The final episode of swish and salacious Telltale-style caped tellydrama Dispatch released yesterday. It’s been a surprise hit – according to the gabbling labcoats at GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc’s superhero workplace comedy is approaching two million sales. Reasons given for this range from the appealing but uninvestigated – there’s a Galactus-sized untapped audience for narrative single player games, and all the publishers are absolute spanners for doubling down on live service projects instead – to the boring – people are still keen on superheroes, especially sociopathic and disgusting superheroes that cut against archetypes from the more pompous Marvel films, and Dispatch is simply a very well-made game.
Good games sell? What a gauche, back-of-napkin excuse for industry analysis. There must be a more arcane and clever-sounding explanation for Dispatch’s meteoric fortunes. Ah yes, here we go: speaking to GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc’s CEO and exec producer Michael Choung has suggested that it’s partly down to the weekly episodic release schedule.
“We’re really just borrowing a rhythm that’s worked for decades on television,” he told the site. “That weekly cadence hits a sweet spot where anticipation builds, but not long enough to fade.” That’s it. That’s the whole quote. Still, it has given me Thoughts.
One is that I can now no longer tolerate the thought of episodic schedules at all. After years of streaming TV platforms, I am now only capable of watching shows all in one go, while crying into bowls of lukewarm salsa. The thought of getting to episode 5 and having to wait multiple diurnal cycles for episode 6 is a source of torment. Anything could happen between episodes! I might start watching something else instead! A piano might fall on me! I might be forced to spend time with my own thoughts! A month between episodes? You might as well ship it after our sun goes supernova.
Another more developed thought is that I want to go back and compare the formal structure of episodic narrative artworks, from Star Trek to Telltale’s Walking Dead games, thinking about how the release tempo affects, for example, the writing of relationships and the choice and structure of cliffhangers. Monthly episodes surely need to be more like standalone releases; within that, what kinds of narrative event are best for nurturing suspense and speculation over a 30 day interval? If I dangle the prospect of killing off a major character, is that a better fit for a weekly rollout? Sorry, these are questions of craft TV writers have been writing books about for decades.
A third thought is that all of this is a far cry from the Telltale days of multiple-month gaps between episodes. Episode 1 of The Walking Dead: Season 2 came out in December 2013. Episode 2 came out in March 2014. Incredible! Just imagine how many pianos could fall on you in three whole months. Telltale was notoriously mismanaged, with parallel, staggered projects and changes of direction creating a culture of crunch; I’m not sure how much that dictated the longer gaps between episodes, but the studio was clearly operating at the brink of capacity, for a lot of the time.
A fourth thought is simply that I need to go back and finish Dispatch. I reviewed the first couple of episodes, but then a week went by in which I stumbled upon new anime series Sanda and decided to rewatch Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun (no high velocity piano encounters, at least). Still, I can just about remember enough of episodes 1 and 2 to grasp the stakes going into episode 3. IIRC, there are two romance interests, both Problematic, and a man with flammable BO wants to kick my head in.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
