Double Fine’s attention was focused on its new point-and-click adventure Broken Age and the release of Massive Chalice, but ten years ago it was Psychonauts that was blowing minds…
So you left LucasArts in 2000 to create Double Fine Productions.
I almost can’t take credit for the idea of leaving LucasArts. Friends of mine there did a napkin map and said we should leave and make PS2 games because we could make a lot of money. I was kind of wary. I didn’t want to leave because I had a sweet gig there. A lot of things were taken care of and I only had to worry about the games and making them as good as possible.
How did Psychonauts come about?
Psychonauts was a mutation of ideas. Some of the themes and the concepts had been in early game pitches I made at LucasArts. The idea of dreams went as far back as Full Throttle. I always wanted to work with interactive dreams and visions and I was interested in the idea that there are things in your head that you do not consciously know. But it’s funny because someone walked into the office and said, “Tell me about that thing when you go into other people’s heads”, and I was like, “No, no, it is going deep into your own head”. And I thought ‘Wait, that’s better; that’s totally better’. Someone’s misunderstanding of an early pitch helped me come up with this idea of Psychonauts.
Were you excited about going it alone?
We started with three people figuring out how the fax machine worked and fixed the plumbing; the basic stuff that seems romantic when you are starting out a company and you’re in a warehouse and there’s no heat and it’s awesome. It doesn’t seem that romantic when you are at crunch, though.
Did you prefer being in control?
LucasArts was a great place to work, with tons of super talented people. It was a unique company with an amazing ranch and we got so much attention so it was a safe place to be. But it had to make Star Wars games and make money for George. I wanted to work on original projects and control how the team was treated.
Why did Psychonauts take five years?
You know the saying that bumblebees shouldn’t technically be able to fly if you look at the aerodynamics or the weight of them? If you told that to bumblebees, they’d drop to the ground simultaneously. The same was true of us. If we knew of the obstacles in the way of making Psychonauts, we probably wouldn’t have summoned the gusto to do it. It was the first time we had made a platform game and we had junior people working on their first game. We were working with a publisher – Microsoft – that had just launched the Xbox. We were feeling this thing out.
Why make a platform game; wouldn’t it have been easier to stick with what you knew?
I was inspired by 3D platform games. I liked the 3D environments of them, exploring and swimming and having fun. But I felt they were missing the depth of adventure games so I wanted to do something that felt submersive but had unusual settings and non-typical characters and a deep storyline.
How did you develop the characters?
I was trying to write a document about the various kids you see at Summer Camp, looking at their personalities, what they believed in, what their parents were like and that kind of thing. I was spending a lot of time on the social network Friendster – on which I actually met my wife – and I was like, wait a second, I’m going to make fake Friendster profiles for all of these camp kids. It helped me decide who was friends with who, what they might post on each other’s walls and what pictures they may put up to represent themselves. It was really helpful.
Are back stories important?
I am a big believer in them and that’s the secret I think to making characters that really stand out. But I believe in not sharing those back stories by laying them around a world in the form of books. I wanted the characters to reveal little bits and pieces of a back story as they talk.
Why have Psychonauts’ lead character Raz run away from the circus to sneak into a summer camp packed with youngsters with psychic abilities?
I wanted to make a game about childhood where players could explore secret areas and I think wandering around the woods is something a lot of kids have fond memories of. It’s timeless and doesn’t age.
Was that a hallmark of your own childhood?
I remember being ten years old and exploring areas where I knew I shouldn’t be. At our camp there was a bordering edge of barbed wire fence that you couldn’t get over and there was a cabin down there. We’d say it was where Hatchet Mary lived – someone who hacked your parents apart – and we’d dare each other to go down there. It’s an excitement about going where you are not supposed to go and crossing a line. It was something we tried to capture in the summer camp of Psychonauts.
Psychonauts drew on your past adventure games as well, though, didn’t it?
We had dialogue trees, an inventory and straight-up puzzles. It was how I knew how to make a game. But I also drew on life, so we had paranoid milkmen and bacon and stuff like that. The idea for bacon came from a story someone told me about getting rid of tapeworm. If there is a worm in your stomach or your intestines and – sorry, this is gross – you hold a piece a bacon in front of your open mouth and the smell of the bacon will get to the worm. You’ll see its head popping up at the back of your throat so you grab it and pull it out. I thought it was so funny that bacon is so delicious that even a tape worm can’t resist it. Ford Cruller couldn’t resist it either.
A stand-out part of the game was the excellent voice acting by Richard Horowitz, who played Raz. Why choose him?
