Like any superhero worth their salt, Dispatch has an interesting origin story.
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 very first thing when we started our studio, we got hired to write something that was actually supposed to be live action,” director Herman told Polygon during a recent video call. 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.
“We were watching those YouTube compilations of that early on,” Herman said. He 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.”
Work was progressing for the project when the team rammed into a major roadblock. “We’re headed into production on that,” Herman said, “when COVID hit.”
That project was essentially shut down, and AdHoc turned its attention elsewhere. “Some of that stuff’s been announced already,” Herman said, like The Wolf Among Us 2, which AdHoc is developing alongside the revamped Telltale Games.
AdHoc wasn’t going to let its work on that superhero workplace comedy go to waste, and instead repurposed it into the Dispatch we know today — a choice-based, dialogue-heavy game. “Eventually we just said, ‘Hey, let’s take this thing and […] bring it back into the world that we were more familiar with,’” Herman said.
Dispatch puts players at the desk of Robert Robertson, played by Aaron Paul. Robertson is the former superhero Mecha Man and now has to take a desk job at the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN), working alongside other former superheroes, like Jeffrey Wright’s Chase. Robertson’s in charge of a team of misfit “ex-villains,” as Herman described them, who may be more trouble than they’re worth. “[Robert] doesn’t have superpowers. He’s the guy who should be giving up at any given moment, but that heart and that courage is what actually makes him a hero, right?” Herman said.
He described Robertson’s mindset as, “‘I guess this is my life now. How do I find joy in this?’ And being surrounded by these pretty miserable people isn’t making it any easier.”
Robertson’s work isn’t the most glamorous, and the office could use some upgrades too. Originally, for the live action version of the project, “We intentionally were making everything very shitty — can I say shitty?” Herman said. “Really dumpy, let’s say, and it was like SDN was in a kind of strip mall. There was a Baskin-Robbins next door, you know, and it was kind of this almost insurance salesman-y type of vibe […] it’s a comedy, so we were leaning into it.”
Once the project transitioned to being a game — where set budgets wouldn’t be a concern, and AdHoc was free to design the world how it saw fit — the developer called an audible, as Herman described it. “Why wouldn’t we want to make a place in a world where people enjoy being?” AdHoc leaned on the talent of its artists and art director, and the SDN office was made “less dumpy” with more modern architecture. Still, it’s something of a relic from a different time; Robertson is working in a dress shirt at a cubicle, not in his workout clothes at his home office.
On those “This Is SportsCenter” commercials and how the vibe of Dispatch’s office doesn’t quite resemble a post-pandemic work environment, Herman acknowledged, “It’s weird because office culture’s changed so much and with Dispatch, it’s like they’re in cubicles and no one’s working from home and it’s kind of on the edge of dated, but we also try to lean into it a little bit.” While the game is set in the 2020s, the technology of it has an old-school feel; gone is the dumpy strip mall office and in comes a space that “feels like they’re maybe in an old government building.”
Robertson’s work will definitely feel government adjacent. Comic book readers might get a sense that he’s working for an organization akin to a low-budget SHIELD or ARGUS. His days will be spent sending those ex-villains out on assignments, like squashing robberies or rescuing cats. AdHoc wanted Robertson to lead a team of misfits, as opposed to an Avengers-like squad, “just because it’s funnier.” Originally, Robertson was going to monitor a much smaller team of just three supes, but AdHoc shifted to a larger team to make the gameplay more engaging.
“Once we got into the dispatch mechanic [for the core gameplay loop], we realized more bodies are better,” Herman said. Expanding the team brought about its own challenges, of course. “It was pretty daunting initially, but the gameplay that we were coming up with was sticky, so we kind of stuck to it and then worked [the additional characters] into the story and figured out who those characters were and now we’re here.”
Hailing from ex-Telltale developers, player agency will be at the heart of Dispatch. Players will be able to choose Robertson’s actions and dialogues, and characters “will remember that,” just like in Telltale games. When asked how Adhoc would ensure those choices are reflected throughout the game and its endings, Herman answered bluntly. “Yeah, it’s hard. That’s the short answer. It’s hard.”
But it’s not something that AdHoc worries about at the start, knowing the stories and characters have to grow and that the developers themselves might be surprised by the directions they take. “It’s actually pretty organic and it’s pretty close to how you would write a television show, I think,” Herman said. “The problem is you just have to write multiple television shows or multiple endings, multiple great outcomes to these threads, and I think that’s the part that some people maybe don’t understand.”
On the topic of endings, Herman pushed back against the idea that more is always better; instead, the Dispatch team is focused on making sure each possible ending offers a satisfying conclusion. “I think as a team, we’re less interested in [having a lot of endings], because you got to have 30 incredible endings, otherwise a percentage of the audience are just going to get this kind of shoulder shrug conclusion, right?
“So, our focus is on getting players to care, primarily about characters and about relationships,” Herman said. “We want to allow them to invest in those relationships and have meaningful consequences, and so that’s where we put most of our effort into.”
That effort is still ongoing; Dispatch has a 2025 release window, but no concrete release date just yet. It’s only been officially announced for PC so far, but Herman said, “We have plans to come to consoles. Those plans have not yet been shared, but it is our intent.” Until then, you’ll just have to enjoy the Steam demo and watch some SportCenter commercials. Scott Van Pelt taking LeBron James’ throne will never get old.