Timothy John Schafer was born on July 26, 1967. He is an American video game designer who started Double Fine Productions in July 2000. Before this, he worked at LucasArts for more than ten years. Schafer is most famous for designing highly praised games such as Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and Broken Age. He also helped design Day of the Tentacle and worked on The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge as an assistant designer. Schafer is well known for his storytelling and humorous writing in video games. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards and a BAFTA Fellowship for his contributions to the video game industry.
Career
Tim Schafer was born on July 26, 1967, in Sonoma, California, and was the youngest of five children. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a nurse. While studying computer science at UC Berkeley, Schafer became interested in writing and took inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote short stories in the evenings while working as a publicist at General Electric. Schafer followed a similar path, interning to help develop databases for small companies while trying to get a job at larger companies like Atari and Hewlett-Packard. However, he was not offered a position at these companies. He later saw an opportunity at Lucasfilm Games, which was looking for programmers who could also write game dialogue. This interested him.
During the job application process, Schafer had a phone interview with David Fox. He mentioned being a fan of a game called Ballblaster. Fox explained that the correct name of the Lucasfilm Games title was Ballblazer, and that Ballblaster was a pirated version of the game. Despite this mistake, Fox asked Schafer to send his resume for further consideration. To make up for the interview, Schafer sent a comic showing himself applying for and getting the job at Lucasfilm Games, drawn as a text adventure.
Schafer was hired by LucasArts in 1989. His first job was as a "scummlet," a programmer who helped implement ideas proposed by lead game developers using the LucasArts SCUMM engine. He worked with Dave Grossman to test and improve Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game and helped create the NES version of Maniac Mansion. Schafer and Grossman, along with two others, learned how to use the SCUMM engine from Ron Gilbert as part of a training program called "SCUMM University."
Later, Ron Gilbert asked Schafer and Grossman to join his new project, which became the pirate-themed adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island. According to Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman wrote about two-thirds of the game's dialogue. The Secret of Monkey Island became one of the most praised games of its time. The same team later created the sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
In his first lead role on a game project, Schafer co-designed (with Dave Grossman) Day of the Tentacle, a time-travel comedy adventure and the sequel to Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion. Schafer's first solo project, the biker adventure Full Throttle, was released in 1995. He later designed Grim Fandango, a noir adventure game set in the Aztec afterlife with characters inspired by the papier-mâché skeletons from the Mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos. Grim Fandango won many awards, including GameSpot's Game of the Year award in 1998 and Computer Adventure Game of the Year at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.
Schafer worked on an unannounced PlayStation 2 action-adventure game at LucasArts, but it was never made. Before leaving LucasArts, many developers left the company as the studio shifted away from adventure games. Schafer was approached by colleagues with the idea of leaving to create PlayStation 2 games independently. At first, Schafer felt secure in his position at LucasArts but eventually left in January 2000 to start Double Fine Productions. At Double Fine, he created the platform game Psychonauts, which was first released on Xbox in North America on April 19, 2005. The game received critical praise, including a Game of the Year award from Eurogamer, but it sold poorly at first, causing financial problems for its publisher, Majesco Entertainment. Double Fine later regained full rights to Psychonauts in 2012, allowing them to release an improved version of the game. In 2012, Schafer said, "We made more on Psychonauts [in 2012] than we ever have before."
On March 7, 2007, Schafer hosted the annual Game Developers Choice Awards. He later hosted the event again in 2009. To celebrate, Double Fine released a free Flash minigame called Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, which was a parody of Schafer's LucasArts games. In the game, players take on the role of Schafer backstage at the GDC Awards.
Schafer led the development of Double Fine's next game, Brütal Legend, released on October 13, 2009. The game faced delays because its original publisher, Vivendi Games, dropped the title after merging with Activision in 2008. The game was later picked up by Electronic Arts. Brütal Legend was Schafer's tribute to heavy metal music and art. It featured voice acting from actor/musician Jack Black and cameos from rock musicians like Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Ozzy Osbourne, and Lita Ford. Schafer said, "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."
During Brütal Legend's development, Schafer had Double Fine's staff take two weeks off each year to participate in an event called Amnesia Fortnights, starting in 2007. This was an internal game jam where the company was split into four teams to create a game prototype. Schafer compared the idea to a method used by film director Wong Kar-Wai. After Brütal Legend was released, the game received mostly positive reviews but did not perform as well as expected. Electronic Arts canceled plans for a sequel. To help Double Fine financially, Schafer revisited Amnesia Fortnight projects and selected four games that could be expanded into full releases: Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade, and Once Upon a Monster. These games helped keep Double Fine financially stable, and Schafer continued using Amnesia Fortnights as an annual event. Most of the games created through these events are now led by people other than Schafer.
On February 1, 2012, Schafer returned to the role of director for Double Fine Happy Action Theater, a Kinect-based game he designed to play with his two-year-old daughter.
In February 2012, Schafer launched a crowdfunded project for an unnamed adventure game through Kickstarter, using the placeholder title "Double Fine Adventure." He said that publishers were hesitant to support adventure games, so he turned to crowdfunding to gauge player interest. The project aimed to raise $400,000. Contributions exceeded this amount by more than three times in less than 24 hours, making it the first Kickstarter project to reach $2 million. The project ended on March 13, raising $3,336,371 on Kickstarter and an additional $110,000 from premium pledges. The project eventually resulted in Broken Age, released in two
Influences and philosophy
At the Game Developers Conference in 2003, Schafer shared that he tries to combine story with gameplay, aiming to one day make a video game that does not include any cutscenes. He also mentioned that he frequently sets his stories in worlds that already exist.
Recognition
The press first showed Psychonauts at the E3 trade show in 2002, where it received the Game Critics Award for Best Original Game. An episode of Icons on the G4 Network covered the final week of Psychonauts' production and discussed Tim Schafer's career. At the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards, Schafer and Erik Wolpaw won the Best Writing award for Psychonauts. Schafer and Double Fine Executive Producer & COO Caroline Esmurdoc also won the Best New Studio award. In October 2006, Schafer received a BAFTA video game Best Screenplay award for Psychonauts. In 2012, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) held the "Game Masters" exhibition, where Schafer was highlighted as the creator of Grim Fandango, along with other influential game designers who were credited for expanding game design and storytelling, creating beloved characters, and changing how games are played. In 2015, Schafer won the Vanguard Award at Bilbao's Fun & Serious Game Festival. Schafer received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards in March 2018. He was honored with a BAFTA Fellowship at the British Academy Games Awards in April 2018, described as "a true pioneer of game design, who has pushed the boundaries of the medium through his extraordinary talents." In February 2023, Schafer was named a Hall of Fame Inductee at the 26th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, recognized as "a beacon of creativity and innovation in the games industry."