Dispatch began with four video tracks and a doughnut shop

By Sophie Lindqvist

Dispatch has sold five million copies in the year since its release on PC and PlayStation 5, establishing AdHoc’s workplace comedy about managing reformed villains from behind a desk as a commercial success. An iOS and Android version arrives on 9 December, following October’s anniversary Deluxe Edition.

Built in Unreal Engine, Dispatch stars Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul as former superhero Robert Robertson. Jeffrey Wright, Laura Bailey and members of the Critical Role cast also appear. The animated episodic comedy uses television-style chapters while placing the player in charge of dispatching heroes to calls.

The project began as something else. AdHoc, founded in Los Angeles in 2018 by Telltale Games alumni, set out to make interactive experiences with real actors on screen, and Dispatch started as a live-action production.

Co-founders Nick Herman, the studio’s chief operating officer and co-creative director, and Dennis Lenart, its chief technology officer and co-creative director, have explained which parts survived the move to animation.

How did a browser test become a core game mechanic?

One script fragment remained from the first live-action version into the animated game: the doughnut shop scene in episode two. In the original, players watched camera feeds as the hero Invisigal dealt with a thief and supplied information she needed to succeed. Switching cameras exposed different information, making the player’s choice of attention part of the interaction.

The browser imposed hard limits. Herman said the scene was built around that technology, recalling, “I think it was like four simultaneous tracks of video.” In the shop scene, watching the alley concealed the interior. Players chose where to look, and the game revealed different information. Herman considered it an ideal test, so the team retained the scene.

AdHoc then incorporated hacking from the final design so Robert would appear to help Invisigal. The change translated the original camera-selection exercise into a mechanic suited to the finished superhero dispatcher.

Why did dispatching mechanics require a team?

Sending heroes out on calls required a roster. Lenart said, “So the Z-Team was created to support the gameplay,” before that roster reshaped the story and the season’s arc. What began as a one-on-one mentorship between Robert and Invisigal became an ensemble, showing how interface requirements can drive narrative structure rather than merely decorate it.

AdHoc starts with the world, its characters and the player’s identity before choosing gameplay. Herman contrasted this with studios that begin with genre and polished mechanics, then ask what the story should be. If the player is a superhero dispatcher, the product needs a dispatching mechanic. After the script comes storyboards, animatics and animation.

Storyboard Mode in the Deluxe Edition now exposes that production sequence. It plays the entire game through its original animatics, giving players a view of how scenes were planned, scripted and animated. The update turns a production artifact into an explanatory interface, making design decisions legible rather than concealing them behind the final image.

Why did animation change the story’s scale?

Budget partly drove the switch. Lenart said the live-action team was severely limited by budget compared with big-budget superhero tentpole movies. That constraint helped place much of the story in an office with a small cast. Animation reversed the relationship between scale and expense and also echoed the handmade style of Mixtape, giving AdHoc room to grow.

With animation, a large action scene required broadly similar expenditure to a scene of characters walking and talking. That let the studio reserve spectacle for moments that warranted it and compete with the best animation of comparable scenes. The production decision widened both staging and narrative range without a proportionate rise in cost.

What did five million sales change?

Herman said he did not know of any major epiphanies about how interactive stories should work. He described the launch as a labour of love and a long body of work distilled into one experience the team considered exciting and of high quality.

Success has given AdHoc and developers of similar games more confidence, he said, because the field had lacked a recent, clear example of a game like Dispatch reaching enough success for a developer to raise funding.

Dispatch also reached people who had not considered gaming for themselves, Herman said. Lenart saw that response as motivation to keep making narrative games and expand the studio’s possibilities. His answer shifted attention from a breakthrough to a funding precedent and evidence that an episodic workplace comedy could find players beyond a core game audience.

The Deluxe Edition is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch/Switch 2. Existing owners can upgrade for $10.99. The 9 December mobile release will extend Dispatch beyond its original PC and PlayStation 5 launch, while Storyboard Mode makes the studio’s story-first process part of the product.