Note that there are some small spoilers for the Dispatch game in this article. Not many – a couple of small ones – but consider this a heads-up.
It seems absurd now to think Dispatch would be anything but a success. It might have fallen awkwardly with regards to The Game Awards, with half of the series qualifying for it and half not, meaning it didn’t feature as strongly as it could have, but I’ve no doubt it’ll finish high on game of the year lists. There’s so much confidence in this superhero workplace comedy, so much charm and so much swagger, it seems as though it was always destined for big things. Except, it very nearly wasn’t. There was a time, a very real and painful time, when Dispatch nearly didn’t make it – when Dispatch nearly died.
As game director and AdHoc studio co-founder Nick Herman tells me, speaking in a video call: “We had a publisher who dropped us halfway through because of… financial things.”
Dispatch writer and fellow co-founder Pierre Shorette continues: “The industry was collapsing, if you recall, two years ago. We were right there. Without really getting into the details, we were at the tip of the spear of it all popping. The publisher we were at was connected with Embracer, and I feel like Embracer was one of the first dominoes to really set the industry shaking, so we were right there at the edge of it. It was a weird place to be.
“We were doing contract work at the time,” he adds. (One game AdHoc was working on was Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us 2 – a project that has since disappeared into development limbo.) “We’d been pretty good about staying busy. And had we not had that contract work basically paying the bills for us to continue development, we would have died three years ago.”
But finding another publisher wasn’t easy – in fact, Dispatch never really found one. The game lists Critical Role as publisher – the role-play mega-group that’s become an entertainment brand and a publisher of board games and tabletop RPGs – but it’s a nominal title, there to add exposure and clout, and to formalise the relationship for the other game AdHoc is making: a Critical Role game set in the group’s campaign world of Exandria.
Mostly, rejection was what Dispatch faced, which is why it’s so strange for Herman and Shorette to see people mystified when they say they didn’t know the game would be a success. “People are mad at us because ‘how could they not know this was going to be a huge success?'” Herman says.
“I’ll tell you how,” Shorette adds: “you have basically everyone tell you it’s a bad idea for seven fucking years!”
“Telling us ‘this is dumb, don’t do it,'” Herman says.
“‘You’re making a game in a dead genre,'” Shorette says.
“And god I’m glad it shook out the way it did and people rejected us,” Herman continues, “and we pachinkoed all the way down to our last resort and found someone, because now we are in the most control. We don’t have a publisher: we’re our own publisher. We weren’t forced to do anything we didn’t want to do. And now we have full ownership, whereas that wouldn’t have been the case if people really believed in us.”
Dispatch started life as an interactive live-action television series, which sounds to me similar in concept to Netflix’s Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, where you’re invited to choose the direction the story takes at prescribed moments throughout. Laura Bailey, the Critical Role member and an award-winning video game actor, was attached to the project back then (Herman and Shorette knew her from their Telltale days), but she was the only person we’d recognise from the current Dispatch cast.
Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul wasn’t yet on board to play main character Robert. Apparently, the studio was thinking about going for someone else, Rahul Kohli, the British actor we saw on The Game Awards stage the other night promoting Housemarque’s game Saros, in which he stars. Kohli also happens to be the partner of Alannah Pearce, who we know better now as the muscled Dispatch hero Malevola, or “muscle mommy” or “demon Cindy Crawford”, as Shorette refers to her. “We talked about Rahul, yeah,” Herman says.
This live-action incarnation of Dispatch was being made for a company related to Walmart, the American supermarket behemoth. I assume it was Eko, an interactive storytelling company Walmart announced in 2018, although this isn’t confirmed. And the project went a long way through development, it had shoot dates, but Covid struck and closed the world down and took the project with it. Maybe it was for the best. As Herman told me in a pre-release Dispatch interview: “You’re asking a bunch of game devs to shoot a TV show. It would have been a fun failure.”
Dispatch was forced to change. There are things we would recognise from that early idea in the game we can play today, Herman says, but the tone was noticeably different. “It was a much sadder Robert – less hopeful, less optimistic, more just destroyed, working a dead-end job,” Herman says. “And you were focused on one hero. There wasn’t a Z-team. It was just: you would choose one of three heroes to help.” Those heroes were Water Boy, Mr Whiskey – the person in the cat costume – and Invisigal. There was no Blonde Blazer, the blonde-haired super woman, at all. Scratch that: there was a Blonde Blazer, but it wasn’t who you think.
