Amidst the vendors exhibiting at this week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco is one lone Mac game publisher, a new face on the Mac scene called Telltale Games. The company is employing a unique business model to attract gamers that’s worked very well since it was founded in 2004, based around episodic content rather than monolithic releases.

Telltale has made games licensed from established properties like Wallace and Gromit, the popular clay animated characters from Aardman, Sam & Max, Homestarrunner.com, Bone, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Monkey Island.

The big guns in the game industry – companies like Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft and others – work similarly to movie studios, releasing blockbuster games that can cost millions of dollars to produce and promote. Telltale is following a business model similar to the television industry, releasing games in episodic chunks each month.

Dan Connors is CEO and founder of Telltale Games. The trick to finding a successful game that works well as episodic content has been to find material that resonates with both customers and the development team.

“We’ve focused on finding stuff that excited us first,” said Connors. “It’s paid off in a lot of ways. We work with interesting people like Steve Purcell.” Purcell is the cartoonist behind Sam & Max, an award-winning independent comic about a pair of animal private investigators.

Producing games that are released episodically requires different skills than creating a blockbuster release. “The intention is to appeal to different customers,” said Connors.

While a megahit from a big game publisher may require an immersion of dozens of hours to really wring the most of the game, Telltale’s are decided more casual experiences. Players are able to enjoy the world for a few hours and then put it away until next month, when the next installment is released.

Tales of Monkey Island is the first of many Telltale titles to come to the Mac. It’s a graphical adventure game that follows the story of Guybrush Threepwood, a bumbling pirate. This won’t be many older Mac users’ first experience with Monkey Island – the series has been a fan favorite since its first release 20 years ago. The game is being released in its entirety on the Mac, since it’s already released for PC – so Mac gamers will have to pony up $35 all at once to get it.

Connors explained that the underpinning technology that powers Telltale’s games has been brought natively to the Mac, rather than using a translation layer technology like Cider. This will pave the way for easier Mac conversions in the future, he said. The new games require Macs with Intel processors and Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

Telltale is also allowing customers who have already downloaded the Windows version of the game to download the Mac version at no extra charge. And going forward, new releases will be made with both Mac and PC versions bundled together.

Telltale’s leaving it up to Mac customers to tell them which of Telltale’s back catalog should come next. A poll on the Web site lets gamers choose from Sam & Max, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, or Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures.