Telltale has worked with established titles since the company’s inception in 2004. Lee escapes unharmed, thus beginning his journey out of Macon, where he meets a variety of people hoping to survive, including little Clementine.

As the playable character, the game begins with Lee in a cop car heading to jail, when a zombie derails the car and kills the driver. When I first played The Walking Dead, I mistakenly believed the game was about Lee Everett, a former University of Georgia professor who is convicted of murder after killing a man for sleeping with his wife. Six years later, the series, and the company that made it, has come to an end. I listened to people grow attached to the characters, hoping death wouldn’t be so inevitable. I watched videos about what choices other players picked and why.

It was episodic, reminiscent of television shows, but with the interactive spin of letting the player decide what to do. The Walking Dead was unlike any game I had ever experienced. When I tried the game’s first episode, “A New Day,” I was hooked. I was initially disinterested in yet another story about surviving a zombie apocalypse, but so much chatter about the game made me realize that the epidemic was a secondary role to the story. I’ve played every episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.

Little did we all know an 8-year old girl named Clementine would herald in a new form of narrative gaming, and a story to be cherished forever. This is a eulogy for the end of a series and of a company, and also for a game that I loved to death.

Clementine season