Walking Dead: 400 Days
My Favorite Telltale Game
400 Days, started shortly after we finished Walking Dead Season 1, was the most fun I ever had working on anything at Telltale. I directed it and had a lot of input into its creation. As such I’m going to talk about it at length. Sorry.
A New Thing
We knew after finishing Season 1 we were going to do a DLC episode, but wanted to differentiate from Lee and Clementine’s story, as that story felt complete. So we asked ourselves “What’s next? What’s exciting? What’s new?”
So a few other writers and I sat in a room for a few days and decided on an anthology episode. We’d each go off and write 10 story pitches, and a few days later we convened to select which of the 50 story pitches would comprise the episode. Myself and the other writers went off to work on these stories, and a few weeks later we had 6 fleshed out pitches ready to go into production.
Meanwhile some of the designers were prototyping new mechanics, and between us we put 3 new mechanics into this episode. The character team had to figure out how to make 27 characters, and I fought hard to put my brother Chris in the game (he became Eddie) since he was such a huge Walking Dead fan. (Chris would later go on to be the Season Director for Walking Dead: The Final Season, where, SPOILER, Eddie would be killed).
This game is near and dear to my heart. It was a small team trying new things, rolling forward, getting excited and just putting things in that we thought were fun. We also had a lot of fun figuring out how to let you play the narratives in any order you liked, and to make sure that small things would link cross-chapters to enrich multiple playthroughs and give people hooks to discuss the world and its characters, and even some ties to Season 1.
Fun fact: The very start of the episode, where you see the Truck Stop alive and well before the apocalypse, you can see the precursor to the story Kenny tells in Season 1 about getting attacked at a gas station.
Trailer
Here is the launch trailer for 400 Days. I remember specifically the first time Shaun Finney showed this to me how I excited I was, seeing this cut to Jared’s terrific track for Bonnie’s chapter.
interconnected Stories
The stories in 400 Days overlap in all kinds of interesting ways. The Truck Stop environment was built to be the hub of all these interactions, a place where, either inside it or nearby, the fates of our survivors intertwined. A lot of the stories in 400 Days were conceived to be cheap, so we could afford to cram as much content as possible into it, and the truck stop was a way to reuse the same environment over and over without it getting stale (hopefully), and for the player to see it change over time.
There have been a lot of articles written about all the different threads and throughlines we put into the game, so rather than list them all here I figured I’d just link them below. (I will say everyone seems to get the names of the guards on the bus mixed up!).
One thing I’m not sure people would have noticed was that depending on how you play the chapters, the establishing shot of the diner to start the next chapter you play will be different. So for instance if you play Wyatt’s chapter, the establishing shot of Shel’s story will show you the broken hazard signs they crash though.
IGN - “400 Days Chain of Events”
VentureBeat put together a nice chart that shows many (but not all!) of the links in the chain (click to visit the site):
Vince - 2 Days In
Vince’s story was internally referred to as “Prison Bus” for the whole of development, and that’s still how I think of it. Probably the least expensive of the episodes.
Connections
You can see Shel and Becca running from walkers on the highway at the start of the episode, and Clyde, one of the bus guards, is a zombie that attacks Bonnie later. You can also spot the RV that Shel’s group uses out the back window of the bus. The man Vince shoots at the start of the chapter is Tiny Carlos, the drug dealer Eddie mentions in Wyatt’s chapter.
Fun fact: I’m the voice actor playing Tiny Carlos. We didn’t have budget for him so it’s just me.
wyatt - 41 Days In
Wyatt’s story was written and designed almost entirely by me. I frequently wish I’d had time to do a second draft, because this one is probably (for obvious reasons) my favorite of the mini episodes. Partially it’s Jared’s score, which we intentionally evoked John Carpenter, and partially it’s the setting, and partially it’s the idea of two goodhearted knuckleheads trying to make their way in this harsh world.
The initial idea behind the story was to put it far enough into the apocalypse that if you hit a person with your car, you’d think twice before going to help them. You needed to be able to understand as a player why Eddie would be pushing to check on him still—that the world isn’t horrible enough yet that they’d just leave him. The “click and drag” mechanic for Wyatt dragging Clyde to the car was already being prototyped by Harrison Pink and Mark Darin when I started writing, so I stole it to put in here. :)
Connections
Nate showing up to menace them in the truck was a fun nod, and one of the first crossovers we thought of, way back during selecting the initial stories.
The man you hit is also Clyde, one of the prison bus guards. This is why he has become a zombie to attack Bonnie after she falls down the hill in her story.