“We haven’t talked about this [but] Blonde Blazer used to be the name of Flambae”
“We haven’t talked about this [but] Blonde Blazer used to be the name of Flambae,” Herman reveals. “He was blonde. In the original, original scripts, he was Blonde Blazer. And I can’t remember what she was called; we started moving names around at some point.”
The longer Covid lingered, the more a fundamental change began to take hold. As the real world got less hopeful, the game got more hopeful. As the real world darkened, the game lightened. Shorette and Herman refer to this as the Ted Lasso effect, referencing Apple TV’s award-winning comedy that came out around the same time, centered on a relentlessly optimistic football coach called Ted Lasso. “It was definitely impactful,” says Shorette. And this uptick in optimism changed how the team wanted to go about things. “We spent so much time at Telltale just figuring out how to make people like people and then figure out the worst way to murder them,” Shorette says, “and it just got old.”
For instance, in the first draft of Dispatch, Robert’s lifelong friend Chase – who has superspeed but also ages at superspeed when he uses his powers – would die. There was one revision where the season would even end with his death. But Shorette took it out and changed his mind. “Why?” says Shorette. “I liked him. Why the fuck would we kill character we like? It was so hard to get people to like him. Why would we throw that away?”
Alongside Chase, the project had two other core characters in Invisigal and Blonde Blazer – the actual Blonde Blazer this time. These characters were established early on as the core of the experience and driving force of the story. Everyone else, the Malevolas, Sonars, Punch-Ups and Prisms, came quite a lot later. Indeed it wasn’t until the team took a mid-development excursion to Reno, or “shit Vegas”, as one of Shorette’s friends calls it, that the Z-team concept whereby you look after a group of misfit superheroes was landed upon.
You’ll recall that the live-action idea had been about coaching a hero one-on-one, so the game would focus on one hero and one mission and you’d coach them through it, watching their progress on a series of security camera feeds. Sound familiar? It is – the remnants of this approach are in the game still, in the first mission where Invisigal goes to the doughnut shop. “That was in the original script,” says Herman, “except you had a bunch of cameras, you were able to hop around, and you were able to engage with the environment. It was a little bit more adventure-gamey, honestly, more puzzley.” And there were bigger ideas for this approach than that.
“The doughnut shop was a small box,” says Herman, “but we had prototypes for big versions of that where you’re going through enemy bases and stuff. And it was cool but it was really expensive because it’s all cinematic. All these angles of cameras, all these different things that can happen. So we were slowly realising we’re going to do three of these in the whole game, it’s so expensive, so we’ve got to pivot to something we can put everywhere.”
Dispatching was the answer and a thematically appropriate one, dreamt up in a designer’s room in a hotel in Reno. It’s the system you know from the game now: you see a map of a city and events occur in it which you dispatch heroes to attend to. It’s a pleasing layer of strategy. More importantly, it’s gameplay that doesn’t require cinematics, where characters can chat without having to be animated, and where episodes can be broken up and given gameplay substance. But a sudden need for a team meant the team also needed characters.
Shorette and Herman and the rest of the team began looking wherever they could for characters they could pull in. That literal bat-man in the break room who’d been put there as a gag? He’ll do. “I had forgotten that Sonar was just a gag,” Shorette says, laughing. Herman adds: “We had to dust that guy off and, okay, maybe he also turns into a giant bat. Maybe he’s a crypto guy. But originally it was just a guy who’s screaming in the break room and it was adding tension to a dialogue scene you were having.”
Ideas for the other heroes came quick and thick, and soon there were so many, some had to be cut, such as Winter, “A K-pop star,” says Shorette.
“Was he?” asks Herman. “I don’t think he was. He was dressed like a Japanese homeless man.”
“But the vibe was one of those homeless people where you’re like, damn, you should be on a runway,” Shorette says. “He had a Korean idol-y kind of face. He looked like a Saja Boy undercover.”
And Herman groans and says “I know” when I mention the obvious: that cutting a Saja Boy-like character in the year of KPop Demon Hunters is a massive missed opportunity.
