Tim Schafer Talks Psychonauts Originality, Dialog, Release

Thanks to GameSpot for its interview with Double Fine founder and Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer, following the game's split with Microsoft and subsequent re-signing with Majesco. Schafer, best known for "work on Day of The Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango" at LucasArts, discusses originality ("One of the good things about the state of the games industry right now is that it's incredibly easy to be original. I mean, if you released a game these days that didn't have any army guys in it people would freak out. 'Omg. Where did they get the idea to not use army guys? Are they taking drugs?'"), shaping Psychonauts' story ("I still write most of the dialog. I had some help this time around from Erik Wolpaw from Old Man Murray."), and the state of the game ("We've got a few levels at beta right now, some others at alpha, others somewhere in between, and a new level that we're doing now. We're looking at an early- to mid-2005 release.")

Comments

for those who don't know...

[hkon]

Psychonauts is also a nickname for those who are religiously following the band Motorpsycho. The Greateful Dead had/has Deadheads, Motorpsycho has Psychonauts.

Yes, this is totally off topic, I just thought it'd be fun with a bit of useless trivia.

Re:for those who don't know...

[acxr is wasted]

I believe, in this context, psychonaut refers to someone who explores inner space.

Army guys?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Guess he's not seen the sales figures for original games lately.

Anyone remember Bill Hatcher? Made by Sonic team, pushed eggs around, fight evil crows dressed in a chicken suit... yea thought now..

No one wants to take a risk any more because the industry is no longer about the games. It's about the money, if you get a format (FF, FPS games) you can make endeless sequals and be 99% sure of getting your money and a bit more back.

Just look at this year. Top two most wanted games are, Half-life 2, FFX whatever it is now and Doom 3. All three will sell millions and be called classic even if they suck.

Why risk money when you can have another sure fire "open my legs and ride me till dawn" sequal?

Re:Army guys?

[bigman2003]

A lot of people were very upset when Microsoft dropped this game. "Oh, finally there is something original, and Microsoft had to go and dump it!"

The fact that it was picked up by Majesco should say something about the quality of the game. Possibly it is not all that it could have been?

Re:Army guys?

[AvantLegion]

>> Anyone remember Bill Hatcher? Made by Sonic team, pushed eggs around, fight evil crows dressed in a chicken suit... yea thought now..

It's not the originality that sunk that game - it's the fact that the game oozed with lameness.

Not that Billy Hatcher was "original" in any sense, except the "it's not a sequel" sense.

Plus, it's those big games that give publishers the money to make Billy Hatcher games. Complain about the big titles and make them go away, and you lose your Billy Hatchers too. It works that way in movies. It works that way in games. Every time someone makes a post like this, this fact has to be re-explained.

Re:Army guys?

[bugbread]

No one wants to take a risk any more because the industry is no longer about the games. It's about the money

Perhaps you can refresh me of when, exactly, the industry was about the games, not the money. I'm pretty young, so my memory only goes back to the Atari 2600, but it was quite definitely about the money back then. Perhaps you're thinking about the glory days of Pong or the Magnavox Odyssey?

Re:Army guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you can refresh me of when, exactly, the industry was about the games, not the money.

I was thinking the same thing and I go back to the original Pong controller.

Re:Army guys?

[Deadguy2322]

No, it just isn't typical US-based stale, derivative game design. Microshaft also canned the new Oddworld game, after they pretty much bought OWI to do Munch's Oddysee and to talk shit about the PS2. Basically, if it doesn't look like a PC game, MS is afraid to publish it. No wonder the XBOX has failed to dominate the market the way they said it would. The people I know with XBOXes bought them just to mod them, and don't run ANY XBOX games.

Re:Army guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one wants to take a risk any more because the industry is no longer about the games. It's about the money, if you get a format (FF, FPS games) you can make endeless sequals and be 99% sure of getting your money and a bit more back.

Two words: Nintendo DS.

And you're still going to tell me nobody wants to take a risk or try anything new?

Re:Army guys?

