The Walking Dead (video game series)

At the onset of the zombie apocalypse, Lee Everett rescues young Clementine whose parents had traveled to Savannah prior to the apocalypse. They join with other survivors in Macon, Georgia to protect themselves from the undead, taking shelter in a defensible motel. When their position is overrun by both walkers and scavengers, the group flees and heads towards Savannah hoping to find boats to flee the mainland. Lee promises to reunite Clementine with her parents while teaching her rules of survival in this new world. In Savannah, they find no boats, and a strange man communicating to Clementine via walkie-talkie. When Clementine goes missing, Lee in his panic searching is accidentally bitten by a walker. With his time short, Lee assures the safety of the remaining survivors and goes to rescue Clementine, held by a man who has blamed Lee directly for the death of his family. Lee and Clementine overwhelm the man, and as they escape, they witness Clementine's parents, who have already become walkers. Clementine drags a weakening Lee to a safe location, and Lee, in his final moments of rationality, directs her to find the other survivors, before telling her to kill him or leave him before he fully becomes a walker.

400 Days is a downloadable special episode. It focuses on five different protagonists and it serves as a bridge between Season 1 and Season 2. In the final scene, the survivors of each story are offered to be taken into a safe camp.

A 3-D virtual pinball adaptation of the first season, developed jointly by Telltale Games and Zen Studios, was released on August 27, 2014 as downloadable content for most of Zen Studios' family of pinball games and also as a standalone paid mobile app.[7][8]

More than a year after the first game, Clementine is separated from the other survivors and forced to fend on her own. She meets up with another group that are attempting to flee a man named Carver, who runs the human survivor camp at a strip mall, as alluded to in 400 Days. Clementine learns Carver seeks to capture Rebecca believing her to be carrying his child while she insists it is her husband Alvin's. They come into another group, discovering that Kenny, one of the survivors that Clementine traveled with from the first season and who had lost his wife and son to walkers, has managed to survive. In the midst of a walker attack, they are captured by Carver. Learning that a massive walker horde is approaching the strip mall and will readily overrun it, the group manages to escape with other prisoners, killing Carver in the process after he kills Alvin. During their escape, a woman that Kenny had taken a romantic interest in is bitten by a walker, forcing Clementine to intercede to kill her before she can turn, angering Kenny. As they regroup, Clementine becomes close to Jane, a loner that was part of the prisoners at Carver's camp and who teaches Clementine survival skills. Later, Rebecca dies after giving birth to a child, which they name Alvin Jr. (AJ) As winter sets in, Jane and Kenny become hostile towards each other, and Kenny's distrust of the group leads to a fraction of them fleeing from Kenny, Jane, Clementine, and Alvin Jr.. Jane forces Clementine to see what Kenny has become from witnessing the deaths of his loved ones by faking the death of Alvin Jr., and Clementine is forced to intercede, killing one of them and opting to continue with the other while overseeing to Alvin Jr. herself.

In June 2014, Telltale announced a three-episode series The Walking Dead: Michonne. The mini-series released on February 23, 2015 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; February 25, 2015 for iOS and Android; and March 1, 2015 for PC, and serves as a tie-in between the first two The Walking Dead seasons developed by Telltale. The series mostly focuses on Michonne's untold story on what took Michonne away from Rick, Ezekiel, and the rest of Rick Grimes' trusted group and what brought her back.[17] Samira Wiley voiced Michonne in the game. The mini-series was originally scheduled to be released as downloadable content for Season 2.[18] However, in December 2014, Telltale announced that the game would be released as a standalone title that would not require any previous game in the series to play[19]

The third season of The Walking Dead launched with two episodes on December 20, 2016.[24] The season plans to tie in all the possible endings from previous seasons without compromising the story to avoid pushing away new players to the series. In an interview with IGN, Kirkman stated that the third season would bring the video game closer to the comic book's time frame. It takes place a few years after the second season, and includes a somewhat older Clementine along with AJ, the infant she rescues at the end of Season 2 who is now a toddler.[25][26][27] Clementine is a playable character along with a new character, Javier.[28] A New Frontier uses the updated Telltale Tool, the same game engine Telltale used for Batman: The Telltale Series.

During the 2016 PAX Expo, Telltale revealed the third season will be released in November 2016, with the subtitle "A New Frontier".[29] Telltale later had to delay the first episode's release until December 20, 2016.[30] Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published retail versions of Season 3 as part of a deal with Telltale for Batman that was released in August 2016.[31] The physical edition was released on February 7, 2017, featuring the first episode on disc and download codes to obtain all future episodes of the series.

