapter. GOG have just announced that all of the defunct choose-your-own-adventure studio's games will be de-listed next Monday, May 27th at 11am BST. That includes Telltale's own games like Puzzle Agent, and all three seasons of Sam & Max adventures, as well as licensed games like The Wolf Among Us, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Batman, and the excellent Tales From The Borderlands. The last of which has already been removed from Steam, though publisher 2K Games are working to bring it (and it alone) back, as reported by Eurogamer.
One of the games facing the axe isn't even Telltale's own. They merely published Hector: Badge Of Carnage, which was developed by Irish studio Straandlooper. Some of Telltale's older games are already gone, including their Wallace & Gromit, Back To The Future, Game Of Thrones, Jurassic Park, Tales Of Monkey Island, Minecraft: Story Mode and Bone: Out From Boneville games. Looking at the full list of games, it's really quite stunning how prolific a studio they became, especially considering how their debut series - Bone - never got past its second episode, leaving many to declare episodic games dead on arrival.
The full list of games due to be de-listed from GOG, with links to our past coverage and stores (if you buy them now, they'll stay on your account), is as follows:
Batman - The Telltale Series (Steam/GOG)
Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series (Steam/GOG)
Tales From The Borderlands (Steam/GOG)
Hector: Badge Of Carnage (Steam/GOG)
Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People (Steam/GOG)
Sam & Max Save The World (Steam/GOG)
Sam & Max Beyond Time And Space (Steam/GOG)
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse (Steam/GOG)
Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy: The Telltale Series (Steam/GOG)
Telltale's The Walking Dead series has thankfully escaped this cruel fate, and is currently on sale on the Epic Games Store. You can get all five seasons together for around £20. Those games are a rare exception, as they were snapped back up by Walking Dead rights-holders Skybound, along with the Telltale staff required to finish the final season. The fact that the collapse of one studio is putting the fates of over two dozen games (many, many more if you count individual episodes) at risk highlights that our current system might be a tad broken.
While GOG have announced a May 27th deadline, there's no word on when these games might disappear from Steam, too. If you want to preserve your adventure game collection, you might want to snap them up and make backups sooner rather than later. Hopefully the next time this happens, there'll be some kind of preservation or backup plan in place. Sadly, I feel that this story is doomed to be repeated a few more times before the industry learns from its mistakes.