THE HIGH TIMES INTERVIEW

TIMSCHAFERStory and photos by

TYLER STEWART

Backed into a corner, Tim

Schafer finally agrees to the

interview.

November 2012 High Times The High Times Interview 93

You started in the industry as a programmer and a writer, two very different jobs.

At Berkeley I studied pro-gramming, but I found myself more and more interested in creative writing. I entered some short story contests and stuff and, back then, the job seemed perfect. They called us scuttlebutts, we were like the lowest on the totem pole, but it didn’t matter.

‘They’ being LucasArts, who during that time dominated PC gaming. What was it like work-ing for George Lucas?

Beside the fact that it was on Skywalker Ranch, I was actually really excited about the games. We didn’t know what we were going to work on; we were just four young guys in a room, and we were messing around with some practice art. They were just teaching us how to use this language, SCUMM.

The first game you ended up working on was The Secret of Monkey Island.

Ron Gilbert, one of the teachers who trained us on SCUMM, would come in in the afternoons and watch what we had done with it. He picked me and Dave Grossman out of that group to work with him on The Secret of Monkey Island, which he was just starting to develop.

Why did he pick you two?’Cause we had done the

dumbest jokes, maybe, I don’t know. There’s something about the kind of jokes and the cre-ativity that you use when you don’t think it matters, the kind that takes away worry. If you don’t think what you’re doing is going to be used by anyone you can kind of free yourself to try crazy, stupid things and they turn out to be the funniest, best stuff sometimes. I assumed that Ron would come in and fix it all. But he was like, ‘No, no, this is good, we’re gonna use it.’ Which was a good lesson for me in that

sometimes you just assume something has to change because it’s so ridiculous, but it actually doesn’t. A lot of the lessons that I’ve learned in the industry have been about not worrying about stuff.

Most people have a focused strength in either the technical or the creative. What do you think has been a big driver for your development of both skills?

I love computers. I just saw them as one more tool to make something fun for other people to enjoy. Like draw-ing a picture, it’s a way to take something in you and use it to entertain someone else, or capture something and share it with someone else. Video games are just another way of doing that. It was very helpful when I was writing dialogue to be able to program, because you could make the dialogue work for various interac-tive possibilities that happen in the game. So, you know, if you’re playing a character and he wants to say something but the game needs to figure out whether you have a cer-tain inventory item in your pouch, or whether you’ve met another character, or whether you chose to be a female char-acter or a male character, the writing has to change to incor-porate all that or else the programming has to work around it to change the writ-ing. So being able to choose from either solves the problem instantly. It’s really essential to make those games work that way for me.

What would you say your early influences were, text adventure games?

Yeah. I loved those. I grew up playing a lot of Infocom text adventures, like Zork, Dead-line, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Wishbringer, those games. And then the Scott Adams adventures before that which were really just simple commands. I loved those games. I played those on my Atari all day long.

Once upon a time, video games were treated like a niche hobby supported by the geekier subset of society—you know, the “inside kids.” But with the advent of computer technology and

several generations of gamers disproving the stereotypes set by their predecessors, the indus-try has boomed into a more profitable business than both music and film, projected to pull in more than $67 billion in 2012 alone. As a result, more people are recognizing the medium as an art form—and within that culture, the artists have emerged.

One of those artists is Tim Schafer, considered among the crowd as one of the most rebellious, eccentric and creative minds in the industry. With games like Grim Fandango, a noir tale set against the backdrop of an underworld occupied by Mexi-can calaca figures, and Psychonauts, an adventure wherein lead character Raz is tasked with ventur-ing into the minds of his subjects—literally—to extract emotional baggage and uncover subcon-scious thoughts that darken their psyches, Schafer hasn’t shied away from challenging people to think differently while getting their kicks. He’s also known for his sharp wit, scripting classic games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Full Throttle during his time at George Lucas’ studio LucasArts.

That reputation helped him launch his own stu-dio, Double Fine Productions, in 2000. Since then, he and his team have released seven titles—all to critical acclaim. The most popular among them is 2009’s Brütal Legend, which stars Jack Black, Tim Curry, and rock icons Rob Halford and Ozzy Osbourne in a story so metal, its density can’t be measured. Today, Double Fine is riding the wave of the most successful crowd-sourcing effort in video game history, having raised almost $3.5 million through Kickstarter to fund a return-to-roots point-and-click adventure game, the genre that made Schafer famous. As a result, he’s reject-ing the shackles that publishers often throw on the wrists of development teams by reaching out directly to the fan base. Combined with the loom-ing antiquation of discs, this experiment could have a resonating effect on the game industry’s future, and Schafer is happy to lead the charge.

High Times dropped in on Double Fine to meet him, where we discussed the benefits of being a geek, the creative process and the importance of finding altered states of consciousness.

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Did you have any influences from the writing side, like comedians or personalities whose humor kind of echoes through in your writing?

Growing up I loved comedy albums. I would find them in my brother’s room, these old Bill Cosby and George Carlin albums. Just hearing the audi-ence laughing on the record, there was something really magical about them. But then reading stuff like Kurt Von-negut in high school had a big impact on me. Just his way of telling stories was really funny and sad at the same time. And surprising and unpredictable.

Humor seems to be a major part of the narratives in your games. That doesn’t mean they lack emotional depth—they some-times focus on darker aspects of our humanity and of nature. Do you think that it’s important to find humor in the dark stuff?

