The Walking Dead (season 1)
Robert Kirkman, who created the comic book series in 2003, says he had considered the idea of a "Walking Dead" television series, but never actively pursued it. "I certainly wanted it to happen, just because I knew it would be good for the book... I'm certainly not against adaptations, like some creators." When Frank Darabont became interested in adapting the comic books for television, Kirkman said it was "extremely flattering" and went on to say that, "He definitely cares about the original source material, and you can tell that in the way he's adapting it. It's an extreme validation of the work... Never in a million years could I have thought that if "Walking Dead" were to ever be adapted that everything would be going this well. I think that that's all because of Frank."
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.