At first I was trying to go with a Charlie Brown kind of thing with real kids. We had some come in and read out some lines but they didn’t have the right acting experience. With Richard we could say, “Okay, can you do it again but a bit faster because you don’t know the bad guys is bad yet?” and he would say “Gotcha”, and do it about eight different ways. Some little kids can’t change their performance and often just read it the same way again. Yet Richard had this hilarious audition tape. He’s one of those guys who is always changing his voice, like Robin Williams. It was great to have him.
And the soundtrack was the fine work of Peter McConnell, who you had worked with for years…
He worked on Money 2 and Day Of The Tentacle – he wrote the theme for that. We called him in for Psychonauts and he did an amazing job. He has also been involved with Broken Age.
You have said before that Psychonauts came out at the wrong time, when the market had changed. Do you stick with that?
Yes, it was very near the end of the Xbox life cycle. The reason it got cancelled at Microsoft was because they were not going to fund any more Xbox games from the start of 2005 because they were bringing out the Xbox 360. We came out in February that year. I was like, “We’re two months, just two months over that year” but it was just a little too late.
Was that a stressful time?
We had the company riding on it. It was our only game and to think it could all come crashing down would have been a waste. Nobody would have seen it. It would have just disappeared and I would have retired from games. It would have been devastating.
Did you really think of quitting?
No. [laughs] When I get on track with something, I see it through. I made that game and I put so much into it that I would not have accepted any possibility of not finishing it. It’s like with Broken Age. Three years in the making and I’m sure some people thought that we had stopped working on it but no, we’re just about done.
Was it touch and go?
We were so close to the end of our money. I made an announcement to the company at one point that we were shutting down and that Wednesday’s pay check would be the last one. Then two weeks of money came in from a random source and we signed with Majesco so it worked out. When you are really dependent on a publisher for your future, it can be very dicey.
Looking back on it all, would you have done things differently?
Yeah. We didn’t know what we were doing at the time. The fact it was good was because we kept plugging away and learning. The levels took a lot of designing and redesigning and for a long time it wasn’t fun to play. It had crazy backgrounds but the character didn’t feel right because we hadn’t emphasised Raz enough. At some point we got a task force together of people from every discipline to look at Raz and how he felt and played. We looked at how Raz grabbed ladders and tightropes and how he walked and how he stopped walking, how he turned and stuff like that. I think the big lesson was to do that first before you do the rest of the game.
Some dismissed Psychonauts as a children’s game, didn’t they?
Day Of The Tentacle had the same problem. We got a call once from Steven Spielberg who wanted a hint for his son Max. The first thing he said was it was great that we made games for kids. I wanted to say, “Ahh, it’s a fun game for kids to play in that it doesn’t have bad content in it – except for microwaving your hamster and stuff – but it’s not just for kids”. I’ve just always been drawn to cartoon-like humour, and stylised artistic visuals. I grew up with Ren & Stimpy and Warner Bros cartoons. They always had adult content. I just assumed everyone loved that kind of thing too.
Will you ever make a sequel?
Yes. I think the time has to be right and we have to have access to the right kind of money. It has to live up to the first game.
In 2012, Minecraft creator Markus Persson tweeted that he would fund a sequel. What happened there?
It was a nice offer but I think the actual price tag of what it would cost was not what he was expecting. The first game cost $13m, so not exactly cheap. It was an exciting moment and I would still like to do it. But he’s probably got plenty of people asking for money.
Are you surprised at the cult following?
Of course not, it’s awesome [laughs].
Do you feel vindicated for having made the move, then?
[laughs] Yes. Vindicated. I win. [laughs]
Turning to Broken Age briefly, why have you gone back to creating adventure games?
When I walked away from adventure game there was a feeling they didn’t sell and that it was a very narrow focussed, old-fashioned genre. But I wanted to do a game in the style of Nathan Stapley, one of our 2D artists, and really showed his painting style. Adventure games were a natural choice but it never seemed to be a kind of game that you could easily get funding for.
Lucky that Kickstarter arrived then?
The digital age has led to a democratisation of things and we don’t need to wait for a giant company to approve the things we like. We just make it and we can have our own very niche thing and if that’s an adventure game, then we don’t need to wait for them to become popular again.
Have you been able to experiment?
Every adventure game we had made tried to be more modern, accessible or different. We had simplified the verbs from Monkey to DOT, got rid of verbs altogether and introduced 3D controls, that kind of thing. So my question was how to keep that progression going. I was playing Machinarium which inspired me and showed how a single touch interface would do the same things that a verb interface could. I realised games could branch out again. There had been a feeling of apologising for adventure games.
Want to read more from the great mind of Tim Schafer? Check out our special digtial collection of interviews with the Monkey Island and Brütal Legend creator, available to download now.
