Revived Telltale Is Bringing Back ‘The Wolf Among Us’ For Another Season

Good News: Another season of The Wolf Among Us, a criminally overlooked series from Telltale Games, is coming, with some of the creative leads behind the first season returning. A very short (but evocative) trailer for the new season debuted tonight at The Game Awards.

Bad News: In September 2018, Telltale unceremoniously laid off 275 employees without any severance. They got fucked, and nothing about this changes that. That still happened.

There’s no word yet on where this takes place in the overall timeline, except that it’s before the graphic novel that inspired it, Fables. The original voice actors for Bigby (Adam Harrington) and Snow White (Erin Yvette) are coming back, too. The season is still in pre-production, so any talk of a release date is being punted on right now. So, patience.

How is this possible, anyway? Though Telltale went under because of chronic mismanagement, where there is the potential for money, someone will eventually seek it out. A company called LCG Entertainment picked up the remaining pieces of Telltale earlier this year, promising to eventually start work on old Telltale games and potentially new ones.

This new season of The Wolf Among Us comes from AdHoc, according to a FAQ released to VICE Games ahead of The Game Awards, and the team includes several Telltale employees, including lead writer/narrative director Pierre Shorette and game directors Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart. The original composer, Jared Emerson-Johnson, is also back.

Not surprisingly, one of the first questions in the FAQ directly addresses old Telltale:

Q: Are you bringing back any other former Telltale employees?

A: As we announced back in August, it is our plan to grow slowly and very strategically, and we’ll be looking to work with key talent from the previous company when and how we can, whether that’s via hire, contract, or partnerships. Sara Guinness, former Telltale Games Director of Operations, has been fulfilling that same role and heading up our Northern California office. And we have just hired Zac Litton, Telltale Games’ former VP of Engineering, as Telltale’s CTO. We will be recruiting additional full-time staff next year as production ramps up and are prioritizing former Telltale employees. We will have positions open in Malibu and Corte Madera. We should have more news on this front soon.

It’s hard to not remain bitter over what happened to Telltale, and how it so accurately represented the worst ways the video game industry can, and often does, treat its workers, but “prioritizing former Telltale employees” for positions on this team is, at least, something.

One small but potentially important detail: for the first time, these games aren’t being built in Telltale’s notoriously archaic in-house tech. This season is being made in Unreal Engine.

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).