Shane Walsh (The Walking Dead)
Shane Walsh was created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, the writer and original artist of "The Walking Dead" comic book series. The character first appeared in the first issue of the comic book series in October 2003, but was expanded upon greatly in the television show adapted from the comics in 2010. As a result, Shane lives much longer in the chronology of the story in the show than he does in the comics. Kirkman described the comic book version of Shane's character as a short and quick "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" arc compared to that of his counterpart in the television series. Kirkman said he preferred the show's version of Shane and that the differences between the two versions of the character illustrate the ability to explore and evolve elements from the comic book in different ways on the show.
Telltale Games
Telltale's breakthrough success came with the licenses of the comic book series "The Walking Dead" and "Fables" in association with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in 2011. Allison anticipated that "The Walking Dead" series could be a $20 to $30 million franchise. Their "The Walking Dead" video game presented an alteration of Telltale's approach, as rather than a traditional adventure game where players would need to solve puzzles, "The Walking Dead" was more focused on providing a cinematic experience but presenting choices to the player, either through dialog trees or through quick time events, that would create "determinants" that would feed into latter parts of the episode and into future episodes; one example would be deciding which of one of two characters to save from a zombie attack at the spur of the moment. While these decisions do not have a direct impact on the game's overall narrative and structure, it provides a more personalized story around what decisions the player had made. This format provided highly successful: the game sold one million copies in 20 days, exceeded 8.5 million episode purchases by 2013, and an estimated $40 million in revenue. The success led to two additional 5-episode seasons plus a 3-episode mini-season to date. "The Walking Dead" is considered to have revitalized the waning adventure game genre due to this more emotionally driven focus. Since "The Walking Dead", nearly all of Telltale's games have used a similar approach of being built around the impacts of the player's choices as determinants in later episodes and seasons.