I feel that it’s more that I’m injecting the dark stuff once in a while into humorous situ-ations. When I’m writing, it’s not about searching for jokes, but to start with where the characters are. I look for their source—what drives them, what their background is. Like anybody’s life, we’re all here, but maybe years and years ago something terrible happened to us. It doesn’t mean we’re here broken because of that, but it means something. And it means in everything that we do, it’s there lurking, and you manage to have fun and have lighthearted moments even though you’ve been through something bad in the past. That’s all you’re writing, it’s all part of life being tragedy and comedy mixed together, and one doesn’t exclude the other, and neither one is a cure for the other and they’re just always coexisting. And I think the funniest moments come from having all that back-ground knowledge of what a character has been through because you know what that surprise, or that twist, or that joke means to them.

A lot of developers make these really washed out, serious games with little or no humor in them. What do you think about those types of games?

I like serious, you know. Of course, for me it would be a very dif-ficult challenge. I often start out with a high concept being serious or serious-sounding and then when I discuss the structure, these character journeys are all very serious. And then when I go to write the scene, the actual dialogue, there’s just a lot of like idle time that has to be filled and it gets filled with jokes for some reason. You know at the micro level it’s a lot more jokey than at the larger level. Like in Grim Fandango, the four-year jour-ney of the soul across the Land of the Dead is not a comedy setup, but when you’re in there and there’s a demon with a big tongue hanging out of his mouth, funny stuff happens.

You had tremendous success with Kickstarter. The goal was $400,000 and you raised $3 million more than that. What does that mean for the game you guys are creating?

It means an incredible amount of freedom for us because the money came with no strings attached, except for our own commitment to the

backers, who are our biggest fans and ultimate players of

the game. And that’s who we want to please anyway; when we’re making

a game we’re always think-

ing about making those guys happy,

so that’s all we have to do. We don’t have to worry about a publisher, or investor, or any-

body else telling us what to do. It’s a totally different

way of making games than usual when you’re working with someone else’s money.

Do you think that this experiment will

have long-term effects on the industry, or could this be a fluke?

I think it’s a permanent

change. It has opened up a door that will stay open. The future is definitely going to be all digital,

so you don’t have to worry about distribution. This just takes yet another one of those pillars away, which is that you don’t necessarily need someone to get financing. You could go to the crowd. As long as you have a compel-ling idea and you are able to present yourself as an interesting person who could

do an interesting project in an interesting way, you could get money from the Internet.

Speaking of opening doors, there’s a rumor you wanted to put a peyote trip sequence into Full Throttle ...

I self-censored that because I knew I couldn’t get it in. George Lucas is a little bit like Disney in that he’s a family game maker. I thought about it, but I stored a lot of those ideas away until I made Psychonauts.

Which was the very definition of a mind trip.

I think Psychonauts was kind of the realization of that. I’ve always been interested in psychology and the human mind and what it does in altered states of conscious-ness. Those states can be achieved in a lot of different ways: it could be meditation, it could be drugs, it could be an Australian Aboriginese walkabout, or just dreaming.

What about dreaming?I took a class on the

psychology of dreams, Psy-chonauts was really inspired by it. A big part of it was about how people create things in their dreams that represent emotional things going on in their lives. You know, people will dream about a bear when they’re really scared about their father or something. They’re trading metaphors just like a poet or a writer does. They’re regular people who would not consider themselves as skilled poets, but they’re creating beautiful symbols for these emotional things. Everyone has this power in their head to create poetry, and they do it when they’re dreaming.

“Games can put you in a meditative state that is healthy. They’re like lucid dreams.”

From top: The Secret of Monkey Island (1990); Full Throttle (1995); Grim Fandango (1998); Psychonauts (2005); Brütal Legend (2009).

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And so do you think that to understand our minds better, it’s important to find these altered states of consciousness?

I definitely think you need some way of leaving your day-to-day state of mind, because sometimes there’s that rut you get in that you need some-thing to kick you out of, to see things differently, and to relax and be happy. I think if you just have this repetitive men-tal cycle all throughout your day and you bring it home, it just wears at your heart and you die early.

So, peyote ...I’ve never taken peyote, I

can say that, but I ... let’s see, what can I say about that ... I planned on pursuing the idea.

Got ya, got ya. Well, what role do you think things like pot play in the industry, in terms of conceptualizing ideas and even approaching programming?

I had a friend who would say that he felt like all day

long he was running through a library in his head, knock-ing over shelves, knocking over books, and he would just keep going. Then he would sit down at the end of the day and he would smoke pot, and to him that was putting all the books back on the shelf, sorting out his mind and getting it all taken care of. It’s different for everyone, but for some it’s just another one of those things that can free your mind up a bit and allow you to think more clearly.

Not everybody in our reader-ship does play video games. How do you explain to some-body just what art value they have and how fun they can be?

To me they’re literature just like books and movies, and there’s great art being done in the world of games. I think it’s like comic books, where there’s good ones and bad ones and sometimes it’s help-ful to have a guide or someone who knows a lot about them

because there’s like five good ones to every hundred bad ones. You know, to like really find the stuff that’s meaning-ful. But I think, as I hope the art form progresses and the games become more about emotional topics and things like that, they can have the same benefit as books and movies do where they help you run kind of a practice session in emotional situa-tions. You know when you read a great novel, it helps you

develop emotionally because you see the foreshadowing of situations that helps you to prepare when something like that happens in your life. Games in general can do that same thing, putting yourself in situations that help you visualize something that is not safe in your real life or you’re not ready for. Games can put you in a meditative state that is healthy and great for development. They’re like lucid dreams.P

Double Fine’s walls are covered in years worth of concept art, fan submissions and deadline tears.