There seems to be something of a small running theme out of this year’s Gamescom, and that theme seems to be smaller third-party outfits bringing fan-favourite games from years ago to the Nintendo Switch. Following on the heels of the first two Grandia games being confirmed for a Nintendo Switch release, and a Saints Row: The Third port being confirmed for Switch soon afterward, Telltale Games has finally confirmed a more obvious Nintendo Switch release of theirs, namely that they will be bringing the previous three episodic seasons of The Walking Dead to Nintendo Switch at various points before the end of 2018.
Naturally, The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season, which includes all five episodes as well as the bridging DLC, 400 Days, will hit Nintendo Switch first, specifically on August 28th, and will cost $24.99 USD. Successor games, The Walking Dead: Season Two and The Walking Dead: A New Frontier don’t have specific release dates or prices for Switch yet, but they will be seeing release on Nintendo’s hybrid console before the end of 2018. It appears that offshoot miniseries, The Walking Dead: Michonne isn’t currently being included among the Nintendo Switch re-releases, though this could be because it doesn’t tie in with Telltale’s core The Walking Dead game storyline. It has nonetheless been confirmed however that the former three seasons of The Walking Dead on Nintendo Switch will be based on their enhanced builds from the Walking Dead: The Telltale Series Collection made for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which offered some performance and graphical upgrades most notably.
The Nintendo Switch ports for Telltale’s former mainline The Walking Dead games are almost certainly due to the fact that the all-new The Walking Dead: The Final Season ended up releasing its first episode for Nintendo Switch last week, marking the first time that Telltale’s The Walking Dead games have successfully made it to a Nintendo platform in any capacity. Despite Telltale originally claiming that The Walking Dead: The Final Season would launch on Nintendo Switch later this year, it ended up debuting at the same time as the competing PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One builds of the game, which indicates a heightened need to allow players to properly re-live the former stories surrounding recurring protagonist, Clementine.
Widely considered to be the most famous and beloved among Telltale’s episodic adventure games, the Walking Dead games, which inhabit the universe of Image Comics’ The Walking Dead graphic novels (and not the popular AMC television series that they inspired), originally debuted with the simply-titled first season, The Walking Dead, which introduced Clementine as a supporting ally to player character, Lee Everett, and went on to garner numerous Game of the Year 2012 nominations and wins. The successive The Walking Dead: Season Two then placed Clementine in the player character role with a debut in late 2013, and while it wasn’t a Game of the Year sweeper like its predecessor, it was nonetheless still received well by critics and fans. The same is true of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, a third season that once again placed Clementine in a supporting role in lieu of another new player character, Javier “Javi” Garcia, and marked the first game that was fully designed around current-gen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware, to the point of cancelling its planned last-gen Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 editions shortly before release.
Keep shambling to Eggplante for major news and updates on Telltale’s The Walking Dead games.