10 HBO Series Telltale Games Should Adapt After "Game of Thrones"

Image via Complex Original

The Crypt Keeper is in danger of leaping over an entire generation's awareness of how fucking awesome he was.

What started out as a comic series from EC Comics in the 1950s, Tales From the Crypt was later adopted by HBO as a serialized, episodic horror series that relished in its own campiness.

A Telltale verion of the show seems packaged with a gore-covered bow on it. Self-contatined, stand alone seasons that would be narrated by the Crypt Keeper would allow for players to digest single sitting experiences without having to commit plot points to memory between seasons.

Tales From the Crypt was on the air for seven seasons in the early '90s and was almost infamous for its celebrity cameos. We miss Tales From the Crypt.

Sure, Spawn is no stranger to being represented in video games.

Most have been trash, but comic book characters from the '90s are experiencing a bit of a resurgence at the moment. Marvel just announced they're bringing back Spider Man 2099 and we're sure Rob Liefeld is still convincing someone to pay him to draw characters with shoulder pads, no feet, and guns the size of most compact cars somewhere.

HBO's Spawn was everything the comic was, but animated and somehow even dirtier. There's so many moving parts here: Image Comics, HBO, Telltale Games, and Todd McFarlane that a narrative driven Spawn title done in the same way as the upcoming Tales from the Borderland seems fucking delusional. 

That doesn't mean that this isn't a brilliant idea though.

Red Dead Redemption: The Telltale Game.

What more do you need than that? 

Guh, fine. It's been too damn long since we've had another Western worthy of existing outside of Rockstar Games' shadow. It's hard, nigh impossible as we've seen since, to out-perform the open-world grandeur that was Red Dead. A sequel is coming, it has to, but if there were an HBO show that would vibrate like a plucked chord as a Telltale game, it would be Deadwood.

Granted that chord would be mostly about brothels, gold claims, gunfights, deception, outlaws, and every other component of the amazing three season run of Deadwood. Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, and Powers Boothe were cut off at the knees, but could be resurrected as non-playable characters in a Telltale game.

The game could use the massive tapestry of characters as a means to weave the player into the town of Deadwood. You could begin as a prospector, a small business owner, or just one of the many drifters passing through the horse piss-flooded streets of Deadwood.

Boardwalk Empire was a slow burn.

What started out as a seemingly over-polished vehicle for cameos, Paz De La Huerta's breasts, and Michael Shannon's scene-chewing turned into one of the most gratifying series about bootlegging, criminal enterprise, and Atlantic City itself.

A Telltale helmed Boardwalk Empire title would need to focus on the inherent grift, corruption, and political subterfuge of gangland New Jersey during Prohibition. Aside from the game having the potential to be simply gorgeous, thanks to the production value HBO placed on Atlantic City, the game would be an experiment, like all Telltale titles, in trust and decision making. 

The game could focus on either Steve Buscemi as Enoch "Nucky" Thompson and his empire, or, be centered on an entry-level thug climbing his way up the underworld ladder.

Either way, we'd play the shit out of it.

Arguably the one show on this list that may deserve a Telltale game more than The Sopranos would be The Wire.

The Wire is practically universally accepted as one of the most important crime dramas of the 21st century. A series that began as a police procedural about the drug trade in Baltimore evolved into a social commentary on the bureaucracy of city government, the public school system, and the print news media.

But nobody wants to play a Telltale game about America's crumbling social institutions. We want to play a game about the tragic folly that is the American War on Drugs from both sides of the fence.

A narrative driven title that would switch perspective from Stringer Bell and the Barksdale drug operation to the police officers tasked with bringing it down.

We can skip the fifth season serial killer nonsense and focus on the characters that defined the first four seasons in one of HBO's most peerless productions about the American condition and atrittions of all governmental systems. 

We'd be amazed if this wasn't already in the works.

Aside from the season one finale literally breaking HBO GO, True Detective is already paced like a Telltale game. With two separate chronological arcs that eventually braid back together in the present, the Southern Gothic set-pieces, the pagan/mystic iconography, and the complete deconstruction of the buddy-cop trope, True Detective seems primed for some sort of interactive adaptation.

Just make sure it doesn't suck.

And who better to be tasked with that than Telltale. The formatting of True Detective already falls in line with Telltales narrative structure of breaking titles down into seasons. Meth running bikers, the bayou, the exploration of the human condition from two diametrically opposed world views in Rust and Marty, and the Yellow King would fucking slay as a Telltale title.

Maybe a prequel about Rust's time working in narcotics in Texas? An oblique tie-in to the first season itself? Who knows, but this seems like the lowest hanging fruit on the list.

Long shots of all long shots, HBO's wildly underrated supernatural Depression-era Dust Bowl drama is often dismissed out of hand. 

Which is short-sighted considering the scope and ambition of the show. Biblical good vs. evil, the Knights Templar, tarot, end-of-days, Christian mythology, and the overall general eerie setting of a 1930's traveling carnival were all what made the show so compelling.

A Telltale title that delved even further into the Masonic components (Illuminati alert) and the series driving narrative arc of "a creature of light and a creature of darkness" being born once every generation would lend itself brilliantly to an interactive point-and-click title like Telltale's The Walking Dead.

Long shot? Definitely, but the idea of turning Fables into a video game seemed like a long shot as well. Look how that turned out.

Sex and violence were the defining features of HBO's cripplingly expensive period drama. Rome.

Granted, sex and violence are the hallmarks of most of HBO's series, but Rome was steeped in blood and nudity to a marvelous degree. With only two seasons being aired before being cancelled, think about what Telltale could do with the historical component alone of the show. 

Telltale has already gone on record saying large-scale battles will be a part of their Game of Thrones title, and like GoT, Rome was filled with massive battlefields filled with thousands of legionaries. Ceaser and the armies of Rome marching on Europe, deceit, redemption, and oceans of blood would all combine to create a flawless Telltale title.

Let us never speak of the THQ helmed, 2006 PlayStation 2 officially licensed turd that was The Sopranos: Road to Respect.

A miserly cash-grab that hoped to piggy-back on the popularity of the Grand Theft Auto series while milking the HBO brand. It was abysmal.

The Sopranos deserve a better handling of its legacy and who better than Telltale Games? The Sopranos has six seasons worth of mafia heft to dissect, and Telltale could construct a brilliant point-and-click title steeped in the show's lore.

The Walking Dead from Telltale is already on its second season, just imagine what could be done with New Jersey and HBO's most famous organized crime family. Hits, racketeering, intimidation, grift, prostitution, and gang war would make this a fucking juggernaut. 

One big problem: James Gandolfini has passed away and Telltale would need to find one hell of a convinicing replacement.