STUDIO PROFILE DOUBLE FINE
In 1999, after a decade developing successive adventure gaming masterpieces at LucasArts, Tim Schafer was shocked to hear the company was working on a sequel to his blockbuster point-and-click title, Full Throttle, without him. “I got pretty down about that because I realised, ‘Wow, I really can’t control the games I’m making; they don’t even talk to me about making a sequel.’” As he watched colleagues leave to start companies like Infinite Machine and Nihilistic, he thought to himself, “If they can do it, maybe I can do it.”
After putting the finishing touches on his seminal 3D adventure title, Grim Fandango, he worked on an unfinished spy game, before biting the bullet and leaving. “I was just sitting around my apartment in my flip flops and bathrobe with this loose idea,” he recalls. The spy game he abandoned would have featured a mechanic that allowed players to meditate on objects and search for clues within their own heads. “I was talking to someone and they were like, ‘Tell me about that game where you go into other peoples’ heads’. I was like, ‘No, you don’t go into other peoples’ heads, you go into your own head, but wait a second…’”
This misunderstanding quickly snowballed into the concept for , a surreal platformer where players travelled through people’s minds, healing their past traumas. (You can read about it in issue 228.) As his idea gathered pace, Tim started putting together a team, largely consisting of his LucasArts colleagues. “My first dumb move was not just that I wanted, and I thought, ‘Well, we’re going to sign a contract really soon, so I’m just going to start paying people,’ and then it took months to sign the contract – so those entire life savings were gone in a matter of months.”
