The Walking Dead

Telltale Games' The Walking Dead from 2012 is one of the most influential adventure games of the last fifteen years. This episodic title, based on Robert Kirkman's comic, was built around dialogue and morally ambiguous choices with no clearly right answer, centred on the relationship between former teacher Lee and young Clementine, whom he tries to protect amid a zombie apocalypse - its focus on emotion and storytelling over traditional puzzles helped reignite the whole narrative-adventure genre and inspired many other studios to adopt a similar choice-and-consequence style of storytelling.

Almost a decade later, the brand headed in a completely different direction: Skydance Interactive released The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, a first-person VR survival-action game set in a flooded New Orleans, where the player, cast as "the Tourist", faces off against both zombies and other survivors. It launched on PC VR and headsets such as Quest and was praised for its physical combat and tense atmosphere; the 2022 sequel, Chapter 2: Retribution, brought a new story and support for newer-generation headsets, including PSVR2.

Over the course of a single decade, then, The Walking Dead brand moved from a carefully written, story-driven episodic adventure on PS3 and Xbox 360 to intense VR survival action - what ties the two together is mainly the licence and the zombie-apocalypse setting, while both the approach to gameplay and the target platform changed fundamentally, from watching a story unfold with a controller in hand to physically fighting for survival inside a headset.