Tim Schafer - Career

Career

While studying computer science at UC Berkeley, Tim Schafer worked at Lucasfilm Games. During his application process for the job, he had a somewhat disastrous phone interview in which he mentioned being a fan of Ballblaster. The interviewer, David Fox, informed him that the Lucasfilm Games title was Ballblazer, and that only the pirated version was known as Ballblaster. Schafer was still permitted to send in his resume and a cover letter, so to make up for the phone interview, he sent in a comic of himself applying for and getting the job at Lucasfilm Games, drawn as a text adventure.

On March 21, 1989 Schafer sent a job application to Atari, which was denied. Atari stated that they had no available positions at that time, and that he would be reconsidered depending of their needs in relation to his experience and skills.

After play testing the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade action game and assisting with the NES version of Maniac Mansion, Schafer was assigned as a writer and programmer to the production of the pirate-themed adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island.

According to series creator Ron Gilbert, Schafer and fellow writer-programmer Dave Grossman were responsible for about two thirds of the game's dialogue. Monkey Island is noted for its humorous story, though it was originally conceived as having a more serious tone; Schafer and Grossman wrote much more humorous placeholder dialog, which persuaded Gilbert to turn it into a comedy. The Secret of Monkey Island became one of the most acclaimed games of its kind. The same team created the sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.

In his first lead role on a game project, Schafer co-designed (with Dave Grossman) Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, a time-travel comedy adventure and the sequel of Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion. Schafer's first solo project, the biker adventure Full Throttle, was released in 1995. He went on to design the highly acclaimed Grim Fandango, a noir adventure game set in the Aztec afterlife featuring characters similar to the papier-mâché skeleton decorations from the Mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos. Grim Fandango won many awards, including GameSpot's Game of the Year award of 1998.

Schafer worked on an unannounced PlayStation 2 action-adventure game at LucasArts, but it never entered production. He left the company in January 2000 to found Double Fine Productions, where he created the platform game Psychonauts. The game was first released on Xbox in North America on April 19, 2005. It won much critical acclaim, including a Game of the Year award from Eurogamer.

On March 7, 2007, he hosted the annual Game Developers Choice Awards. He later hosted it again in 2009. To coincide, Double Fine released a free Flash minigame entitled Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, a pastiche of Schafer's LucasArts games in which the player takes on the role of Schafer backstage at the GDC Awards.

In fall 2009, Schafer completed a new game called Brütal Legend. The game was released on October 13, 2009, on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles. In an April 2009 interview on The Jace Hall Show, Schafer had this to say about Brütal Legend: "For Brütal Legend, 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."

Schafer announced in July 2010 that EA had canceled the sequel to Brütal Legend. Instead of Brütal Legend 2, Double Fine had a period called "Amnesia Fortnight", where the team came up with prototype games that could be pitched to publishers. From these, four smaller games were made that for the first time in Double Fine's history had project leaders other than Schafer: Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade and Once upon a Monster.

On February 1, 2012, Schafer returned to the role of director in Double Fine Happy Action Theater, a game concept he devised in order to be able to play a game with his two year old daughter that she would be able to enjoy as well.

On February 9, 2012, Schafer launched a crowdfunded project for an unnamed adventure game via Kickstarter.com. The game and accompanying documentary were projected to cost US$400,000. Contributions exceeded that amount by more than three times in less than 24 hours, making it the first Kickstarter project to reach a $2 million figure, and the second most successful project on the website thus far. The Kickstarter project has since reached the $3 million mark. When the project ended on March 13, funding reached a level of $3,336,371 in Kickstarter with an additional $110,000 from premium pledges.

Another title from the "amnesia fortnight" prototype session was developed into Double Fine's first free-to-play iOS title with funding from Dracogen. The game, titled Middle Manager of Justice, was accidentally released in all territories on September 5, 2012, but was quickly pulled. That build was later branded beta, with the final release coming later in 2012. Like the other four "amnesia fortnight" titles, Middle Manager of Justice had a project leader other than Tim Schafer.