Yesterday marked the debut of The Walking Dead: Solve to Survive, a series of online cryptic puzzles available exclusively via our free-to-join rewards program Skybound Insiders. To help celebrate the arrival of these unique new Walking Dead brain teasers, we sat down with the team that created them at Those Beyond — CEO Mark Warrick, Creative Director Fox Rogers, and Product Director Matt Hyde. Here’s what they had to say…
How would you describe The Walking Dead: Solve to Survive puzzle games? They’re an innovative new media format for the franchise.
Mark Warrick (MW): The Walking Dead: Solve to Survive is a new fan social gaming format that we call Mass Community Play. It is different to party play just by the size of the audience that engages with the content concurrently. Party play is for 8 to 20 people. But imagine party play with 10,000 people? Now imagine it for a million fans all playing at the same time? It’s not been done before at this scale. That is Mass Community Play. And The Walking Dead: Solve to Survive is pioneering it!
Fox Rogers (FR): What we discovered is that communities that come together to solve something in common often have a lot more camaraderie — like when they enter these Solve to Survive puzzles — because they help other people to solve the problems they’re having in the game. A lot of people find it difficult to find commonality by just chatting online without something to do together. So it’s a good way of building community, by giving all of the fanbase the same goal, and then allowing them to discuss that goal amongst one another, to build commonality and trust between players. People bond through these puzzles. They start to become friends in the fandom.
What sparked the idea for these puzzles and how did they evolve?
Matt Hyde (MH): When we started our studio back in 2021, we had a thesis that there must be a new form of entertainment to discover for fans to engage with the worlds they love in a more active way online. Not passive by just watching or consuming content from the IP holder or chatting in a forum. But more fundamentally through a sense of belonging that came from the way they engaged and being directly in contact with the millions of other fans like themselves. Like being in a real world stadium with hundreds of thousands of fans together. Could we replicate that feeling of togetherness and make a new social gaming destination on the internet?
FR : So we tested the idea with our own authored indie sci-fi world that had a niche cult following in 2022 of 30,000 fans. Every 3-6 weeks we gave them a common objective in the form of a cryptic puzzle to solve, a mini-ARG campaign or a casual game with a high score to unlock a community objective if they achieved it together. Sharing hints and clues in a chat stream was encouraged. Over the next 8 months, we were astonished to see the audience come back time and time again for the next instalment of Mass Community Play. We created a pressure cooker effect where games would only be live for 24 hours. It created more intensity. We were seeing tens of thousands of fans all descend on the puzzle at the same moment. The integrated live chat created the heat of togetherness. We knew we could take the formula to blockbuster IPs and replicate it.
How did you begin working with Skybound?
MW: Matt knew Ian Howe at Skybound from several years ago when they worked together on a game publishing deal for a studio he was involved with.
MH: Yes, I’ve known Ian for quite some time. And when we were building out this whole thesis and idea around Mass Community Play, Ian and The Walking Dead came to mind. So we jumped on a call and just showed him everything we’re working on.
MW: Ian really resonated with how Mass Community Play could solve a major problem in the entertainment industry. Everyone in an entertainment company is working hard on the next season of content, whatever it is, and that gap can be 12 months plus. As we know, when a season of Invincible finishes, all the fans go, “When is Season 3?” That is all you hear! It’s really hard to keep them engaged for 12-24 months and so they fade and need to get completely re-marketed to with the associated extortionate marketing spend. So when we spoke to Ian, we said, “We think we’ve got a formula here where we can do something really crunchy every four to eight weeks that fans will love to play with the rest of the fandom and will want to keep coming back”. The marketing spend for the next season could dramatically reduce if this succeeds.
That really resonated with Ian, and it really resonated with Will Kassoy (Head of Consumer Strategy) who we were immediately referred to.
How did you go about designing the Solve to Survive puzzle campaign?
FR: From a design perspective, I think lots of people think of game-like experiences as having a protagonist. Whereas what we’re doing with Solve to Survive is, when you build relationships with the worlds that you love, you build a relationship with everything in those worlds. Even in Fallout, you develop a relationship with stimpaks! That means that when you see these things in these puzzles, you develop almost a love for the detritus of that world. With Solve to Survive, we’ve said, “What does the everyday survivor in The Walking Dead listen to when they boot up a radio? What does the everyday survivor of The Walking Dead do when they find a stash box that’s not theirs? What things do they look at and why?” That paints a much more colloquial picture of what The Walking Dead world is like, beyond the characters that people are familiar with. That’s what Solve to Survive does naturally, it gives players an item and allows them to build. Almost like when you go up into your attic and there’s a bunch of your granddad’s stuff, and you start digging through it and you build relationships with it. You build a picture of what their lives are like outside of those items that you have. That’s what is really unique about these puzzles.
It’s something we will continue to build well into the future, because people love hearing random radio channels from the world of The Walking Dead from all the survivors. You build a mental model of what The Walking Dead is like as a universe, beyond those characters that people are familiar with. Certainly, from my perspective, that’s something we’ve aimed to achieve with the puzzles. And it’s something that I’m super excited about continuing because it’s unique in this context. I think lots of brands are starting to discover this — Star Wars has lightsabers, and there’s lots of other items that people absolutely adore.
Were you guys big fans of The Walking Dead?
MW: Yeah, I’ll be honest, I was introduced to The Walking Dead first through the TV show before the comics. I’ve personally watched it two and a half times through now.
That’s hardcore!
MW: It’s just one of those things… [Laughs.] I’m terrible like that. Game of Thrones, I’ve been through it like three times.
FR: My relationship with The Walking Dead is… I spend a lot of time just looking into video game lore. My personal interest is going very deep on these things. So I’ve watched all the series, but then I spend hour after hour of my time on YouTube watching these 90 minute icebergs on what the relevance is, or what certain things are, the difference between the comics and the series. Because that’s where I like to lose my time. So instead of podcasts, I’m often listening to YouTube on these deep fandom discussions. A lot of speculation goes on in The Walking Dead franchise, on, like, where the origin of the virus came from, and stuff like that. So this is the kind of stuff that I love to dig into. I very much like to try and emulate that in some of the work we do by playing on things. That’s been my relationship, which just ends up being ridiculously deep in regard to the number of hours viewed.
MH: I’ve delved into both the comic books and the TV show and I often find myself referring back to the comics for spoilers, I just can’t resist! [Laughs.] Plus, I enjoy comparing the differences between the comics and the series.The franchise is rich with compelling characters and gripping storylines that keep you on the edge of your seat.
It’s incredibly exciting for us to collaborate with Skybound, work with such a standout property as The Walking Dead, and pioneer a new form of entertainment through Mass Community Play on the Arise Engine.
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