Announced in November 2017, The Walking Dead Collection includes all episodes from the first three seasons, as well as "400 Days" and The Walking Dead: Michonne. The collection was released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on December 5, 2017.[32] The content of the first two seasons and "400 Days" has been visually improved, reflecting on improvements Telltale has made in their engine since these seasons were first released, including high-definition texture mapping for all survivor characters, improved dynamic lighting, and upgrading the game's graphics to use DirectX 11 over DirectX 9. The older games also use the user interface elements developed for the third season as to provide a consistent interface to the players.[33]

The Walking Dead Collection was nominated for the Tappan Zee Bridge Award for Best Remake at the New York Game Awards 2018.[34]

Announced during the July 2017 San Diego Comic Con, The Walking Dead: The Final Season, launched as four-episode series on August 14, 2018 for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch version to launch later that year.[38] Episodes are expected to launch roughly each month through December 2018.[39] Clementine will return as the lead character, voiced by Hutchinson, as Telltale found that fans of the series were not pleased with how little interactivity there was with Clementine in A New Frontier. Telltale wanted to have the final season call back to what fans had praised about the first season, and knew they needed to make Clementine the focus. With this direction, Telltale decided to make this the final season for The Walking Dead series so that they can create a satisfactory conclusion to Clementine's story arc.[40] For this purpose, Telltale brought back Gary Whitta, the writer for the first season and "400 Days" content, to help close out Clementine's story.[41][40]

The story follows from A New Frontier with Clementine having rescued AJ from the McCarroll Ranch, with an ellipsis a few years ahead, where AJ is now a young boy. With diminishing resources amid the apocalypse, Clementine and AJ find the importance of staying with communities of vital importance, meeting other characters who have little memory of the time before the downfall of society. Clementine starts to teach AJ the essentials of survival as Lee had taught her. Telltale had initially considered writing a version of Clementine that had become more jaded, but found this was far too different from the established version of the character, and reworked her to be more sympathetic.[40][42][43]

The final season used the updated version of the Telltale Tool first introduced in Batman: The Telltale Series, along with improvements in the visual style to approach the style used in The Walking Dead comic.[40] Some scenes will feature "unscripted" zombies who may attack Clementine if the player is not careful, creating new freeform combat sequences, while other parts of the game will continue to use quick-time events as from previous games.[42]

Despite the title The Final Season, Telltale did not rule out future The Walking Dead games; Creative Director Kent Mudle said that The Final Season title represented the end of Clementine's journey from Telltale's view, but could revisit the franchise through other characters.[44]

However, due to the sudden near-closure of Telltale Games on September 21, 2018, only two of the four episodes were released and production on the latter two were cancelled, effectively leaving the season half-finished. Skybound Enterainment later stepped in to develop the rest of the season, re-hiring some ex-Telltale staff in the process, as Kirkman had felt it necessary to properly complete Clementine's story. Skybound has also acquired the publishing rights to all previous Telltale The Walking Dead games.

Skybound published The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series that includes all episodes from all four seasons, as well as 400 Days and The Walking Dead: Michonne, for release on Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 10, 2019.[45] Each of the previous episodes in the series was remastered to use the new rendering system that was introduced in The Final Season, and adds over ten hours of developers and voice actor commentary. Additional improvements have been made in character models movement and lip syncing.[46][47]

In addition to the Definitive Series edition, Skybound has also published all four seasons (including the 400 Days content) for the Nintendo Switch by January 21, 2020, and republished all four seasons, 400 Days and Michonne on personal computer digital storefronts in January 2020, after they had been pulled from sale from Telltale Games' closure.[48]

According to Telltale, the combined games in the series have sold over 50 million episodes worldwide by July 2017.[43]

The Walking Dead has received critical acclaim, with reviewers giving praise for the harsh emotional tone, the characters, story and the resemblance to the original comic book, although criticizing the graphical glitches. The game received over 80 Game of the Year awards and many other awards.

"Episode 1 – A New Day" received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 85.14%[49] and 84/100,[50] respectively, for the PlayStation 3 version, 83.87%[51] and 79/100[52] for the Xbox 360 version, and 83.38%[53] and 82/100[54] for the PC version. The game received various accolades including the IGN "Editors' Choice", PC Gamer "Editors' Choice", Xbox Editors' Choice Award, and the PlayStation Gold Award.

