AdHoc Studio, founded in 2018 by former Telltale employees, initially aimed to create multimedia content. They drew inspiration from ESPN's "This Is SportsCenter" commercials while developing a live action superhero workplace comedy. The deadpan humor of athletes in an office setting influenced their project's direction. However, their progress was interrupted by the onset of COVID-19, which forced them to shift their focus from the halted project to other endeavors.
AdHoc Studio was founded in 2018 by Telltale vets Michael Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette. Originally, AdHoc was going to work in multimedia spaces, and not strictly games, with chief creative officer Shorette telling Variety in 2019, "As a group of people whose expertise and experience has come from making Interactive Narrative that sits in that space between, we feel now is the perfect time to form a studio that focuses on creating content for a new space."
The studio was working on a "live action superhero workplace comedy" at the time. For inspiration, the team pulled from an unlikely place: ESPN's "This Is SportsCenter" commercials. Athletes, coaches, and team mascots would join SportsCenter anchors in ESPN's offices for legitimately comedic commercials hinging on the oddness of kitted-out athletes in an office setting, like Las Vegas Golden Knights players running the Stanley Cup through the office dishwasher.
Herman called the deadpan, office-bound humor, "a cool vibe. This is an interesting juxtaposition, at least visually, and it's a great setup for jokes and stuff like that, so we keyed into that early on and that became like a touchstone as we were developing the projects."
We're headed into production on that," Herman said, "when COVID hit. That project was essentially shut down, and AdHoc turned its attention elsewhere.
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