Tim Schafer: 'There were so many occasions when I thought my career in games was over'

We went through a period in the games industry where I felt I was being shamed for doing story. It was like, all games should be Deus Ex, all games should be design-driven and systemic. Interactivity is what’s unique about games, a powerful tool that can’t be ignored, but I don’t like limited ideas about what games “should” be. It annoys me because there are so many different people playing games who like them for completely different reasons. Gamers aren’t just one thing.

I learn a lot from my daughter. She likes to play little choose-your-own-adventure games when we go out to restaurants. While we’re waiting for our food to come, I’ll take her on imaginary dungeon crawls: I’ll say, “Okay, you’re in a cave, and in one direction you can hear a growling noise and in another you can hear dripping water – where do you go?” She got really into them and wanted to do them for me – and hers were so much more creative than mine. Mine are all dungeons and dragons and ghosts, but in hers anything could happen!

I like that people in the games industry are taking diversity more seriously. If you looked around the room at the Baftas, there were so many powerful women ... you’re really missing something if you’re not seeing this. Games are for everybody now and games can cover all topics – there’s been a small group that’s controlled games for a long time and not everyone is like them. “No, everyone in this game should be white” is such a fucking silly thing to fight for – how weird, what do you gain from that? But there are so many new stories and topics and experiences that can be gained from letting people in.

Revisiting the old LucasArts games is the opposite of what I usually try to do, which is immediately forget what I just worked on and then do something completely different. I don’t want to be lost in nostalgia. But it had been 20 years, and after that amount of time I thought, okay, it’s fair. We went back to the original musicians and artists and programmers to get help with the remasters and it was like a team reunion. That’s what those memories are about – you play one of those games and you remember sitting in a room with these people, solving problems that were really tough – and you realise how each game was such a miracle; that coming together of that exact group of people at that time, because none of us could have made those games without the others.

There was a time when getting respect for artists was a struggle. In the early days, programmers ran the show – they did everything and they’d get angry at the artists for thinking they were an important part of the process. It seems strange now because artists are so important to games. I try to keep mutual respect at Double Fine, because games really are a great collaboration between different artistic and technical disciplines.

The things I think are most important are great ideas and inspiration – they’re precious because they don’t come all the time. They are like magic fairies that fly through once in a while, and you’ve got to catch them in a jar or you lose them. If you want to be creative you can’t put anything else above that process. Sometimes your first dumb ideas are the best ones. Your brain is always trying to censor them, but those ideas are often the ones with the most flavour.

I think comedy in games is more about giving the comedy tools to the player and making them feel like they’re the comedian. People liked that in Monkey Island; Guybrush always had a witty response and they felt almost like they had come up with it.

With our next game Psychonauts 2 I’m doing most of the writing. I try to keep myself engaged with the parts of production I like the most, like writing and brainstorming. A lot of people who’ve had success doing something creative can get pulled into the nuts and bolts of raising money, business development and production – that can be powerful because you get to make important choices to protect the creativity, but it can also lead you into a situation where you wake up one morning and go, what am I doing? This doesn’t inspire me!

There were so many occasions when I thought my career in games was over. When I started my company, I signed a big game with Microsoft, one that burned a lot of money, and then it got cancelled. We’d crunched for four years already and now we were going to go out of business, and what were those four years about, and what are these 40 people going to do? We just fought and fought, and got it re-signed. But at one point we had no prospects, we were out of money and I stood in front of the staff and said, next Wednesday’s payroll is the last one. Just then my throat closed up and I couldn’t talk and everyone was sat there in silent ... it was the brutal end. It was horrible.

We don’t want to be like the publishers we’ve had trouble with in the past. Most publishers are investing the money of your shareholders and have to look at every project and think, how am I going to turn this dollar into 35 dollars? That’s not our priority – we want to be financially successful but we’re not only looking at that. If you want to be making money you should probably just invest in some fund. We want to do what the company has always done throughout its history: encouraging and supporting and fighting for creativity. We want to fight for developers who see making games as a labour of love. Just like us.