Fun Fact: Eddie is modeled heavily after my brother Chris from this video (as the comments will attest ha ha).
russell - 184 days in
Poor Russell. Seems like he already had a rough time out in the world with his previous group, and of all the people he could meet immediately afterward, he meets Nate.
Nate was a difficult character to get right. He was there on the page (written wonderfully by Sean Vanaman), but hard to execute on in practice. He needed to be likeable but also make you uncomfortable. He needed to seem unpredictable but also stable enough that you’d trust him in a firefight.
And then of course he’s a complete racist asshole. Poor Russell. Glad he got away from that guy.
Connections
Nate is of course the guy in the truck who attacks Eddie and Wyatt, but also the old racist jerks inside the Truck Stop owned the RV outside originally (I don’t think there’s anything to actually point to that in the game?). The old couple also ends up as “watchdogs” in Shel’s group later on.
The biggest connection is that [SPOILERS for Walking Dead Season 1] either Doug or Carley, whoever was shot on this same stretch of road, will be lying in a ditch. A lot of people seem to think we got the position wrong, but we assumed the corpse had been laying out there long enough that the animals had got to it. :(
bonnie - 220 days in
Bonnie’s story was another one I wrote and designed. Since I was directing I especially didn’t have time for rewrites on this one so Nick Breckon took it over and did a great job tuning it up. The idea came from how you’d survive as a dependent person in a world like this, and that idea turned into Bonnie, who was an addict, being both saved by and then dependent on Leland and Dee. Dee of course resented Bonnie and Leland loved her, being a bit henpecked.
We really wanted you to feel bad when you smashed Dee in the face (hence her horrible unmoving eye). And if you saw it coming, and refused to hit her, well, then you find out what she had planned for you anyway.
Connections
The bag Dee steals here is from Shel’s group, who are living in the Truck Stop at the time, so the group that chases you all into the corn is Shel’s. When you run into them in the field, you can spot Stephanie and Roman’s silhouettes.
Bonnie is also the only character guaranteed to go with Tavia in the epilogue, and thus the only main character from 400 Days you are guaranteed to encounter in Season 2.
Fun fact: The cornfield sequence was designed for Wyatt’s story (it would happen if you stayed in the car) but due to budget we had to move it here. In that scenario Eddie would have left Wyatt behind.
shel - 236 and 259 days in
Shel’s story was entirely (or almost entirely) written and designed my Mark Darin, one of the greats. Thinking about it now, I think we really should have called the story “Becca” because it really is about her, but I suppose that would have been out of place with the rest of the stories. This was the story that tied most directly into Season 1, sharing some of the same characters.
Connections
The blood stain on the floor that Shel investigates is from the old couple that Nate murders (the woman is now out back as a “watchdog”). The flashlight the group is looking for was in the bag that Dee stole, which is why they say it’s “still in the cornfield somewhere.”
“Banang,” a Telltale in-joke we put in nearly every game somewhere, appears in the storage closet (walk close to the camera).
The group of old folks at the camp is the same group Lee runs across in Episode 4 of Season 1. “That guy with the mustache” is, of course, Kenny (he also mentions Ben if he was still in your group at that time).
Fun fact: Originally Becca’s recital was meant to go smoothly, but Javi Espinoza suggested changing it so that Becca wasn’t quite ready yet to inject some levity. The mistakes are maybe a little too subtle. Originally she said “wait” a lot more often, but it got distracting from the conversation you were having so we cut it down.
epilogue - 400 days in
Sadly, budget meant that Tavia, who originally had her own, secret 6th chapter, was pared down to a very small role in the end of the game, this epilogue. Who goes to Carver’s camp (from Season 2) with Tavia is dependent on how their chapters played out.
Originally, though, we had much bigger plans.
Below is a document myself and Mark Darin wrote at the time outlining what would happen in Tavia’s story. It changed a lot from the document during the process of making it (we got all the way to having a prototype running before we needed to cut it down). The fact that we didn’t get to make this still bugs me, as I feel the episode as a whole would have been much better and more fondly remembered, but alas, ‘twas not meant to be.
No, I have no idea why it was called “Fishduck Highway.” Also, the term “emo chick” was common parlance in my part of the woods, and I’ve matured since then. Apologies!
Connections
The obvious connections here are that each of the group members from the previous chapters have formed a group of their own and you meet them. They haven’t made it too far from the truck stop; again their lives are intertwined within in a strange way. We never discussed whether they knew how their paths had brushed so closely together before, but I like to think they don’t know, that the past is the past and none of that matters anymore.
Fun fact: Bonnie shows up in Season 2 because she always went with the Tavia. We thought it might be fun to show her codependency issues resolved in Season 2, but that sadly fell by the wayside as we had to scope down during Season 2 development.