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[forsaken1111]

The humble bundle updated with new games which I am not interested so I now have keys for the following to give away:

Gone Home With Soundtrack
Deponia
Chaos on Deponia

[kcwong]

The humble bundle updated with new games which I am not interested so I now have keys for the following to give away:

Gone Home With Soundtrack
Deponia
Chaos on Deponia

On Steam I saw some people I know bought Goodbye Deponia. I asked if he knows it's only 1/3 of the story, and that he should get the complete series first.

... two weeks later I saw him starting to get achievements. 

Who started this trend of episodic adventure games anyway? Back then we have a full game from the get go, if more comes afterwards those are called sequels, not the next portion of a single game. Was it TellTales?

[nenjin]

I don't know where it really started, but I know why it's started. Those kinds of games basically liken themselves to TV. They care more about story craft than content, and so can make you wait three months for something that gets played and done in 20 minutes. They're typically small studios that can't afford to do their entire vision in EA, because they need to get paid now. So they take what would be like a $20 complete game, and break it up into multiple $10 episodic installments.

I guess if you truly like something the price is irrelevant, but when I've paid $60 for an episodic game that gives me maybe 2 hours of total playtime, and will probably never get replayed.....it doesn't get me reaching for my wallet for more of the same.

[Aklyon]

Telltale has basically made a thing out of them making episodic games. Supposedly they aren't too bad.

[i2amroy]

It's a trend from visual novels, IIRC, where (just like books) sometimes there was an book 1/2/... to the story. I find that often visual novels stories tend to cost a bit less and last a fair bit longer per episode than their Americanized equivalents, though.

[Mephisto]

Speaking of Telltale and episodic gameplay, there's currently a Telltale sale going on on Steam where you get up to 75% off basically all of their titles but the newest and the one that hasn't come out yet. Again speaking of things that haven't come out yet (and makes no sense to me but whatever), Minecraft: Story Mode, the newest Telltale story, is on a 10% off prerelease sale.

[BurnedToast]

As far as I can remember, it was telltale that started it with the "new" (2006) sam and max games. It was episodic because it was originally released on gametap, which is (was? don't know if it still exists) sort of like netflix for video games. So they released one episode per month, to stretch it out and help justify those monthly subscriptions.

It was a really popular series, so telltale must have figured why fix something that works? and just kept making episodic games.

[Reelya]

I have a copy of Andrew Rollings & Erneast Adams On Game Design published in 2003. It has a section on episodic delivery. It basically says nobody was doing it yet, though a lot of industry people had expressed interest in the idea due to ballooning dev costs, and basically the idea that you can charge people a subscription to play each episode, similar to how early MMO subscriptions already worked.

They note an early attempt was Majestic from EA in 2001.

As for episodic VNs, the canonical one would be Higurashi. And the first of those came out near the end of 2002. Way too soon to have influenced the start of episodic games in America like Telltale.

[n9103]

You guys are thinking much too recent for the origins of game episodes.
Nearly every shareware game back in the 80s onward was episodic, with the first chapter/part being freely available, and latter ones being purchase only.
Other than the obvious technological changes, there is generally a larger focus on modern episodic games than there was back then.
Well, that and it's pretty rare to find anything resembling a shareware first chapter anymore.

[Culise]

Certain early games also did this as well as far as terminology is concerned, though each "episode" was distinctly larger.  Commander Keen is the first example that comes to mind, but I'm pretty sure both Doom and Wolfenstein 3D did it.  It's probably worth noting that these are all from the same company (Id Software), and this practice also ended well before Telltale joined the fray. 

EDIT: Ah, as above, and n9103 is also correct to note the idea of releasing the first chapter as shareware. 

[Metalax]

At almost exactly the same time that Telltale started their first episodic release there were also several others that were trying out the Episodic Content idea with HL2:EP1 and the first(and what ended up being only)SiN Episodes being notable members that either failed to learn to count to 2a or flopped.

While Shareware is a somewhat similar idea, it also has the significant difference in giving away the first episode for free while these were trying to get people to buy into the series without that(although IIRC telltale did end up releasing one of the Sam&Max episodes for free).

[n9103]

Back on topic: GOG's got a squeenix sale this weekend.
http://www.gog.com/promo/square_enix_weekend_promo_091015

[Frumple]

There were plenty of chapter-based games that didn't do the first free, though, or had the shareware give only limited access to the first chapter (basically a demo). Would say there was a bit of a drought for the things for a while, and that they've now apparently switched genres -- about the most likely ones to work like that were platformers, followed by FPS games, iirc, then other stuff. It actually wasn't common at all for point & click et al, from what I can recall -- but yeah, the whole episodic thing isn't exactly new.

[Reelya]

While Shareware is a somewhat similar idea, it also has the significant difference in giving away the first episode for free while these were trying to get people to buy into the series without that(although IIRC telltale did end up releasing one of the Sam&Max episodes for free).

Yeah, I'd say the shareware model is more in the vein of an extended demo that acts as advertising. It's more like viral marketing than a true episodic delivery system. You play the demo, then you get the marketing speil, and are expected to buy the full version. "full version" gives away that it is not truly episodic.

Episodic delivery revolves around buying ongoing episodes as separate purchases.

[n9103]

feel free to complain to half the devs/publishers that called them episodes then.