It's been a busy past few years for the crew at Telltale Games. Alongside its traditional CSI titles, the developer has produced numerous bite-sized episodic adventures featuring Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Strong Bad, and the Monkey Island crew.

And alongside the steady stream of Tales of Monkey Island episodes on PC and WiiWare, the company just released the second season of Sam & Max on Xbox 360 via Xbox Live, with the remaining episodes of Wallace & Gromit due there shortly.

With all this activity, I caught up with CEO Dan Connors to discuss not just recent events, but where the company is headed in the future and what's coming next.

Shack: It's been more than five months since the first Wallace & Gromit hit Xbox 360. The other three have since hit PC, but not Xbox. What's taking so long?

Dan Connors: The Summer of Arcade [promotion] was a big deal for Microsoft and they had a lot of scheduling stuff going on there. We had run up against it for Episode 1, so after Summer of Arcade came in, we kinda skipped a beat on getting the second one out. We decided it would be good to get them all built and ready to go and get them all out in a close timeframe together so that we could really let people know they're there and really put a lot of effort behind our marketing and letting people know about the rest of the episodes.

Shack: So what you're saying is, no more five month wait between episodes?

Dan Connors: [laughter] That will definitely not happen. That is over.

Shack: I recently charted out all of Telltale's recent releases. It seems like Wii releases are arriving much closer to their PC iterations--Strong Bad was simultaneous, Monkey Island is relatively close--but Xbox 360 is seeing much later releases--the first Gromit took two months to hit Xbox. Why is that?

Dan Connors: I think Xbox right now has ...there's probably just a volume of titles going through Xbox that makes it different. I think the processes are different, as far as getting the products presented in the right way.

There's a lot of work with achievements and things like that that are not necessarily things that you consider when you're doing the PC build. If you want to sync up with Microsoft, to get the schedule in sync, there's a lot of business considerations you have to make as far as making sure that happens.

I think with every console manufacturer, they all have their versions of checks you have to go through to get through their system and get on the platform. It really is something you just need to learn to navigate and need to figure out what the system is and hour it works and schedule accordingly. I think with Microsoft and Wallace & Gromit, it was a bit of a learning experience. I think with WiiWare, it was so important to [Strong Bad creators] the Chapmans that Strong Bad be a Nintendo product, we really made shipping on WiiWare as the launch platform a critical piece of the scheduling, and that was a big part of it as well.

Shack: Going forward, will we see Xbox 360 releases hitting closer to PC?

Dan Connors: I think our goal, going forward, is to launch on as many platforms as we can simultaneously. We've also added Steam to some of the [PC] launches.

For us, it takes a lot of effort to get the word about any title and marketing is just a huge investment and it doesn't make sense to break that into multiple launches. We don't think that's going to be a winning strategy.

There's a lot of stuff you need to consider in launching. Obviously, the sooner you launch, the sooner the product's out in the marketplace and you can return on your investment. But if you want to maximize how loud you can be about the product and you want to get the word out as big as you can, then having a simultaneous multi-channel release is the smartest thing. I think everybody in the business has realized that, especially on the retail side. It takes a lot of work. There's a lot of syncing up with a lot of different people. It takes a lot of discipline to pull it off.

Shack: The first episode of Sam & Max hit Wii as a retail disc. Are there plans to bring some of those other series, like Strong Bad, Monkey Island and Gromit, to consoles via disc instead of just download?

Dan Connors: We're definitely hard at work on that. I think our retail plans got a little bit slowed down by the global economic crash. I think now that things are starting to come back up, hopefully there'll be a strong Christmas this year--it'll make sense for us to bring the products out to retail. As of last year and last Christmas and some of the trepidation around the business in general, it's a lot harder to bring retail product to market. But we are certainly working on that. For us, it always makes sense to bring it to retail and it's always been part of our strategy to bring the seasons out as a season pack. We just have to figure out the right way to do it and the right way to present the products to people and the right marketing campaigns around it.

Shack: What lead to releasing the first two seasons of Sam & Max on Xbox Live as full season bundles, instead of individual episodes?

Dan Connors: It just made sense to both Telltale and Microsoft to do it that way, since the product was there and it was already out on the marketplace like that. It made a lot of sense to just make it available to Xbox users like that. With Sam & Max [season] 2, it's going to be the first non-PC release for it. It's going to be available, all five episodes, in one sitting for $19.99. It's going to be a very great value.

We could've done a lot with having ten episodes available to just do whatever we wanted with and schedule however we felt was right and really give a feeling of episodic with the existing platform, but I think we both decided if we were gonna go after building a new episodic model on Xbox, it would make sense to do it with a fresh product like Wallace & Gromit.

Shack: What are your thoughts on the future of episodic content on Xbox 360? I mean, Microsoft just re-released Fable II in episodic form.

Dan Connors: Yeah.

Shack: As a company that really banked itself on episodic gaming years ago, that has to make you feel pretty good.

Dan Connors: [laughs] I think we're okay in the ego department, anyways. It's a great thing to see. It is really cool. I think Telltale's examples on the PC and WiiWare and Xbox are probably a lot of what the Fable team's going on and trying to make it work.

As far as we're concerned, it was real interesting with Monkey Island where, this year when we launched, there was a real expectation at the launch that this was going to be an episodic experience because the name Telltale was associated with it. The player that came to buy the game knew that they were in for a six month experience and kind of knew the formula--we didn't have to do a ton of explaining.

It really has shown in the reviews where, in the old days, it might've been like "hey, this was too short" or "I didn't get enough" or whatever. Now it's like, "wow, that was great, I can't wait to get the next one." Which for us, was always the huge thing we needed to educate people on and get people to expect. I think the Telltale brand has an expectation of that experience, and if more people can do it and help us in defining it, it'll be easier. More people will know when you say episodic what you're talking about--that it's a thing that's delivered monthly or weekly on a regular schedule and you either buy it at the beginning or you start off and buy ongoing episodes. There's a level of understanding there.

I guess that's a long-winded way of saying [that] having more people do it is great for us because it educates more people on what it is. The question then becomes execution, and if they're executed in a way that's radically different from the way that Telltale's doing.

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