Traveller's Tales

Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Video games
Founded	1989; 36 years ago (1989)
Founders	Jon Burton Andy Ingram
Headquarters	Knutsford , England
Products	Toy Story (1995–2001) Sonic the Hedgehog (1996–1997) Crash Bandicoot (2001–2004) Lego (2005–present)
Parent	TT Games (2005–present)

Traveller's Tales is a Britishvideo game developer and asubsidiary ofTT Games. Traveller's Tales was founded in 1989 byJon Burton and Andy Ingram. Initially a small company focused on its own games, it grew in profile through developing games with larger companies such asSega andDisney Interactive Studios. In 2004, development onLego Star Wars: The Video Game started withGiant Interactive Entertainment, the exclusive rights holder toLego video games. Traveller's Tales bought the company in 2005, and the two merged to createTT Games, with Traveller's Tales becoming the new company's development arm.^[1][2]

Traveller's Tales started developing games withPsygnosis, which were most notable for creating 3D effects. Their first game wasLeander, also known asThe Legend of Galahad.^[3] With Psygnosis they developed a video game adaption ofBram Stoker's Dracula, as well as other original productions likePuggsy andRascal. Thanks to an agreement between Psygnosis,Sony Imagesoft and Disney Interactive Studios, Traveller's Tales could produce several games based on Disney's properties, such as the Mickey Mouse gameMickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse and other games based onPixar films likeToy Story,A Bug's Life,Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue andFinding Nemo (the latter two thanks to agreements withActivision andTHQ).^{[citation needed]}

Traveller's Tales was best known in the 1990s and early 2000s for their second-party collaboration withSega to develop games based on theSonic the Hedgehog franchise, resulting inSonic 3D Blast andSonic R, which were produced in close effort with Sega'sSonic Team. Both games were regarded as technical achievements in theMega Drive (Sonic 3D Blast) and theSega Saturn (Sonic R), adding to the high-tech development status they already had with games likePuggsy,Mickey Mania andToy Story. They were also responsible forCrash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex andCrash Twinsanity, under theVivendi label.^{[citation needed]}

They developedLego Star Wars: The Video Game as well as its follow-ups. Outside of the Lego games, their work includes entries in theCrash Bandicoot franchise, twoThe Chronicles of Narnia games,Super Monkey Ball Adventure, andWorld Rally Championship andF1 Grand Prix for thePlayStation Portable.^[4]

The company was purchased byWarner Bros. Interactive Entertainment at the end of 8 November 2007,^[5] but continued to operate independently. Following the release ofThe Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), Traveller's Tales would work exclusively on Lego titles – though other TT subsidiaries such as TT Fusion continued to use other intellectual property until the early 2010s. While some of the early Lego titles would be published byLucasArts, from 2011 Warner would also act as the studio's exclusive publisher.^[4]

In 2015, Traveller's Tales entered thetoys-to-life business withLego Dimensions, which used a toy pad to enter physicalLego minifigures and Lego models into the game, as well as interact with gameplay. The game included existing Lego themes likeDC Comics,The Lego Movie andThe Lord of the Rings, as well as new properties such asPortal 2 andWizard of Oz. The game was discontinued in October 2017.^[6]

Traveller's Tales has won twoBAFTAs, one for Gameplay withLego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, and one for Children's Videogame of the Year forLego Batman: The Videogame.^[7][8]

On 20 January 2022, a report published byPolygon detailed the amount ofcrunch that occurred at the studio during the development ofLego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, including dozens inside the company being at odds with management, due to expressing frustration over tight development schedules, the company's crunch culture, and outdated development tools. In addition, the use of NTT (a new in-house engine that was being developed to replace Traveller's Tales' previous engine in attempt to avoid paying royalties for using a third-party engine likeUnreal Engine orUnity) was controversial within the company, as many employees had been pushing to instead use Unreal Engine. NTT turned out to be difficult to use, with some animations taking hours more to produce than they would on the old engine. As a result,The Skywalker Saga would end up being the only game developed by Traveller's Tales to use NTT, with the company deciding to use Unreal Engine going forward for their future projects.^[9]

• Official website

• 1989 establishments in England
• 2005 mergers and acquisitions
• British companies established in 1989
• British subsidiaries of foreign companies
• Companies based in Cheshire
• Knutsford
• Video game companies established in 1989
• Video game companies of the United Kingdom
• Video game development companies
• Warner Bros. Games

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use dmy dates from March 2016
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from May 2023
• Official website different in Wikidata and Wikipedia