Variety is reporting that four former employees of Telltale Games have founded AdHoc Studio, a new development house dedicated to narrative gaming.
AdHoc Studio will be lead by CEO Michael Choung, who left Telltale in 2016. He’ll be joined by three other veterans from the studio, including Chief Technology Officer, Dennis Lenart, Chief Operating Officer Nick Herman, and Chief Creative Officer Pierre Shorette. Lenart and Herman were previously employed by Telltale as Creative Directors, while Shorette operated as the Director of Writing.
The quartet isn’t ready to announce their first game yet, but they plan to focus on an “interactive, live-action experience”:
AdHoc isn’t ready to discuss its first project or who it is partnering with just yet. However, the team is strongly hinting that its it will be an interactive, live-action experience. While full motion video games aren’t anything revolutionary, that segment has experienced a small renaissance thanks to Sam Barlow’s “Her Story,” CtrlMovie’s “Late Shift,” and Big Finish’s Tex Murphy revival, “Tesla Effect.”
Specifically citing the huge response to Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the AdHoc team believes the public is finally ready for this kind of interactive entertainment:
“It feels like we’re at the precipice of a big shift in how we consume media where the lines between film, television and games are starting to blur,” Shorette, AdHoc’s chief creative officer, says. “With streaming platforms in our homes and cell phones in our pockets we’re in this unique time where the barrier to entry to interaction is gone. So as a group of people whose expertise and experience has come from making Interactive Narrative that sits in that space between, we feel now is the perfect time to form a studio that focuses on creating content for a new space.”
Hopefully we’ll learn more about AdHoc Studio’s first project soon.
