Brendan Caldwell

Brendan Caldwell

Brendan is a critic and games journalist with 15 years experience, and writer on a few indie games which he is honour-bound never to talk about on Jank.

Life at Telltale was “complicated”

"The whole point is to bleed a little bit for this"

When survivors of Telltale Games get together, they tell war stories. I know because two veterans are speaking to me now, and they look into the middle distance as they tiptoe around the complex feelings they have regarding their time at the ill-fated studio. 

"The stories would just go on for days," says Michael Choung, who wrote for a handful of Telltale's games between 2014 and 2016. "Whenever Telltale people get together and talk," explains Choung, "it's not like 'what fond memory would you like to share with me, because I will share my fond memories with you!' It's always just like: 'Oh my god, that was happening to you? Oh my gosh.' Yeah, so it's a very complicated feeling."

I'm chatting to Choung in a video call alongside fellow Telltale alumni Nick Herman, director of The Wolf Among Us and choreographer across many Telltale games. He agrees things were sometimes messy, but would later sum up his time at the studio as "worth the squeeze".

"It's got to look like premium animated television," says Herman. "You got to look at it and think it's something that would be on Netflix."

Choung and Herman are now two

Why we are making Jank

Because if we didn't we would probably explode

What I want from Jank is simple. I want to find the good PC games, and write about them with an honesty and thoughtfulness that only independent ownership can allow. An oasis where good writing on games can live in peace. I want Jank to be a little tropical island you can visit, where you will always find me in the shallows, trousers rolled up, spearfishing for something interesting. Like Tom Hanks in Castaway.

Except I'm not a shill for FedEx. So I also want to fire autoplaying videos into the sea. I would like churn to take a backseat to quality scribbles. And if the noise of deals posts could please diminish into nothing, that would be nice. Perhaps paragraph-long headlines could also get straight into the bin? No worries if not. At the very least, I would appreciate a place where I can safely shit on Call Of Duty when annually called upon to do so, a high horse upon which to laugh at Leslie Benzies' latest disaster. What? You mean having your own site allows you to just do all that? Cool. 

A woman with white hair looks dead-eyed toward the ground, saying "This is good for me".
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