"Episode 2 – Starved for Help" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 86.53%[55] and 84/100,[56] respectively, for the PC version, 86.26%[57] and 84/100[58] for the Xbox 360 version, and 85.90%[59] and 84/100[60] for the PlayStation 3 version. The game won the GameSpy E3 2012 award for "Best Adventure Game".[61]

"Episode 3 – Long Road Ahead" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 88.47%[62] and 88/100,[63] respectively, for the Xbox 360 version, 86.11%[64] and 87/100[65] for the PlayStation 3 version, and 85.41%[66] and 85/100[67] for the PC version. IGN's Greg Miller gave the game a 9 out of 10, saying "It's a disturbing, depressing and entertaining entry in a journey that's been nothing short of excellent so far."[68] GameSpot gave the game an 8.5, saying "The Walking Dead has passed the midway point of its series of five episodes with every indication that the game will keep getting better right through to its inevitably depressing and unsettling conclusion."[69] MTV also gave it a positive review, saying "Telltale has created a series of wrenching, emotional decisions in the middle of a collection of not-too-hard puzzles in a visually-impressive adaptation of the Robert Kirkman comic series (with some nods to the TV show)."[70]

"Episode 4 – Around Every Corner" received positive reviews, but to a lesser extent than the previous episodes. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 84.00%[71] and 80/100,[72] respectively, for the PC version, 82.50%[73] and 82/100[74] the Xbox 360 version, and 78.94%[75] and 81/100[76] for the PlayStation 3 version.

"Episode 5 – No Time Left" received critical acclaim. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 94.75%[77] and 89/100,[78] respectively, for the PC version, 88.15%[79] and 89/100[80] for the Xbox 360 version, and 87.75%[81] and 88/100[82] for the PlayStation 3 version.

400 Days received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 78.20%[83] and 78/100,[84] respectively, for the PlayStation 3 version, 78.00%[85] and 78/100[86] for the PC version, and 76.88%[87] and 80/100[88] for the Xbox 360 version.

The Walking Dead: Season Two overall received generally positive reviews from critics earning praise for its atmosphere, tension, and Clementine's newly appointed role as the protagonist, but earned criticism for its lack of hubs and certain aspects of its storytelling.

Episode 1 – All That Remains received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 81.29%[89] and 82/100,[90] the PC version 78.76%[91] and 78/100[92] and the Xbox 360 version 77.50%[93] and 80/100.[94] Matt Liebl from GameZone gave the episode an 8.5/10, stating that it "...is just a taste of what's to come -- a mere setup for the horror that awaits us in the final four episodes."[95]

Episode 2 - A House Divided received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 87.29%[96] and 82/100,[97] the PC version 81.39%[98] and 81/100[99] and the Xbox 360 version 79.44%[100] and 80/100.[101] Mitch Dyer from IGN gave the episode a 9.5/10, saying it is one of the best episodes Telltale Games has ever made.[102]

Episode 3 - In Harm's Way received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 82.43%[103] and 80/100,[104] the Xbox 360 version 82.25%[105] and 82/100[106] and the PC version 82.22%[107] and 81/100.[108]

Episode 4 - Amid the Ruins received mixed to positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 79.22%[109] and 78/100,[110] the PC version 78.58%[111] and 78/100[112] and the Xbox 360 version 72.00%[113] and 71/100.[114]

Episode 5 – No Going Back received positive reviews, higher than its predecessor. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 81.67%[115] and 87/100,[116] the PC version 79.19%[117] and 78/100[118] and the Xbox 360 version 77.00%[119] and 84/100.[120] Mitch Dyer of IGN gave the episode a 9.5/10 saying that the finale is "an impressive and intelligent episode, and among Telltale Games' finest stories."[121]

The Walking Dead: Michonne received mixed reviews from critics earning praise for its action sequences, atmosphere, and the character development of Michonne, but earned criticism for its story, side characters, short episode lengths, and graphical glitches.

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics with particular praise directed at the game's updated graphics, new cast of characters, action sequences, and overall new direction. However, the short episode lengths and the treatment of the Season 2 endings were both subjects of criticism. The game's story and Clementine's shift to a supporting character were both met with a mixed response.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season received generally positive reviews earning praise for its characterization, visuals, and upgraded gameplay mechanics and is considered by both critics and fans to be an improvement over its predecessor and a return to form for the series.