page_title: Tim Schafer
section_title: Double Fine Productions (2000–present)
hierarchical_section_title: Tim Schafer / Career / Double Fine Productions (2000–present)
caption_attribution_description: English: Game Developers at a en:BAFTA event in July 2011. From left: en:Rod Humble, en:Louis Castle, en:David Perry (game developer), en:Brenda Brathwaite, John Romero, en:Will Wright, en:Tim Schafer, en:Chris Hecker.
context_page_description: Timothy John Schafer is an American computer game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Schafer is best known as the designer of critically acclaimed games Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend and Broken Age, co-designer of Day of the Tentacle, and assistant designer on The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. He is well known in the video game industry for his storytelling and comedic writing style, and has been given both a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Developers Choice Awards, and a BAFTA Fellowship for his contributions to the industry.
context_section_description: Schafer worked on an unannounced PlayStation 2 action-adventure game at LucasArts, but it never entered production. Prior to his departure, a number of other developers were leaving LucasArts as the studio shifted away from adventure games. Schafer was approached by his colleagues with the idea of leaving the company to develop PlayStation 2 games on their own; Schafer was initially wary of this believing he felt secure in his position at LucasArts. He left the company in January 2000, to found Double Fine Productions, where he created the platform game Psychonauts. The game was first released on Xbox in North America on April 19, 2005. It won much critical acclaim, including a Game of the Year award from Eurogamer.
  On March 7, 2007, he hosted the annual Game Developers Choice Awards. He later hosted it again in 2009. To coincide, Double Fine released a free Flash minigame entitled Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, a pastiche of Schafer's LucasArts games in which the player takes on the role of Schafer backstage at the GDC Awards.
  In fall 2009, Schafer completed a new game called Brütal Legend. The game was released on October 13, 2009, on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles. In an April 2009 interview on The Jace Hall Show, Schafer had this to say about Brütal Legend: "For Brütal Legend, I've always seen this overlap between medieval warfare and heavy metal.  You see heavy metal singers and they'll have like a brace around their arm and they'll be singing about Orcs.  So let's just make a world where that all happens.  That all gets put together, the heavy metal, and the rock, and the battling, actually does happen.  Let's not flirt around with this; let's just do it."
  Schafer announced in July 2010 that EA had canceled the sequel to Brütal Legend. Instead of Brütal Legend 2, Double Fine had a period called "Amnesia Fortnight", where the team came up with prototype games that could be pitched to publishers.  From these, four smaller games were made that for the first time in Double Fine's history had project leaders other than Schafer: Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade and Once upon a Monster.
  On February 1, 2012, Schafer returned to the role of director in Double Fine Happy Action Theater, a game concept he devised in order to be able to play a game with his two-year-old daughter that she would be able to enjoy as well.
  In February 2012, Schafer launched a crowdfunded project for an unnamed adventure game via Kickstarter.com, using the placeholder title "Double Fine Adventure"; Schafer stated that he had found publishers extremely wary of an adventure in the current video game industry, and decided to turn to crowdfunding to seek player interest. The game and accompanying documentary were projected to cost US$400,000 dollars. Contributions exceeded that amount by more than three times in less than 24 hours, making it the first Kickstarter project to reach a $2 million figure, and the second most successful project on the website at the time. When the project ended on March 13, funding reached a level of $3,336,371 in Kickstarter with an additional $110,000 from premium pledges. Ultimately, the project culminated in Broken Age, released in two acts over 2014 and 2015.
  Another title from the "Amnesia Fortnight" prototype session was developed into Double Fine's first free-to-play iOS title with funding from Dracogen.  The game, titled Middle Manager of Justice, was accidentally released in all territories on September 5, 2012, but was quickly pulled.  That build was later branded beta, with the final release coming later in 2012. Like the other four "Amnesia Fortnight" titles, Middle Manager of Justice had a project leader other than Tim Schafer.
  A remastered version of Grim Fandango was announced by Double Fine Productions in June 2014, along with a remastered version of Day of the Tentacle, announced in December 2014; Double Fine was able to negotiate a deal with Disney for the remastered versions following the closure of LucasArts in 2013.
  Schafer stood in support of Anita Sarkeesian and other game develo
caption: Schafer and other game developers at a BAFTA event in Los Angeles in July 2011.  From left: Rod Humble, Louis Castle, David Perry, Brenda Brathwaite, John Romero, Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Chris Hecker.
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