Telltale Games has hired Leah Hoyer as VP of creative
Hoyer was formerly director of narrative design at Microsoft and head of narrative at ArenaNet
Leah Hoyer has joined Telltale Games as vice president of creative, following other high-profile roles at The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft and ArenaNet.
The new role will put Hoyer in charge of writing, design and voiceover teams across the entire company. Given the number of episodic series Telltale now produces that's no small task. The California-based studio is working with a broad range of IP, including The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Borderlands and Batman, with a series based on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy still to come.
Hoyer will bring considerable experience to the role, including almost nine years as director of original programming for The Disney Channel. She switched to games in 2012, joining Microsoft as a director of narrative design where she worked on Quantum Break and Sunset Overdrive, among other projects. Immediately prior to joining Telltale she spent two years as head of narrative on Guild Wars 2 at ArenaNet.
When we last spoke to Hoyer, just after she joined ArenaNet, she admitted that telling a good story in a game is "hands down" more difficult than it is with television. "That's largely because the whole point of TV is to tell a really good story," she said, "and there's so much more that has to happen in a game than just the storytelling."
Speaking to Gamasutra about her ner job at Telltale, Hoyer made a similar point. "I'm a firm believer that game story is at its best when all of the disciplines work together. We have so many more tools at our disposal than books or even film and TV.
"People who want to create narrative for games need to understand what the other disciplines do and how they are integral to the story experience."