Tales from the Borderlands finished by a ‘skeleton crew’ due to poor sales

Telltale Games has seen huge success with its numerous point and click franchises, but it appears that sales for Tales of the Borderlands were rather more disappointing compared to its lauded stablemates.

No exact figures have been revealed, but in a recently published oral history of the game’s development on the Campo Santo Quarterly Review, season director Nick Herman has revealed that sales were so bad that the game was deemed "a failure" internally and ended up being finished by a "skeleton crew" who volunteered to work late into the night to get it finished.

"Sales forTales from the Borderlandsweren’t great," says Herman. "They were decent, it’s not like we were losing money, but compared to something likeThe Walking Dead, it wasn’t on the same level. The mentality was, we’ve got to wrap this season up quick, because we need to move on to some other things, and we’re holding on to staff, and it didn’t? – ?I couldn’t let go, and let the season just end either abruptly or not pay off the things we were setting up."

Herman continued: "We had a vision, we knew what we were pushing for, but it was really late nights for an extended period of time. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that everyone on it, it was a voluntary choice."

Telltale recently announced a whole swathe of new seasons for many of its existing franchises, including a final season for The Walking Dead, and second seasons for Batman, A Wolf Among Us and Minecraft: Story Mode. Tales of the Borderlands was, of course, curiously absent from this list, despite being the best-loved entry in Telltale’s portfolio by critics and gamers alike. Now, it seems, there was good reason for Telltale’s silence on the subject, and it therefore seems unlikely that we’ll see a second season announced for the game any time soon.