The Walking Dead: 400 Days 

(Telltale Games)

400 Days builds upon the first season of The Walking Dead. This special DLC focuses on 5 different protagonists, each with their own short personal story in a tight geographic area.

When we decided we wanted to do an additional episode, we knew we didn’t want to just do more of Lee and Clementine. Their story had a definite end, and re-opening it just wouldn’t be satisfying for players. We instead decided to try a completely new approach to storytelling.

The five characters’ stories overlap with each other and the main season story in a way that allows the episode to feel like a cohesive unit as well as a genuine piece of the overall story.

Working on this project was in a lot of ways very different from working on Season One of The Walking Dead. It was a much smaller team, at times consisting of only myself, the Lead Designer and the Lead Director. Because of this, we were able to take a lot more risks and chances with an unconventional storytelling style.

400 Days ended up being a very special project that helped push Telltale into more unique forms of narrative design.

(And if you’re interested, you can see a collection of the crossover points between the short stories here)