All Articles: Tales From the Borderlands

Chris Hardwick, creator of The Nerdist and the host of @Midnight and Talking Dead, is moving into video games. Specifically, he’s lending his voice to one:

Just finished the 2nd of many recording sessions for a video game. Can't say what yet, but it's REALLY fun, funny and part of a series…

— Chris Hardwick (@nerdist) March 23, 2014

So who wants to speculate on what funny game franchise Hardwick could be involved with? We know Tim Schafer is hard at work on Broken Age Act 2 and it’s suspected that Valve has the humorous Portal 3 in development somewhere within their secret catacombs. Another possibility is the new Saints Row game that Jay Mohr is connected to. And even though it would be funny for fans, I don’t think it’s a spot in the next episode of Telltale’s second season of The Walking Dead. Call me crazy.

But all three of those comedic franchises would definitely fit Hardwick’s vocal and comedic stylings well. And I’m sure I missed several strong possibilities. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.

Marge: You liked Rashomon.
Homer: That’s not how I remember it.

Developers from Telltale Games and Gearbox Software took the stage at the SXSW Festival today to talk about their upcoming collaboration, Tales From the Borderlands. During the talk, the developers revealed that the game will feature a two-sided narrative that will be told in flashback by the two main characters. Fiona, the Carmen Sandiego-like woman in red, is a con artist and Rhys, the cybernetically-enhanced dude with her, will be broody and cybernetically enhanced. Together, they’ll weave a story about their time on Pandora that won’t quite match up with the other’s retelling or with reality. The storytelling conceit, which was borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, has been used many times over the years including the Simpsons quote above and my favorite episode of The X-Files ever (season four’s “Bad Blood”).

Tales From the Borderlands is said to be funnier than Telltale’s more recent output (it definitely won’t be like the typically dour The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us) and will feature the franchise’s signature brand of humor. There will also be some shooting sections to the game, but according to Telltale’s Harrison Pink, they’ll be controlled “in a Telltale kind of way.”

Even with all this new information, the developers did not reeval any gameplay video and we still don’t know when Tales From the Borderlands will be released or what platforms it’ll appear on.

[Source: Polygon]

Key staff members from Gearbox Software and Telltale Games are going to be on stage together at SXSW to talk about the details of their upcoming episodic game series, Tales From the Borderlands. Randy Pitchford (President of Gearbox), Anthony Burch (Borderlands 2 writer), Matthew Armstrong (Borderlands Franchise Director), Kevin Bruner (President of Telltale), and Harrison Pink (designer) will all be on stage together to discuss how this idea came to life.

The panel will be moderated by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, The Indoor Kids from the Nerdist Network, and will start at 5:30 PM on Saturday, March 8.

Did you ever wonder what made Gearbox Software and Telltale Games want to merge the run-and-gun gameplay of the Borderlands franchise with Telltale’s brand of episodic adventure games for Tales From the Borderlands? Apparently alcohol, and lots of it, had something to do with it.

Speaking to Polygon, Telltale’s Steve Allison revealed that initial discussions for the collaboration occured over several rounds of tequila backstage at the 2012 Spike TV Video Game Awards:

“We were backstage at the [2012] Spike VGAs,” Allison told Polygon. “And Gearbox was sitting at table one and we were sitting at table two — we were there for The Walking Dead. We got to talking a little bit, and I don’t remember when it the night it became, ‘we should do this thing,” but it happened over a few cocktails.”

“We could have easily left it and chalked it up to too much tequila, but we followed up when we got home,” he said. “And they remembered the conversation.”

The rest of the interview is well worth a read as Allison also discusses Telltale’s Game of Thrones adaptation and how the team plans to tackle four projects at the same time.