AdHoc Studio, the team behind the upcoming superhero choice-based narrative game Dispatch, is full of ex-Telltale developers and writers. However, even though they've got the chops for making games, initially Dispatch was designed as something else.
A live-action TV show, to be clear. Speaking to PC Gamer, Dispatch's creative director Dennis Lenart described how the project came about. "We originally started in 2018, it was going to be a potential live-action interactive TV show. And we spent a bunch of time on that, you know, wrote a season's worth of content, and a thing called Covid hit. Hollywood shut down, everything changed, the tech partner we were working with pivoted their business, and we kind of put it on the shelf for a while."
While the game has changed a lot since its inception as a TV show in 2018, the team at AdHoc remained influenced by TV shows. "Then when we came back to it, looked at what was there, and thought: 'There's a lot of great elements, but what about expanding here and here and changing this character?' We started getting more into Barry at the time, so there's a lot of that influence seeping in," Lenart explained.
Dispatch's first episode arrives in just a couple of weeks, and we'll be soon seeing how all of AdHoc's influences came together to make this superhero adventure.