[Update: Telltale has made it official, and we were spot on. Visit the official blog post from the company.]
We’ve been getting cryptic tweets for a while now from Telltale Games about their upcoming Game of Thrones adventure game. We have a bit of curated information, and it looks like more will be revealed on Tuesday morning, as the publisher will divulge everything we need to know.
But first, what do we know already? Let us explain.
Telltale first announced Game of Thrones game during last year’s VGX event thing with the trailer below. This is an HBO-based series, not one sharing the same canon as the A Song of Ice and Fire books; this will align with the show.
The company didn’t say much after that, apart from noting that the first episode of the game was due for 2014. “Something related to the game will be at E3,” we were told. Though no direct info was conveyed, during our behind-closed-doors preview of Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands at the show, one comment came up. “Pay attention to how Borderlands is structured, and you’ll know what we’re doing with Game of Thrones.” Tales from the Borderlands takes the experiences of two protagonists and weaves the story together from their vantage points. Their decisions influence events in the other’s, giving different perspectives on how the story unfolds. But it is one story, just told across two threads that bounce back and forth.
According to IBTimes, Game of Thrones will have five different protagonists, and will most likely weave their individual experiences together in much the same way. Expect the five characters to cross paths, experiencing the story as it takes place during events of the show.
So how will it relate to the show? The game centers around House Forrester, a family only briefly mentioned in the books and not in the HBO series. Telltale’s tweets seem to depict the trials and tribulations of the house as it is sandwiched between the advances of the Greyjoys and the Boltons. That places the game during the events of Clash of Kings (Book 2) and Storm of Swords (Book 3), of which the latter made the Red Wedding famous. The game’s tagline “Iron From Ice” falls in line with the famous “Winter Is Coming” of House Stark, which probably puts Forrester as allied to the Stark family.
Hence being stuck between the now backstabbing Boltons and the war hungered Greyjoys. We expect run-ins with both of the enemies and the Starks at some point during the series.
Because this all takes place during the timeline of the show, it means that it can’t actually affect what happens in HBO series. In other words, it’ll just be a side-story that probably has very little effect on the main Game of Thrones plot. An earlier game licensed to the property tried that and was less than successful, to say the least.
All of this will play out over six episodes, which is one more than Telltales usual 5-episode game arcs but one less than the Game of Thrones love affair with the number 7. Six is probably needed to contain the five protagonists, as that many viewpoints would be tough to contain in anything less. This could wrap up before Season 5 of the TV series returns & ends sometime around the beginning of April through June 2015, though it would be a tight squeeze.
And finally, we’ll be getting our first story details of the game in the morning, according to Telltale’s Job Stauffer. We hope our educated guess was pretty close, or else we’ll look like the horse’s butt that we (I) are (am).
Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series is set to premiere “soon”.
Images courtesy Telltale Games
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