Tim Schafer: The Comedy Writer Who Kept Getting Funded

Tim Schafer got his job at Lucasfilm Games in 1989 by writing his application as a text adventure. It is a good story and it has been told to death, but the reason it keeps getting told is that it is the only job application anyone remembers, which is also the shape of the career it started. Schafer’s defining professional skill is making people want to give him money for something they cannot quite picture yet.

The record is stark once you line it up. Psychonauts was dropped by its publisher and sold poorly. Brütal Legend was dropped by its publisher and got sued. Grim Fandango is a masterpiece that lost money. Broken Age ran out of budget on camera. And after every one of those, somebody wrote another cheque — eventually Microsoft, who bought the studio outright in 2019.

I want to take that seriously rather than treat it as charming, because there is a real design argument buried in it.

The LucasArts decade

He arrived as a junior on The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990, co-designing and writing with Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman, then again on Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge in 1991. Those years are his apprenticeship in a house grammar somebody else built — Gilbert’s fairness rules, the SCUMM verb list, the parallel puzzle chains that I unpack in the puzzle grammar of Monkey Island.

Then Day of the Tentacle in 1993, co-led with Grossman, and it remains the best thing he has ever been near. I have argued the case at length in the puzzle comedy peak; the compressed version is that the game’s jokes and its mechanics are the same object. Wine ages into vinegar over two hundred years inside a time capsule because you put it there. Understanding the gag and solving the puzzle are one cognitive act. That is the highest thing this medium does, and Schafer was thirty-one when he helped do it.

Full Throttle in 1995 was his first solo lead, and it is where the pattern starts. It looks tremendous, sounds tremendous, and is over in an evening with a bike-combat sequence and a demolition derby standing in for the puzzles that got cut. Players noticed and said so at the time. The adventure that wanted to be a film is the honest title for it: cinema arrived, and some of the game left to make room.

Grim Fandango in 1998 is the ambitious one — a Mexican folk-art film noir, four acts, a genuine 3D engine, and an interface that fights you the entire time. Tank controls in an adventure game meant you spent the game steering Manny past scenery to find out what was interactive. The adventure game’s last great argument is what it is, and the argument nearly loses on a control scheme. The 2015 remaster added a point-and-click option, which resolved a seventeen-year-old complaint by conceding it. The writing needed no remastering at all.

The pattern, stated plainly

Schafer’s games are written at a level almost nobody in the industry reaches, and designed at a level a lot of people reach.

Psychonauts, 2005, is the cleanest example. The premise is one of the great ideas in games: a summer camp for psychic children where you enter people’s minds, and each level is the architecture of a specific person’s damage. The Milkman Conspiracy is a paranoiac’s street folding at right angles. The lungfish level is a giant creature’s world seen from inside its terror. Conceptually, nothing touches it.

Mechanically it is a competent 2005 3D platformer with a serviceable moveset, and the final level, Meat Circus, is a difficulty spike so notorious that Double Fine went back and softened it years later. The levels are the best in the genre. The jumping is fine. Microsoft dropped the game, Majesco published it, and it sold badly enough to nearly finish the studio before word of mouth turned it into a cult object.

Brütal Legend, 2009, repeats it in a louder key. A heavy-metal open world with Jack Black in it, and about three hours in it stops being an action game and becomes a real-time strategy game about stage battles. Two audiences, each sold the other one’s game. Activision dropped it after the Vivendi merger, EA picked it up, Activision sued to stop the release, the suit settled, the game shipped in October 2009 into exactly the reception you would predict.

The generous read is that Schafer keeps trying to build a system that can carry his ideas and keeps arriving at something the writing has to rescue. The uncharitable read is the same sentence with a different tone.

There is a counter-example worth putting on the scale, and it undercuts the whole thesis in a useful way. Stacking, from 2011, is a Double Fine game about Russian nesting dolls where you play the smallest doll and progress by jumping inside a larger one and borrowing whatever that person can do. The premise, the mechanic and the joke are one object: you are a child solving adult problems by wearing adults. It is a small game made in a fortnight-scale prototype window, and its design is more tightly fused to its idea than anything Double Fine shipped for tens of millions.

That is the pattern’s real shape. The fusion happens when the games are cheap and quick. Scale the budget up and the writing and the mechanics drift apart, because a big game needs forty hours of verbs and a joke does not have forty hours in it.

The funding is the design problem

Here is the part I find genuinely interesting, and it is where Schafer stops being a writer and becomes a studio person.

Double Fine’s answer to the funding trap was Amnesia Fortnight: shut the studio down for two weeks, split into small teams, prototype anything. Costume Quest, Stacking and Iron Brigade all came out of that and all shipped as small downloadable games between 2010 and 2011. After a decade of betting the company on one enormous thing, the studio started making four cheap things a year. That is a structural fix to a structural problem, and it is a smarter piece of design than most of what is in the games themselves.

The other structural move gets less attention and deserves more. Double Fine Presents turned the studio into a publisher for other people’s small strange games, and the catalogue includes things with no commercial logic whatsoever — the sort of project that exists because somebody at Double Fine liked it. A man who spent twenty years hunting for publishers who would take a flyer on him started writing the flyers. That is the most coherent thing on his CV, and none of it is a game he made.

Then February 2012. The Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter asked for $400,000 and took $3.336 million from 87,142 people, and the modern game-crowdfunding era started that month. The scale of it was a referendum: an enormous number of people wanted a Tim Schafer adventure game badly enough to pay before it existed.

What they got was Broken Age, and the documentary crew he had invited in filmed the whole thing going wrong. The budget could not cover the game the money had made possible, so it was split into two acts, and Act 1 was sold in January 2014 to fund Act 2, which arrived in April 2015. Act 1 is lovely and slight. Act 2 is where the puzzles live, including a wire-matching sequence that is the single most disliked thing in his catalogue. Three million dollars and a decade of goodwill produced a game about half the size of Day of the Tentacle.

I am not sneering. Filming your own overrun and shipping it is a level of honesty about production that virtually nobody in this industry offers, and the documentary is more useful to a working designer than the game is.

Psychonauts 2, and what money buys

Microsoft acquired Double Fine in June 2019, with Psychonauts 2 — crowdfunded on Fig in 2015 — already years into development. It shipped in August 2021, and it is the first Schafer game where the mechanics keep pace with the ideas. The moveset is coherent. The levels do the mind-as-architecture thing better than the original and control well enough that you can enjoy them. The writing about mental illness is careful in a way that nothing in 2005 was.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the thing Schafer’s games needed for thirty years was a platform holder’s budget and no ship-or-die deadline. Given time and money, the design catches the writing. The whole career before that was a man trying to buy that condition with charm.

The verdict

Schafer is the best comic writer this medium has produced and an inconsistent designer, and the inconsistency matters because his own studio’s peak proved the two jobs can be the same job. Day of the Tentacle is the standing rebuke: it demonstrates that a Schafer game can be funny through its mechanics rather than despite them, and he has managed it once in thirty-five years.

The funding is downstream of the writing. People kept paying because a Schafer game has jokes and characters and a moral seriousness about damaged people that the rest of the industry treats as optional, and those things are rare enough to be worth a punt on the platforming. That is a legitimate trade, and I have made it happily every time.

Start with Day of the Tentacle Remastered and then play Psychonauts 2, which is on Game Pass and everywhere else. Skip the middle if you must — the middle is where the genre he came from was falling apart anyway, which I go into in why point-and-click died and what replaced it. The two ends of this career are thirty years apart and they are both very good, and getting from one to the other took a Kickstarter, a lawsuit and Microsoft.