It’s always the characters who draw me in. Whether it’s a video game, movie, book, or TV show, the characters come first. Plot, action, themes, visuals, all come second to who the story is about. Not what, not when, not why. Who. Most of my favourite games are driven by character work. Mass Effect 2 is all about delving into individual arcs. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character study I’ve seen committed to polygons. Life is Strange is full of characters I can’t help but connect to. But nothing made me feel for characters more than The Walking Dead.

TelltaleGames used to be king. To explain their magic to younger gamers now would only be met with perplexed faces, in the same way I’ll never quite get the legendary status afforded to The Oregon Trail. Telltale’s brand of choose your own adventure stories, which were point and click games with A or B choices and released episodically, seem extremely dated now. In their prime, they had the world in a stranglehold, and no hand gripped tighter than the bony, rotten fingers of The Walking Dead.

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I loved The Wolf Among Us, and I agree that Tales From The Borderlands and Batman don’t get enough love. But The Walking Dead was the showpiece. In terms of how beloved it was and how crucial it was to establishing and then elevating what we might well deem ‘the Telltale genre’, nothing comes close. And a major part of that was its cast.

A tan young woman wearing a bloodied hat stares ahead

You play the first game as Lee, a man on his way to jail for murder, although much of the first season is built around the question marks over Lee’s guilt. He escapes from the car as it crashes, and tries to assist his arresting officer, immediately showcasing his morally righteous nature. Of course, this is no regular car crash. The zombie outbreak has begun. Lee wanders into a city to find a scared girl all alone, her parents out of town and her babysitter killed by zombies. This is Clementine, the deuteragonist of the game.

Most people will tell you the game is about Lee and Clem, and how they bond together as surrogate father and daughter in a zombie apocalypse (sound familiar?). That’s not even close to the whole picture though. Both of them are trying to find their place in this new world too, in ways the far more driven Ellie and Joel are not.

Clem wants to be a kid and yet must harden herself against threats, and shows herself to be one of the smartest lateral thinkers in the group. Lee, on the other hand, must deal with the fact that protecting Clem will call for violence, which goes against his usual heroic, helpful, and kind nature. There’s also an impressively nuanced exploration of race for a video game from over a decade ago, when we’re still not great at avoiding stereotypes and blaxploitation tropes even now.

But even looking beyond the classic ‘protective father’ archetype that defines Lee and Clem, there’s so much more to The Walking Dead than our two leads. What really made it special, and what other games in this vein lacked, was the strange sense of obligation it placed on you.

The choices you make in The Walking Dead are dangerous, and many lead to death. However, these aren’t always bad choices. In some games, you’ll have a choice to run for the door or grab the gun, and that forces you to think. The door is a quick escape, but you’ll be unarmed. The gun offers protection, but you’ll have to go into danger to find it. This is how choices in The Dark Pictures work, and you’re never quite sure of what the outcome will be. If a character dies, you might be annoyed with the game for setting you up to fail. The Walking Dead was different. It asked you how you’d like to fail.

An adult man sits in a vehicle and comforts a small girl who lays next to him

The people in The Walking Dead were not great characters because they were all so loveable. You met loudmouthed bullies, inept cowards, racist rednecks, and pushy parents, to name just a few. You didn’t love, or even like, any of them at first. And then comes the obligation. A lot of choices in The Walking Dead you know will cause death, and even though you don’t like these characters, you’ll want to keep them alive. They’re bad people, but they’re not villains. Even the racist redneck, by far the worst descriptor there, reveals himself to be merely ignorant, maturing and broadening his worldview throughout the game, before becoming your closest friend.

Some people took pleasure in the ability to kill off characters who annoyed them, and others tried earnestly to keep everyone alive because they knew that’s what Lee would do. Keeping people alive sometimes made things harder - fewer rations, impossible to go unnoticed, more chance of mistakes - but that’s what Lee would do. The obligation to love these people because we knew Lee would protect them despite their faults is what makes The Walking Dead so impressive.

There are plenty of games where you play the hero, where you’re pulled in by an affection for the cast and a need to protect them. There are also plenty where you are burdened by these characters, and the game makes you all the more heroic for saving them anyway. But few games are bold enough to give you these burdens and allow you to free yourself of them, with the only thing stopping you the fact you know the game’s hero just isn’t like that. In not forcing you to love its cast, The Walking Dead made me love them even more.

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