Double Fine's Tim Schafer Interview

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Eurogamer: The number of press releases I read that really make a point of saying a game is "hilarious" and so on - and it very, very rarely is. Is it to do with the medium?

Tim Schafer: I feel differently depending on the day where that comes from. Sometimes it feels like people are trying to be as scary and threatening as possible with their games, because they're worried about appealing to a certain hardcore young male demographic. What do young males want? They want to be tough and edgy and scary and the coolest. But I think actually that crowd loves to laugh, likes comedy and likes crazy, ridiculous things to happen - it is an appealing thing.

And in fact, I think comedy is a way to appeal to a much broader audience than ever play games now. What's better than laughing, and why can't that happen interactively?

Eurogamer: I was at a BBC event yesterday and one of the panels had writers from their comedy shows talking about how they decide what's funny. In your case, how do you decide a joke or a line is funny? Is the most important thing [as it was for the panellists] simply that it makes you laugh?

Tim Schafer: Entertaining yourself is actually a really important way to approach writing for something that's supposed to be funny. You can't approach it too theoretically. In theory, the word 'chicken' is funny, so I'll use the word chicken in this joke because it will be humorous. There are some things that are just so embarrassing - it could be a fart joke or something - that you can't help but laugh when you do it. And you think, if I'm laughing, someone else out there might.

But every once in a while that's wrong, and you really just have to test it; and that's why it's been great showing Brütal Legend in these demo environments, because you never get to see a lot of the audience react to a game. But hearing people laugh at a demo and laugh at all the right spots is really rewarding and helps you at the spots you think are gonna get a laugh: 'Hmm, no-one laughed at that one, maybe we should cut it?' We test our games and watch people playing them all the time, and you can get an impression of what's working and what's not.

Eurogamer: It's almost the equivalent of gaming stand-up.

Tim Schafer: Yeah, you write material, you test material, you improve your material, so it is a little bit like stand-up. And that's maybe why there's not so much of it, because it is kinda scary.

Psychonauts was Eurogamer's top game of 2005. For Brütal Legend Schafer wants a special award for the best "game of two years".

Eurogamer: Brütal Legend is a project that's been kicking around in the recesses of your mind for many, many years, from back around the time of Monkey Island?

Tim Schafer: Yeah, when we were working on Monkey Island I used to think about our competition, which were really serious fantasy games, or what we called in our mean tone of voice, 'elves in tights'. We wanted to make something different, pirate games or biker games - still fantasy worlds, but different.

But I thought, if we were to make a fantasy game it would be cool to out-fantasy the fantasy games and go even farther. And what would be the name of something like that? And that's where the name Brütal Legend came from, because it just sounded like the hardest core fantasy thing out there. So I've been kicking around with that idea for years.

Eurogamer: Why has it taken so long to make it? Why now?

Tim Schafer: Hmm, why now? You don't often get an idea all in one chunk; the whole game as you see it now didn't just fall into my lap 15 years ago. The name came and various ideas, and I've always liked the music, and I always wanted to do a game where you're controlling minions, you know, and had minions at your disposal, and I always liked roadies. And it just seems like these ideas slowly moved together over time, and then it just kind of hits you that they all work great together and you can make a game about it.

We took this photo of George Lucas's house when we stayed overnight at Skywalker Ranch. UNLIKE SCHAFER.

After Psychonauts I was talking about various game ideas with the team and what we could do next, and when I brought up that I wanted to do this one that was based on heavy metal, and based on combat and epic wars in a heavy metal fantasy world, all of a sudden the team got really, really excited. And that's always a good sign, when you can see everyone on the team relating to it. And there's a lot of fun challenges for the team: the programmers have these AI challenges, the designers can pick up these crazy unit designs, the artists obviously got very excited about all the stylised things they could do, and so just feeling the team getting excited was a good sign that this is a great game to make.

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