“We actually had a love triangle with him,” Shorette adds. “He was the one everyone was after. Yeah that would have been great. We should do that for Season 2. If there is a Season 2!”
Let’s leap forwards again in time to people playing the final game, and if the success of the game was unexpected, the ways in which people played the game were unexpected too. One decision that people made in particular surprised the team: more people sided with Invisigal than Blonde Blazer. Internal tests signalled the split would be roughly down the middle, but when the game came out, it was anything but. Statistics showed three quarters of the playerbase choosing Invisigal, and Herman thinks that’s his fault.
“There are things I would do if I was going back to that to balance the choice a little bit better,” he says, “because weirdly, it’s like we have responsibility here. It’s not just pure player emotion or the words on a page or the actors: it’s also about how the choice is presented. That’s my episode and I could have done a better job to push things a little bit towards Blazer. Like, she could have been on screen – we could have split-screen seen her in the back of the limo texting Robert. And just seeing her would make people more choose her. They were staring at Invisigal and getting a text from Blazer, so it’s not really balanced, you know?”
They also didn’t expect people to attach themselves as emotionally as they did to the characters of the game. In their development bubble, they often saw the game as a collection of goofs and gags and literal dick jokes. (They’re big fans of streams where people enable nudity only to hurriedly try and turn it off when they realise what the on/off switch is there for, by the way. “It’s very funny,” Shorette says, laughing. “People are uncomfortable about dicks.”) But the fans’ seriousness about the characters, their artwork, their fiction, their love for them, has shown them a side to Dispatch they didn’t necessarily realise was there.
“To see some people take it so seriously, it almost feels like, oh, we’ve got to take this more seriously now that everyone else is taking it more seriously,” Herman says. “Because for a long time it was just goofs and gags and this is kind of cool – what do you think? And now it’s locked in that people care about these people, they care about these details.
“For it to be called a comedy is underselling how it’s affecting people,” Shorette adds. “I’ve always just called it comedy but I think we’ve always had that dismissive, like, ahh that’s just a bunch of fart jokes. But then people are into Robert’s positivity. They feel like that’s a fucking good man, and we need good male role models, people who are not corny about being positive or believing in people. That’s cool – it’s a good time.”
Which brings back around to where we began, sort of, with fans being somewhat mad at AdHoc for not predicting Dispatch would be a success. Because it turns out fans are also mad that AdHoc hasn’t told them what it’s doing next, as far as Dispatch and a second season or sequel are concerned. “It’s the new problem, right?” says Herman. “It’s like, are you doing it? Are you not doing it?” So how seriously are they talking about it?
“As seriously as anything,” answers Shorette. “But the thing is, the tough thing is, it’s like in music: you have your whole life to write your first album and then eight months to write your second. And there’s a little bit of that feeling. We had so long with this – seven years is a lot of time. If anything, it would have been embarrassing if it was bad. I mean, you took fucking long enough! We’re taking GTA 6 amounts of time on this shit, you know – it better be good. I know we’re not going to have that amount of time for Season 2 because we want to meet the demand.”
“There were zero expectations for Season 1 – external expectations,” Herman adds. “People just had to show up and enjoy it and not have a bunch of theories and stuff in their head. Season 2, if we do it, we know that’s going to be an extra challenge.”
“A lot of pressure,” adds Shorette. “It’ll be about what it’s not as much as what it is.”
The team is “days away” from sitting down and figuring out what comes next, Herman tells me, which considering I spoke to them a couple of weeks ago might already have come to pass. “We’re entering the time where we’re going to really sit down and lay those plans out,” he says. And I would be amazed – flabbergasted, even – if these plans don’t include a Dispatch Season 2.
But the studio also has that Critical Role game to make, don’t forget, though it doesn’t sound as far along as I had hoped it would be. “It’s been bubbling, simmering I would call it,” Shorette says. “It’s not full boil or anything. It probably has had pushes over the last year or so, at different points, but as Dispatch needed to get released, that took up a lot of our resources.”
Whatever the future holds for AdHoc, though, it is certainly bright. Blazingly bright, even. From a studio struggling for survival, nervous about whether the world would want a Telltale-style episodic game, AdHoc and Dispatch have become one of 2025’s most notable successes. The pressure of survival is off; the pressure of success is on. The world cannot get enough of Dispatch.
