An interview with The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman on games and Hollywood | The DeanBeat
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Robert Kirkman, chief creative officer and cofounder of Skybound Entertainment and the creator of The Walking Dead, has been crossing media borders for decades. I’m very excited he’ll be a speaker at our GamesBeat Summit 2023 event, and I was even more excited to interview him this week to give a preview of what he’ll be talking about at our event.
The Walking Dead debuted as a comic book 20 years ago in 2003. It became a hit TV series in 2010 and had a 10-year run. And then the video game series from Telltale debuted in 2012 and sold more than 80 million copies.
That’s what we used to call transmedia until people decided it was a dirty word because all transmedia efforts failed. But somehow, Kirkman made it work and Skybound Entertainment became an umbrella for numerous creators trying to accomplish the same thing.
By making it through the jungle of Hollywood and games, Kirkman and his company became models for how big investments in things like a “writers room” could scale a franchise across numerous media and create new points of entry into the same creative universe. How do you spread a narrative across so many different platforms? And how do you accomplish scale without exhausting a franchise?
GamesBeat Summit 2023
Join the GamesBeat community in Los Angeles this May 22-23. You’ll hear from the brightest minds within the gaming industry to share their updates on the latest developments.
We talked about these topics as a kind of preview for our event in May. The GamesBeat Summit 2023 event takes place on May 22-23 in person in Los Angeles and on May 24 online. (You can get 40% off the ticket price with this code:
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