Telltale designer shares a memory of how an office joke got into a game

Developers caught up in the shutdown of Telltale Games have been sharing memories over social media this weekend and this one, from Molly Maloney, a designer on Tales from the Borderlands, brought a chuckle that was definitely worthy of the game’s namesake.

Quasi-spoilers for Tales from the Borderlands, Episode 5, I guess.

Maloney today related that when her team was working on episode 5 of the 2015 game, they’d sent a request to animators that the animators took quite literally. They wanted Rhys, one of the game’s protagonists, to turn off the monitors over which Handsome Jack was taunting him. The wording was “Rhys flips off the monitors as he runs by.”

And that’s exactly what the animators gave them: Double birds!

And yes, that’s how it really appears in the final game. See here, at the 25:40 mark.

“What we got back was so good [director Nick Herman] decided to just go with that,” Maloney said.

Maloney’s Twitter feed is full of other reminiscences with other Telltale co-workers, nearly all of whom were let go on Friday when the studio effectively closed down for good.