Tim Schafer
Tim Schafer
Timothy John "Tim" Schaferis an American computer game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Schafer is best known as the designer of critically acclaimed games Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and Broken Age and co-designer of The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and Day of the Tentacle. He is well known in the video game industry for his storytelling and comedic writing style...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth26 July 1967
CountryUnited States of America
I've always seen this overlap between medieval warfare and heavy metal. You see heavy metal singers and they'll have like a brace around their arm and they'll be singing about Orcs. So let's just make a world where that all happens. That all gets put together, the heavy metal, and the rock, and the battling, actually does happen. Let's not flirt around with this let's just do it.
If you're not loyal to your team, you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you, and it just won't be there.
After 'Psychonauts,' we could have laid off half our team so that we'd have more money and time to sign 'Brutal Legend.' But doing so would have meant breaking up a team that had just learned how to work well together. And what message would that have sent to our employees? It would say that we're not loyal to them, and that we don't care.
I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you.
I would like to reach non-gamers. It's always great when guys come up to me who are gamers and represent my usual audience, but they'll say, 'You know, Psychonauts is the only game I can actually get my girlfriend to play with me.'
What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.
I like any good game. I don't care what the genre is.
Before 'Final Fantasy VII,' I would have told you that I had zero interest in RPGs with turn-based combat. But that game was so well done, I didn't care what genre it was. Any genre can be done poorly or done well.
If I had done a sequel to 'Day of the Tentacle,' there probably wouldn't have been a 'Full Throttle.' If I did a 'Full Throttle' sequel, there wouldn't have been a 'Grim Fandango.' It's important to make new stuff up.