After Telltale Games’ closure in late 2018, the fate of its biggest hit, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, hung in the balance.
With its final season in progress when Telltale closed, it looked like Clementine’s story wouldn’t reach a conclusion.
Then, as is often the way, Telltale’s assets were sold off by the insolvency managers to try and repay the company’s creditors, staff, and outstanding debt. In an interesting twist, the rights to The Walking Dead were purchased by Skybound, the production company of the creator of The Walking Dead comic book, Robert Kirkman.
Skybound’s first task was to pick up a number of ex-Telltale staffers to allow them to complete The Walking Dead: The Final Season.
Shortly after, Telltale’s entire catalogue, including the previous seasons of The Walking Dead, was removed from sale. That sort of thing isn’t unusual. Publishing rights expire all the time, particularly when concerned entities no longer exist. But it struck onlookers as odd, when allowing people to continue to buy Telltale’s back catalogue might allow the administrators to further pay back the company’s creditors.
Now that decision is looking like it makes more sense – at least, where The Walking Dead is concerned – as Skybound announces a remastered collection of the series. (You wouldn’t want a cheaper version of the game cannibalising your sales when you’ve spent time and money remastering the game, right? Particularly when the proceeds would go to creditors and not you. As new rights owners, it makes sense that Skybound stipulated the old games be taken off sale for this reason.)
The remaster of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, which will be available as a definitive collection with all four seasons, plus DLC, on September 10, 2019. It will be available to purchase in both digital and boxed retail variants. Presumably, the individual seasons will also be available for individual sale, but pre-orders aren’t available for those yet.
The remaster of Telltale’s The Walking Dead also includes a visual overhaul, which Skybound is referring to as the “Graphic Black” look. Frankly, we can’t see the difference. Or at least, we can see that it’s different, but the differences seem very inconsistent at best. You’d be hard-pushed to say it definitely looks better.
But the important thing is that one of the most interesting adventure games of the last decade is rightfully back on sale.
