San Rafael is an affluent suburb north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the sun shines even when San Francisco is draped in fog. But in the past few years, the dot-com blitz's downward spiral has sent a lot of the technology companies in the area packing—either downsized or gone belly up—leaving the traffic a little thinner and many of the offices along the freeway empty. Not so for Telltale Games, who just moved to a bigger office down the street from their original location. They'd been in this office less than a week when Adventure Gamers' server admin Doug Tabacco and I took a drive up to see the new space. We located their name in the building directory—they'd slapped a sticker with their logo over the name of the previous tenant—and made our way up to the second floor.

Heather Logas, one of Telltale's designers, met us at the door and introduced us to the handful of employees who were working through lunch. She then gave an impromptu tour, which basically involved standing in the middle of the office's main room and looking around at the desks set up in face-to-face pairs. When asked how many programmers are with the company, Heather scanned the workstations, counting off on her fingers. "One, two, three… hey—" she called to someone across the room "—how many programmers do we have?" This is when CEO Dan Connors came in from lunch. Latte in hand, he led us around partially unpacked moving boxes to a conference room, steering clear of an area where a dividing line and the words DO NOT CROSS had been stuck to the carpet in blue painter's tape. He started to explain but then just shook his head: "It's a long story."

This is a day in the life at Telltale Games, the start-up founded by three LucasArts veterans just over a year ago that has now grown to nearly twenty people. Telltale, better known as "the guys who got fed up after Sam & Max 2's cancellation and struck out on their own," is deep into the development of their debut Bone game. The 3D, point & click treatment of Jeff Smith's popular comic will be the first of a series of short-but-sweet games available for download from Telltale's website.

When Telltale approached Smith about the possibility of making a game based on his comics, he hesitated. Wary of ending up with a Bone shooter, he asked for a sample of what they had in mind. The team started mapping out the series as a game, initially thinking they could cover all nine volumes in just three installments. As they planned, though, it became clear that the first book, Out from Boneville, had enough going on for it to be a game by itself. And that's what they've been working on ever since. The end result is on schedule for a September release, with the next installment to follow about five months later.

The schedule's tight, but this is intentional. Telltale's big on the concept of "TV for your PC"—short, self-contained games that come out often enough to keep fans satisfied and the company in business. If a game like Grim Fandango is like a feature film, chief technology officer Kevin Bruner explains, Bone is a television show. Rather than putting years of hard work and funding into a game that may or may not pay off in the end, Telltale believes that by releasing a steady stream of games, based on a variety of licenses (comics, TV shows, and even novels), they'll have a better chance of producing quality interactive stories for the players, while staying creative and productive themselves. It's an idea Connors and Bruner came up with back at LucasArts. They wanted to do Sam & Max this way, but LucasArts vetoed the idea in favor of one longer, traditional game—and we all know how that turned out. Connors and Bruner left LucasArts and, along with fellow LEC alum Troy Molander, started Telltale to follow through on their idea. The team doesn't rule out the possibility of developing original properties and finding a reasonable balance between shorter and full-scale productions down the road, but for now, Bone is certainly keeping them busy.

With Bruner, Logas, and recent Telltale hire Dave Grossman (one of the creative forces behind such LucasArts games as Day of the Tentacle) watching over our shoulders, Doug and I played through an early portion of Out from Boneville. It was clear as soon as Fone Bone walked across the screen with a deep-kneed gait lifted straight from the comics that this game has been developed with an incredible attention to detail. The game is in full 3D with fixed cameras, and uses a context-sensitive, mouse-driven interface that should be intuitive even to those who have never played an adventure game. Everything in Bone's world has been designed to make you feel like you're inside the comic, from the Look, Walk, and Talk icons that look just like Fone's eyes, legs, and hands, to the text that displays in the same bold uppercase font used in the books.

The voices, although not what every Bone fan had in mind, are in line with Jeff Smith's vision. This is no coincidence; Smith was involved in the casting process. Telltale started by suggesting "touchstones"—voices similar to how they imagined the characters would sound. In some cases, Smith's ideas were entirely different, and he made his own suggestions. There was one character everyone agreed on, though: the Red Dragon. "I was thinking Johnny Cash," Logas says, a touchstone Smith felt was right on. (Interestingly, this is the character many fans agreed sounds just right when the voices debuted in the recent Bone trailer.) Once the voices were nailed down, Telltale conducted recording sessions at a studio in nearby Fairfax. Jeff Smith has reportedly said that the voices are "pretty close" to what he imagined, an endorsement that has eased the minds of many Bone fans.



Out from Boneville kicks off in the desert, where the three Bone cousins (Fone, Phoney, and Smiley) find themselves lost after being run out of town. As in the opening of the comic, the initial puzzle involves finding a map that will help the trio get out of the desert. The gameplay has been extended a bit, though. Instead of Smiley happening upon the map, Fone must find it hidden somewhere in the scene. He then makes the mistake of handing the map over to Smiley, who won't give it back. Fone has to convince Smiley to hand the map over to him and Phoney, who's being downright ornery about the whole situation. The dialogue-driven sequence that follows is far more complex—and at the same time, more natural—than an average dialogue tree. Controlling Fone, the player can alternate between sweet-talking Smiley (who wants a dollar in exchange for the map) and arguing with Phoney (who doesn't want to give up a dollar) in an attempt to convince one of his cousins to give in. The dialogue options appear at the bottom of the screen, along with icons depicting Phoney and Smiley. By clicking on these icons, the player toggles which character Fone is speaking to, and the dialogue choices change based on how the conversation's going. Just as in real life, the conversation doesn't follow a straightforward path. Ultimately there's only one way to solve the puzzle, but the solution isn't blatantly obvious, which leads to a nice a-ha! moment when you figure out where the dialogue is going.

This scene is followed by an arcade sequence in which the cousins are chased by a swarm of locusts. The arcade action itself is fairly easy, but Telltale is still considering adding in-game help, including an option to skip the sequence altogether if you fail a few times. At this point Fone is separated from his cousins, and much of the remainder of the game will be spent trying to find them. It's also the point where the "try before you buy" section of the game will likely end, and the player will be encouraged to pay to unlock the full version.

Telltale seems to have done a good job of blowing up small segments of the comic into fully playable challenges. One example is a sequence that takes place in the dark, with only a circle of light around Fone illuminated by his torch. This is hardly innovative (King's Quest 4 did it in the eighties!), but the team at Telltale has a knack for making even old conventions fun. While cautiously moving through the darkness, Fone discovers one of Smiley's cigar butts—another event taken directly from the comic—and goes looking for more in hopes of finding his cousin. Each subsequent discovery is accompanied by a little commentary, such as "These things smell nasty!"—a public service announcement for the kids, Bruner and Grossman joked.