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In This Edition,
Skybound’s David Alpert and Jon Goldman on…
The Walking Dead story
Launching its own studio
Taking on Street Fighter
Third-party publishing
… Vampires
In 2001, David Alpert, Robert Kirkman and Jon Goldman met in LA.
The trio bonded over the idea that the worlds of TV, film, comics and games should be more closely intertwined.
“Today, that’s kind of obvious,” Alpert says. “But back then it was very far from the truth. We were coming off of the Doom movie. And Sony had just passed on buying Marvel for $15 million.”
Alpert, Kirkman and Goldman, who would go on to form Skybound Entertainment, noticed that film makers were obsessed with Box Office, TV people were focused on ratings, and games publishers just wanted to sell discs. Could there be a company that crossed all of those things?
Then in 2003, Kirkman co-created The Walking Dead comic. It was a hit, and Hollywood came calling. The deal was simple: Hollywood would make the TV show and get all the IP rights.
Alpert told them no.
“I got told every cliché,” he recalls. “I was literally told, I swear to God, ‘you’ll never eat lunch in this town again.’ I don’t even know what that means. I’m like, ‘I’m going to eat lunch today. I have lunch at my house.’”
Goldman adds: “We like lunch a lot.”
Alpert again: “It is one of my top five meals.”
Back to Goldman: “Those are fighting words. You’re telling me I can’t have a meal? That’s terrifying.”
Six years later, Hollywood came back and was far more amenable to Skybound’s terms. 16 years later, The Walking Dead is a juggernaut franchise. It’s still one of the biggest shows on Netflix.
In the end, Skybound retained the rights to make The Walking Dead games. However, the TV partner could develop titles based on the TV show.
“So, there are some games that came out that we didn’t have anything to do with,” Alpert laments. “And without disparaging our partner, they did a crap job. Those games were terrible. Ok, I am disparaging our partner.”
He adds: “When we’ve succeeded, it’s because we’ve embraced what’s core to the brand. The Walking Dead game from Telltale is a perfect example of that. We set out to make a zombie story that makes you cry. A lot of people wanted to come in and make a twitch shooter. And that’s not true to the brand.”
To Invincible
Skybound’s philosophy is that there is no primary medium. The TV show and the video games are not ancillary to the comics books.
“You never know where you’ll encounter your fan,” Alpert says. “The first medium might be the game, it might be the t-shirt. And if that’s bad, they’re not going to come in. If I had encountered Game of Thrones first in the game space, I never would’ve read all the books and watched the shows. So, you have to treat everything the same.”
Goldman adds: “Look at how much money people spend in video games and how much time they spend. You have to respect them. You can’t give them crap. That’s like a dereliction of duty.”
This leads us onto Skybound’s next big IP: Invincible. The adult superhero franchise, like The Walking Dead, began life as a comic. It’s since transitioned to TV as a hit animated show for Amazon. And this week Skybound will release a major game based on the property: Invincible VS.
“Comics give you the freedom to create a fantastic IP and experiment in a low consequence mode,” Goldman explains. “TV popularizes it. And then video games, of course, are a big investment. So, we want to make sure that there’s a large group of fans ready to embrace it. And to do that, we need to make a hit TV show.”
“If I had encountered Game of Thrones first in the game space, I never would’ve read all the books and watched the shows.”
The company has experimented with Invincible games before, albeit in a small way. There have been smaller projects, mobile games and integrations into things like Fortnite.
“We believe that Invincible is perfect for video games, but we like to just confirm that before we invest heavily,” Goldman says. “And it passed all those gates.”
Skybound is really investing in Invincible VS. Unlike with The Walking Dead, there is no outsourcing going on. The game is being made by a new internal studio called Quarter Up. It’s also using talent from the TV series, including the writing team.
“This has to be something our fans love and we’re proud of,” Goldman says. “And you can’t always do that by offloading it to someone else.”
Quarter Up is a new studio, but the team is a familiar one. It’s made up of people from Double Helix, the developer behind the underrated 2013 Killer Instinct reboot. Like that project, Invincible VS is a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat. It’s a competitive genre, and Skybound needed expertise.
“[Quarter Up co-founder] Mike Willette wanted to put the band back together,” Alpert says. “And they f-ing love Invincible. They were like, ‘we want to do a game that’s for the fighting game community and for Invincible fans, and we want to make it awesome.’ That was exciting to us. A talented technical team that understood the genre intimately, and had massive love for the IP.”
