"What if the gameplay was fun? This blew our f***ing minds": Dispatch devs had a revelation after years of tired Telltale mechanics

Dispatch developers had a big revelation after reusing the same TellTale formula across several years and several games: What if these adventure games could actually be fun, too?

Dispatch co-directors and developer Adhoc's co-founders, Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, are actually veterans of TellTale, the storied studio that pumped out countless choose-your-own-adventure games during the 2010s, from The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us to series based on Borderlands, Batman, Game of Thrones, and much more.

But despite these games tackling vastly different settings and tones, how you'd interact with TellTale's dour zombie apocalypse wasn't much different to how you'd interact with its superhero detective story. That is to say, there were always light puzzles and breezy quick-time-events sprinkled in between the very involved conversations.

During a panel at GDC 2026 attended by GamesRadar+, the duo say they "weren't really sure" that Dispatch was "actually fun" early in development. "It's kind of cool and different. But was it fun? Was fun even an option with the games we used to make? We're so used to, so conditioned to gameplay being the thing you had to do to check the box. We were just living in a world of watered down and entry game puzzles for so long, we just needed it to not suck."

So Herman and Lenart took a step back and asked themselves a frank question. "What if the gameplay was fun? And this blew our fucking minds."

Dispatch is still littered with tough decisions and dialogue options, of course, but in between, it features a hacking mini-game and a light strategy system that sees players sending a group of superheroes to specific crimes - you're often matching the right hero to the right event.

Dispatch's success shows a way forward for a struggling AA narrative genre