Tim Schafer: A Man and His Beard

Tim Schafer built his reputation at LucasArts, working on some of the most popular games of the '90s, including Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Schafer left LucasArts to create his own company, Double Fine Productions. After four years, Double Fine's first game is just about ready to roll. Psychonauts ships this spring on Xbox, PS2, and PC. We sat down with a bearded Tim Schafer to discuss the upcoming action-platformer. Though Schafer now looks like a young George Lucas, we did our best to keep our composure.

Tim Schafer: Psychonauts is the story of this kid named Raz, who's a psychic. He busts into this training camp for the Psychonauts, who are international secret agents who use their paranormal abilities to do spy work. This mystery starts to unfold at camp where kids start disappearing and he uncovers this plot by this crazy madman to steal all the psychic brains of all the kids at camp and turn them into these weapons of mass destruction and take over the world. Raz has to get back all the brains.

The really interesting thing about the game is the way he does that is -- his most important psychic ability is the ability to telepathically jump into someone's mind. And those are the levels for the game. He jumps into their imaginary world and runs around. The idea for the game came from, when you see some crazy person or just your friend who is a weird character, and you're like, what is it like inside their head? That crazy guy's talking to himself on the street, who's he talking to? My friend who thinks everything's about him, in his world is he like at the center of this crazy universe? You just try to visually imagine it and in Psychonauts you get to jump around in the world and explore it.

IGN: I've been following this game for a while -- for a long, long while. What's taking so long?

TS: Because we really care, Hilary. (Laughs) Um, we, you know, Psychonauts is a very ambitious project. We wanted to have 13 really completely unique levels. Each one is a different style -- different style of gameplay, different style of art. We don't reuse anything between the levels. There's not that one doorway/arch combination that you see in every level, you know, it's all custom-made, 'cause I think that's part of the fun of exploring a game and unlocking new areas. It's like a whole bunch of new stuff to see and experience.

We want to make the environment as interactive as possible and that takes time. He has psychic powers and he can use them on all the environments. You can set fire to all the plants, you can pick up the rocks and throw them with telekinesis, you can punch all the kids and you can talk to anybody and if you come back and talk to them later they should say something different. [There's] just a lot of detail in the game, because I think that's what's fun about those kind of games is exploring that detail. So, it took a lot of time.

And it was our first game as a company, Double Fine's first. Kind of exciting, 'cause we're coming out now at the end of our very first game. We learned a lot of stuff and you maybe could say our first year of work on it, we kind of chucked out and started again. So it's really only a three-year project. And then when you -- the last year doesn't count, 'cause that's just basically bugs. So, really it's just a two-year game.

IGN: And really, the whole concept period doesn't count, so when you think about it it's just a one-year experience.

TS: (Laughs) I'm going to get this down to negative time eventually.

IGN: The game's great, it's inventive, and it did take negative three days to make. So why the hell did Microsoft cut the project?

TS: Before we were with Majesco we were with Microsoft. When they first started out with the Xbox, there was a big push for our kind of game -- a non-traditional, ground-breaking kind of game. We wanted to do something that would be a milestone, [that] would change things. They were into that then. They had some changeover and a lot of games didn't fit what they wanted to do anymore. Majesco stepped up and said, "This is exactly the kind of game that we want to make." So, they've been really supportive and great about it.

IGN: When did you first conceive Psychonauts?

TS: Way back during Full Throttle, making Full Throttle, there's a sequence in it where [the main character] Ben was going to eat peyote and go on this interactive peyote trip. We thought that was really cool, but we were working at kind of a family entertainment company and we didn't think that would really fly. We tried to do it different ways and it didn't work out.

Every game I've tried to put some sort of interactive either psychological trip or interactive dream sequence or something like that, because you can mess with images that are on the level of surrealism. Like in a Miyamoto game, you get these crazy surreal images and they're really awesome to look at. The cool thing is, if you do that in a dream or in a mental world, they're all part of the dreamer's head. They all have psychological significance and they all mean something. You see that in someone's head and, you know, when there's a bullet and it has eyes on front of it, that says something about that guy. And you come out of his head and you say, "Whoa, what's going on inside that person's head?" And it relates to how they behave in the real world. And you could have fun with just crazy constructs.

You could make sequels or a TV show or anything out of it, because everyone you know who's a unique character, who's interesting, going into their head would be a whole different level. It would be fun to explore.