Tim Schafer made some of the best-loved computer games of the 1990s. Now he’s going back to the genre he helped define.
If there is a universally-beloved human in the world of videogames—in which strong and vituperative opinions are de riguer and fanboy-drawn battle lines scar the corpse of consensus—that human is Tim Schafer. Schafer, 46, is the founder of Double Fine Productions, the 65-person San Francisco studio that has cultivated a public image as part game developer and part merry experimental digital art studio (in periodic "Amnesia Fortnights" , the employees of Double Fine are split into groups and told to forget their current project and build new game prototypes, some of which have been turned into full games.)
But Schafer is known best for a handful of games from twenty years ago: The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), which he cowrote; Day of the Tentacle (1993), which he cowrote and codesigned; and Full Throttle (1995) and Grim Fandango (1998), both of which he wrote and designed. These four games are all adventure games, a distinctly literary genre that rose to its highest prominence in those years behind wonderful narratives, strong characters, and sometimes painfully difficult puzzles. For the PC children of the 1980s and 1990s, these games are more than a warm memory; they hold the same imaginative power as Disney movies.
Above: Grim Fandango (1998)
As the public appetite, and publisher financing, for these fairly low-tech titles dried up in the late 90s, Schafer continued to do great work; his 2005 platforming game Psychonauts has established itself as one of the great cult titles of all time. But his name, and his sensibility—extraordinarily funny but also sweetly sentimental—will always be linked to the adventure genre.
Yesterday, Double Fine released the first act of Broken Age. It's Schafer's first adventure game in more than 15 years, and it comes at a time when the gaming public, armed with iPads and Kickstarter links, has rediscovered their love for the genre. We talked to Schafer about his new, crowd-funded game, and about the pressure he felt trying to live up to his reputation as one of the fathers of the genre.