Bill Willingham talks The Wolf Among Us

TelltaleGames

We asked Bill Willingham, the creator of Fables, if he'd like to share a message with Telltale followers across the interwebs. Happily he said yes, and now we have a whole blog post without having to write it ourselves! Here's what he had to say about The Wolf Among Us…

Let's start with a confession. I'm not the world's greatest expert on videogames. I like them, or at least some of them, but I'm not good at them.

But I'm pretty good at story (sorry for the indelicate bragging), and I tend to be fairly protective where my own stories are concerned. Okay, maybe I'm not quite the mother bear level of protective. I've never ripped the limbs from a camper to protect my cubs, but I’m willing to learn.

So then anyway, when Telltale Games made its deal with DC Comics to turn Fables into a game I had one overriding concern. Would they get the story right?

Fables has been shopped around for a movie or TV show almost right from the launch of the series. On two different occasions the possible, maybe, could be deal (which is as far as most projects go out there) resulted in scripts for a Fables TV pilot (and in each case the script was never filmed as a pilot). 

In both cases, when I was eventually allowed to read them, the scripts told me the same thing: whoever wrote these stories never read Fables, or didn't like what they'd read, or simply thought they'd do something different to put their own personal "stamp" on the story. Even the one that was a pretty good fairy tale story, in the most generic sense, was a lousy Fables story. Except for using some of the same names for characters they bore little resemblance to the Fables comic book series.

No surprise then that I was most worried about their fidelity to the Fables story, when I heard a deal had been reached to adapt Fables into a Telltale game.

The surprise ending to this tale? The men and women at Telltale got the story right. They know the true story of Fables frontwards and back, so well in fact that I went out of my way to reach a separate deal with Telltale, not only to do what I can to help direct the story of their game, but to make the story in the game canon in the greater Fables fictional universe. That may seem a pretty bold step to take, but their in-game story merits it. It's brilliant to the point of there being far too many moments of, "I wish I’d thought of that."

One more confession, and then I'll let you get back to the rest of this page. Part of my deal with Telltale is to catch their Fables continuity mistakes and make sure they remain true to the original story and characters. But they've made so few mistakes I fear I'm stealing their money. They know the material so well, and remain so true to it, I don't have enough to do.

Maybe I could make snacks for everyone in the break room?

Bill Willingham

Somewhere in Minnesota