This October brings the release of Telltale‘s Sam & Max video game, which follows the “episodic” content model of their Bone game (kind of like a comic series you play on your computer). Joystiq recently chatted with a couple of the folks from Telltale about the release, as well as how well the Bone game has been doing:

With Bone, you’ve been at the forefront of episodic content. How has the release of multiple episodes of that game met and differed from your expectations?

Dan Connors: One [thing we anticipated] with episodic gaming — but didn’t really have any hard evidence to back it up — was that every new release would drive interest in the franchise and give you a new launch of the previous version. So when we released Boneville, it kind of had a little bit of a life cycle, a three-month life-cycle where it was at top-of-mind and had a nice sales curve to it. It kind of died down after about three or four months.

When Cow Race came back, though, the Cow Race sales were at launch level and then the Boneville sales actually equaled the Cow Race sales as well, so we saw the rejuvenation of the previous episode. So the idea that every time you’re launching an episode, it’s bringing value to the franchise and increasing the franchise presence is great. You know, if you look at Harry Potter, the first book has sold the most because every time a new one comes out, the franchise gets lifted up. So it’s nice because you can spread out your marketing effort over six different episodes and continue to always be raising the level of the franchise as a result, increasing sales on six products instead of one.

The first Sam & Max episode is Due Oct. 17.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Independent, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.