Last month, Skybound Entertainment and Genvid Entertainment announced The Walking Dead: Last Mile, a new massively interactive live event (MILE) that’s set to launch this Summer as a Facebook exclusive. The Walking Dead: Last Mile is part game, part interactive television show that will be a completely authentic experience that will immerse participants around the globe in the universe of The Walking Dead in new and unparalleled ways by putting the TWD: LM story and characters in the hands of the players. The first details for The Walking Dead: Last Mile have been revealed including concept art for the game. The Walking Dead: Last Mile features an all-new setting, story, and characters from Skybound Entertainment. To interact, all players need is a browser that gives them access to Facebook.
The Walking Dead: Last Mile is set on a remote Alaskan coast. Players can influence the story and write new The Walking Dead canon that can’t be reloaded, rehashed, or rewritten to better suit the lives of its characters or the preferences of its players. The story arc is not set in stone.
TWD: LM showcases the ability for audiences of any size to experience and influence a beloved virtual world and its inhabitants collectively in real-time while driving the storyline and canon in new, spontaneous directions. Unlike other ‘mass online gatherings,’ TWD: LM truly places all interactive spectators in the same virtual space, creating a new kind of global communal experience that combines the ubiquity of traditional broadcast television with the immersive, interactive engagement of video games.
Genvid’s unique interactive livestreaming technology and services at the heart of TWD: LM puts the audience in collective control of the show’s story and characters, to whatever degree of agency each viewer prefers. Talking about what Genvid learned from its most successful MILE to date, Rival Peak, Jacob Novak, CEO and Co-Founder told Gamespot how players can feel satisfied, no matter their own level of interaction. “If you choose to lean back and watch, it will progress. You do not need to do a thing. The reason you participate in the activities is because you want to have more agency over the outcome,” Novak said.
Shawn Kittelsen of Skybound said that The Walking Dead: Last Mile is being treated and handled like a proper new entry in The Walking Dead comic universe, with new threats in the Alaskan setting that will be revealed for the first time in the franchise. That handling includes the narrative prestige that comes with The Walking Dead, meaning a player character can die at any moment.
In the world of The Walking Dead, we kind of have the opposite of plot armor,” Kittelsen told Gamespot. “We have, like, plot magnets.” It’s likely that players will have to make new characters more than once over the course of the long season, like resetting a post-apocalyptic Tamagotchi. This player character doesn’t seem to be more than a UI addition, but it may help heighten the drama for players wishing to survive the season with a single character. More importantly, it’s a way to give each player their own face and voice in the drama, even as not everyone will be among the diehards who end up in the series itself.
Players who miss TWD: LM content can keep up with what happens via a post-show which will air regularly. Those who engage with TWD: LM long enough will earn currency that can be used to bid on a variety of rewards including a walk-on role in the cinematics of the series.