[bigman2003]

My point was that Majesco is a bottom-of-the-barrel publisher.

If you've got a great game, then someone else could probably do a much better job getting the game out there for you.

Just like the stuff you buy off of television...QVC doesn't get exclusive rights to a product because it's good...the just have a direct link to the least discerning consumers. Majesco is the same thing- the SPECIALIZE in cheap discount-bin games.

Re:Army guys?

[Loadmaster]

I know Majesco isn't the best publisher, but BloodRayne was a good game and BR2 looks even better. They also have the rights to Advent Rising. So I wouldn't call Majesco a value publisher like ValuSoft. They're a smaller publisher with some good games and some low-price fodder so I wouldn't write Psychonauts off just yet.

Re:Army guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Majesco also has Guilty Gear X2 #RELOAD for Xbox, mind you.

Also, I fail to see how this has anything to do with the company's future publishing business.

That's like saying in 1997 "Microsoft, make games? Like what, Solitaire and Hearts?" And then they break out Ensemble Studios and corner the RTS market. Now they've got an undeniably strong PC game house and a half decent console business, too.

Majesco, like all companies, is looking to make money. They re-evaluate markets and business practices. And right now they are on the move . They've got a lot of money from this GBA video cart business and they're looking to spend it to buy into the big publisher business. If you RTFA you'd notice Tim mentions Majesco is looking to expand this year, and with that money I bet they are.

Anyway, I would think it would be pretty shallow of someone to judge a title based on its publisher. Developer, I could understand, but a publisher is just someone that stamps the discs and takes a cut of the profit. What does that have to do with the actual game?

Re:Army guys?

[startled]

if you get a format (FF, FPS games) you can make endeless sequals and be 99% sure of getting your money and a bit more back.

Actually, that's the irony of this reactionary shift to clones-- most games still lose money. Unless you're a sequel to a big IP, making a clone is often a sure-fire way to tank.

If you look at a lot of the sure-fire big hits this season, a lot of them are at least sequels to games that broke ground: Half-Life 2, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas. The Sims is EA's huge money maker; though it's all expansions now, at one point it was stunningly original.

Failure to realize that many of their cash cows are the ones that were groundbreaking is going to spell financial trouble (well, hopefully) for some of these companies. Eventually people get sick of IP x (well, except Star Wars), and if you don't have something new lined up, you're going to pull an Eidos.

Re:Army guys?

[bigman2003]

Damn I hate ACs...

I wasn't judging it solely on the fact that Majesco will be the publisher.

I was also basing my judgment on the fact that another publisher dropped the game.

It went from a top-tier publisher on the Xbox (Microsoft) to a bottom-tier publisher.

To me, that says something.

Re:Army guys?

[Psychochild]

Perhaps you can refresh me of when, exactly, the industry was about the games, not the money.

I think the original poster meant that the primary focus shifted from making cool games to making large piles of money. The industry has always been about both games and money, but there's the question of where the primary focus is.

I'm a game developer that has tried to learn a lot about game development history. In my opinion, the early days of video games were mostly about making cool games more than about making large piles of money. There was a lot of optimism in the fact that this was a fairly new field, and things weren't well-defined yet. There was a lot of creativity required, which means you saw some rather interesting games.

Somewhere along the line, and I don't believe it was a single turning point, things became more about the money than the games. I worked at 3DO while it was still around, and I can tell you that the focus was NOT on making fun games. Rather, the focus was on producing games the management thought people would buy on the tightest schedule possible; less time developing meant more games produced, which was supposed to mean more profit. Whoops. (The humor of replying to a post titled "Army guys" isn't lost on me! ;)

I own my own company now, so I know first-hand that money is an ever-present topic in every business. I'm not some idealist that believes that money should never be a consideration for making a game. However, I think that the current game environment is focusing excessively on profits at the expense of making good games. The same people that are turning network TV into an intellectual wasteland are looking to do the same thing to the video game industry; it's a question of what will sell to the masses.

All in my opinion, of course.

Have fun,