“We believe that Invincible is perfect for video games, but we like to just confirm that before we invest heavily”
On paper, Invincible makes sense as a fighting game. The TV show is full of characters and lengthy fight scenes. Nevertheless, this is a hyper competitive genre filled with well-established names. And it’s not a genre you can enter cheaply.
“It’s mostly an arena-based game,” Goldman explains. “There are much bigger genres we could have taken on, like an open world thing. So, it gives us some constraints. Yes, it’s super expensive. We’re competing against giants. But it has some limitations that allow a newcomer to edge its way in. We’ll find out, but the early signs are pretty awesome.”
Alpert adds: “The fighting game community is pretty stable, right? There’s been a lot of iterations of the same games, and people are hardcore set in their games. There are Street Fighter players, there are MK players, whatever. They have their game. But there’s a whole generation of people that love Invincible that might be perfect for fighting games, but probably haven’t picked one yet. They’re like, ‘I’m 20 years old. Am I going to play Moral Kombat when there’s been 20 editions that I haven’t played before, and I’m going to get my ass kicked because I don’t know any of the moves?’ Whereas, they’re native to this environment.”
Goldman again: “Strategically, we’re in between some release windows. From the very beginning we have stayed close to the fighting game community. We got their feedback and showed them early builds. We have tried to show them the utmost respect in shaping this game, and I feel them pulling for us. There are no guarantees in life, but it feels like we’re on a great runway.”
Skybound’s decision to do this itself is about protecting the brand. It believes a bad adaptation can have lasting consequences on the IP overall.
“It’s possible to find a partner that treats your baby the way that you would treat it. But it’s rare,” Alpert says.
“Jon and I and Robert, we’re owners and principles of the company. We’re not going anywhere. I’ve been working on Invincible since it was launched 23 years ago, and I anticipate working on Invincible and The Walking Dead, and all the other IP that we own, for the rest of my career. If I put out something bad next quarter, next year, even if I make a bit of money, it puts me in the hole. It’s something I have to remake back. It’s this long term vision that we’re able to execute, because I know that if everything else at Skybound doesn’t work, The Walking Dead and Invincible are going to be around for decades to come.”
Next: Vampires
Beyond The Walking Dead and Invincible, I had to ask if Goldman and Alpert had any thoughts on what its next games IP could be. And the duo pointed towards the audio drama Impact Winter.
“It was an Audible original,” Alpert tells us. “It actually was the number one Audible original of all time. It was the first time they took a podcast off platform. They took it to Spotify and Apple Podcast, and it went to number one on both of those charts. Now we have a deal at Netflix to do a TV series with the director of The Hunger Games. We’re hoping to be in production soon.”
Goldman adds: “We have a hunch that vampires will work with video game players just like zombies and superheroes.”
But first, of course, it’s all about Invincible VS.
“All indications are positive, but everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? We’ll see how that goes,” Alpert concludes. “And assuming that goes well, we do have a five-year plan to build out additional capabilities and to build bigger and more immersive experiences. Both for Invincible, The Walking Dead and our other IP.”
What about Skybound’s indie publishing?
Skybound Games has been an active publisher of indie games over the last five years. And it’s launched some well regarded titles, including Before your Eyes, The Big Con, Closer The Distance and Goodnight Universe.
However, the last story related to Skybound’s third-party publishing business is around a legal dispute between itself and physical indie specialist Iam8bit from December last year (something the company didn’t comment on). And Alpert and Goldman told The Game Business that Skybound is now fully focused on its own IP.
“We’ve had a number of different strategies to try to figure out how to play in the gaming space,” Alpert explains.
“In the beginning it was like, ‘oh, we should do the same model that we’re doing in comics and television in the game space.’ And we got some really cool stuff, and we were able to find some interesting opportunities, but ultimately launching a brand-new IP in this ecosystem, while completely possible, it’s also really hard.”
He continues: “We had some successes and we had some failures. We probably had more failures than successes, to be honest. But we learned that going to market is really difficult and it’s only getting harder. So, we wanted to figure out how to be smarter about it.”
Goldman adds: “With Invincible VS, we’ve not only built a development team, we built a top flight marketing and publishing team. We hired top team members from Blizzard. We learned a lot in indie publishing, but we’ve upped our game a tremendous level. And we felt if we’re going to spend all those resources, we should do it on our own IP.”
That’s it for today’s edition. We’ll be back on Thursday to discuss exclusive games, influencers and much more. Until then, thank you for reading.
