Streaming giant Netflix is teaming up with Telltale Games to bring its iconic adventure games to the service starting with Minecraft: Story Mode, according to a report from TechRadar. The game will come out just as it did on consoles and PC, in five episodes. There were three more episodes that took place after the conclusion of the main story, but there’s no word as to whether those will actually end up on Netflix. Anybody watching Netflix on a device that can choose items with a directional button should be in the clear, though older devices that lag a bit in the normal Netflix experience, like the Nintendo Wii and first-generation Roku, could conceivably be left out due to hardware and network limitations. As a side note, Netflix’s celebrated original show Stranger Things will seemingly be getting a Telltale Games adaption, though details on that were sparse.
The report says that the games will be hitting the streaming service in a toned-down format that feeds players the action via video files that are queued up by in-game choices and actions, which means that the heartfelt tale of a block person and their heroic pig will likely have a lot less skeleton swashbuckling, and other titles in the lineup will probably see similar treatment. This could have quite the impact on more combat-heavy titles in Telltale’s lineup, such as Tales From The Borderlands and Batman: The Telltale Series, if they end up joining the service.
Telltale Games’ library won’t be Netflix’s first foray into interactive content. The service previously pushed out a Shrek spinoff called Puss In Book: Trapped In An Epic Tale, which was not quite as involved as a Telltale game, but did offer some choices to the viewer and essentially amounted to a choose-your-own-adventure book in movie form. Telltale’s works tend to offer players off-the-cuff dialog and action choices at a moment’s notice, which means that a larger number of different video files have to be stored and served. Netflix may handle this by paring down player choice a bit, but could also simply serve up the full-fat versions of the games, albeit with less emphasis on tests of reflexes or combat skills.