Dispatch, AdHoc Studio’s superhero workplace comedy, is an indisputable hit. The team led by ex-Telltale devs has announced that the episodic adventure game has reached 2 million players as of this week, and has become a viral sensation for streamers and content creators. The game’s success flies in the face of claims that narrative adventure games have gone out of style. So what does AdHoc hope the industry learns from its success? Conversely, what do they hope developers don’t take away from it? These are some of the things we asked when we sat down with co-directors Dennis Lenart and Chris Rebbert.
According to Lenart, the simplest reason for the game’s success is that “people still enjoy good narrative games.” Rebbert expanded upon this by pointing out that simplicity and ease of access have become so rare in games that something refreshingly straightforward like Dispatch is offering an experience many players want but often have a hard time finding in today’s market.
“I play some free-to-play games and stuff like that, but I feel like I get on so many games now, and it’s like I have to download an update every time I get on, and I have to pay for any extra thing,” Rebbert said. “I think when we talk about our favorite games, we always talk about, ‘I just want a linear experience. I don’t want to come jump in and compete.’ And not to say those experiences shouldn’t be available for those who enjoy them, but I feel like a lot of people would like to have experiences like this, where they can just jump in and have a personal singular or linear playthrough or whatever it might be that is uninhibited by microtransactions and stuff like that, you know.”
Rebbert also pointed to Dispatch’s consistent release schedule, which made each episode a weekly event for fans, in contrast with the old Telltale games or the early Life Is Strange games, which launched sporadically over several months. Dispatch’s regular cadence allowed AdHoc to own a few weeks of mindshare.
“I was talking to Natalie [Herman], our producer, about it yesterday, and it was just like, ‘How often do you have, like, those moments of anticipation anymore, you know?’” he added. “Because most TV shows even get dumped on a streaming platform, and people watch them at their leisure. You don’t have this cultural anticipation in conversation; that was really nice. We were witnessing it more than participating in it. I got increasingly excited to jump on and watch streamers on those days. It was cool to see people get increasingly excited for the next drop. I haven’t seen, culturally, that happen in a long time, and it’s cool that it was successful.”
While it all worked out in the end, Lenart says that Dispatch felt like a gamble throughout its development. He thinks the team’s belief in the project, despite outside insistence that single-player narrative adventures were a dying genre, helped them push through their doubts.
“There were several points along the way where things [felt] destined to fall apart for this kind of game coming out in this specific time in this market,” Lenart said. “At every step of the way, I feel like the team pulled together and just made something happen where we didn’t think it was possible to make it happen. So it is definitely a credit to everyone at the studio for continuing to believe in the project, from the early days when it was an idea that we didn’t know if anyone would like, except for us, all the way through the final details and the final push to get out into the world. So it’s, it is really gratifying to me to be able to see the team enjoy the success that the game is having and see the little details that they put in and contributed, called back in memes. It’s just fun.”
On the other hand, it’s always possible that something will blow up and some C-suite executive will completely misread why it took off. For Dispatch, Rebbert and Lenart say they don’t want people to aimlessly try to emulate the game’s raunchy sense of humor. Rebbert says that nudity and curse words are not a silver bullet for success if they’re not pulled off with “taste and dramatic weight.” Lenart says that the more irreverent side of Dispatch came about later in development, and the original draft was much more reserved and comparable to The Office meets Ted Lasso.
“In all of the stories that we classically tell as a team of collaborators, the scenes that are the most exciting to us are people sitting around a couch or a table talking,” Lenart said. “All of the visual flair or some things that people might think are gratuitous, all of that is sort of flavoring that gets peppered in the story and the characters where they’re at in the moment. It’s not the thing we start with. I definitely think there are some IP out there that start with ‘How do we get the crazy thing or the insane image? What’s going to be the shock value thing? Then let’s stitch that piece together into the story.’ We’re the exact opposite.”
All eight episodes of Dispatch are available now on PC and PlayStation 5.