“Fans Want It All To Be Good”: An Interview With Skybound About IP Expansion From Video Games To Movies & TV Shows

screenrant.com:

Skybound Entertainment, the company behind and comic series and several of its adaptations, is coming to Brazil for Gamescom Latam 2024. Two of its high-ranking members, the CEO David Alpert and the co-chairman Jon Goldman will address a keynote speech during the event.

The idea is to talk about how Skybound is expanding its IPs across multiple types of platforms and the challenges involved in not creating only adaptations but developing products that share a universe but are not simple copies within other formats. Ahead of the event and their presentation, had the opportunity for an exclusive interview with Alpert and Goldman.

Telltale's The Walking Dead series is one of the most beloved story-based games ever. How well does it hold up when fans replay it?

Screen Rant: Having worked across the board with different formats for these popular IPs that everybody knows, what do you consider to be the most difficult part of adapting a TV show into a video game nowadays?

David Alpert: Yeah, I think the main thing with adapting a show into a game is finding the unique position that you're going to offer, right? So what is the focus? How do you make it so that it's not 80s-style where you're recreating the same experience that you had watching the show or watching the movie, but now you're just doing the same thing? How does it add something to the experience of living in this world, right? Bruno, I don't know how familiar you are with, have you ever played the Telltale Walking Dead game?

Yes, I have. I love it a lot.

David Alpert: Okay, great. So you get it. You were like, you don't want to tell the blind story. You want to expand the universe. How do we, you know; there's a scene in that first episode where Glenn appears to know that it's in the same universe as Walking Dead, that it's contiguous. It gives you a sense of time and space and geography. But it doesn't necessarily say «oh, we're going to follow Daryl Dixon and Rick Grimes.» We're going to look at this