Don’t you wish you could sit down and chat with your favorite online characters? Who would you sit down with?
Well in the glorious year of 2010 Telltale Games asked and answered that question.
You may know Telltale from their library of fantastic narrative focused games like The Walking Dead, and The Wolf Among Us.
Telltale blazed the trail for narrative heavy games, and for a short period of time they reaped their reward. The studio reached an unfortunate end in 2018 where the employees were brought into a surprise company-wide meeting where they were told they had 30 minutes to leave the building and not to come back. The studio had closed.
“When he said that we weren’t getting severance, our health insurance was running out two weeks later. Like. Nobody balked because it was just like, ‘Wait? We don’t come back to work? Like. That’s it, right now?”
Paul Mastroianni (Telltale: The Human Stories Behind The Games by Noclip)
Among their amazing catalogue of games is the incredibly unique “Poker Night at the Inventory.” A game in which you sit down with your favorite famous internet characters and gab while playing high stakes poker.
The game originally released back in 2010 and with the current speed of internet culture the “famous” characters featured in the game have all but disappeared from the zeitgeist save for the dark hallways of millennial’s dreams.
The game serves as an amazing time capsule, and frankly the world was a worse place without it. The poker in the game was also very fun, but that’s hardly the most interesting thing about it.
The characters featured are Sam from the Sam and Max detective series of point and click adventure games, Strongbad the comic relief from the early flash animated series Homestar Runner, Heavy from the ever iconic Team Fortress 2, and Tycho who is a character from the Penny Arcade comics.
When the game came out I was 14 and hardly had the context to understand who these characters were except for the Heavy. As time has passed I’ve come to learn about the other characters except for Tycho who seems better off left alone.
A lot of the fun of the game is watching these fictional characters ask each other questions about their lives, and having them recount their stories from their own perspectives. What’s particularly unique to me is the way that “The Inventory” is a place where all their fictional worlds are real. So instead of talking about their lives as actors they each get to candidly talk about their lives as if they live in different parts of the world.
Unfortunately the game was unlisted from digital stores in 2019 shortly after the studios closure along with the second game: Poker Night at the Inventory 2.
Games like these are fraught with intellectual property challenges. Most of the difficulty keeping a game like this in stores is legal negotiation rather than game development. As time goes on finding the rights holders to properties gets tougher and tougher.
See more about that in this video about CD: Project Red and GOG which specializes in revamping old games for sale.
It came as a surprise to me that all the way in 2026 the game was listed under a new developer with a new release date. The developers were a company called Skunkape Games who had performed some sort of benevolent necromancy on Poker Night.
Who is Skunkape Games?
As it turns out Skunkape is a studio founded by former Telltale employees who loved the games they made so much (Sam and Max in particular) that they have been working to buy the rights and continue to maintain the Sam and Max trilogy.
They describe themselves as:
“A handful of early Telltale developers, now the owners and caretakers of the episodic Sam & Max adventure games!”
Apparently they didn’t forget about Poker Night either. Maybe it’s just because it has Sam and Max in it, but either way I couldn’t be happier to see the legacy of these classic games live on.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Skunkape games for your dilligent work.
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