A huge part of what a kid learns when they're growing up is social and emotional development. As adults, we take it for granted that other people have emotions that are different from ours, and we can identify what they are, but those are skills that children have to learn.
— Tim Schafer
What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.
I would like to reach non-gamers. It's always great when guys come up to me who are gamers and represent my usual audience, but they'll say, 'You know, Psychonauts is the only game I can actually get my girlfriend to play with me.'
I've always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn't matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is 'Tetris,' one of the greatest games ever made.
People talk about games and loneliness - it's a lonely activity. I didn't understand that. 'Gears of War' was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn't sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house.
I think when you play 'Psychonauts,' you are kind of playing inside of my head.
Kinect is such a great new entry into the field because it takes away one of the big barriers to little kids to playing a game, which is the controller. You can't hand a basic video game controller to a child and expect them to understand what a left bumper is and to click in the right stick.
I'm a dad now, so now I just don't care what I look like. Once you've created life, you just don't care what anyone thinks.
I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.
Before 'Final Fantasy VII,' I would have told you that I had zero interest in RPGs with turn-based combat. But that game was so well done, I didn't care what genre it was. Any genre can be done poorly or done well.
If you're not loyal to your team, you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you, and it just won't be there.
Publishers are very risk-averse, so they lean towards licenses and sequels. But the fact is that even those are not guaranteed hits. So, if 'playing it safe' does not guarantee hits, they might as well leave it up to the really creative, risk-taking people, because they couldn't do any worse.
I've always hated superheroes. I cannot stand them. I love Norse mythology, but I hate superheroes. They ruined movies, then comics, and now games.
I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you.
Adventure games are all about details - if you happen to take this one object and use it with this other object, in a really weird place, at a weird time. If you happen to write a really funny dialogue line for that, even if it didn't solve the puzzle, people will appreciate that.
I've now met, I would say, almost every single one of my rock idols. I feel like I should just drive off a cliff now.
I enjoy everything. I actually do listen to everything. In high school, I listened to a lot of metal and punk rock.
The Internet has allowed a lot of access - people feel entitled to change the ending of games, for example. So there are a lot more voices coming at you all the time, which I think has its effect on creative decision making and possibly makes people more afraid to take risks.
I like any good game. I don't care what the genre is.
After 'Psychonauts,' we could have laid off half our team so that we'd have more money and time to sign 'Brutal Legend.' But doing so would have meant breaking up a team that had just learned how to work well together. And what message would that have sent to our employees? It would say that we're not loyal to them, and that we don't care.
For every character, I think about who they are, their story, what they are, and who they were before their game started. What was their life like? Where did they grow up? What were their parents like?
There was a 'magic rock' my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as 'Pikmin' - I wanted to go into that world.
If I had done a sequel to 'Day of the Tentacle,' there probably wouldn't have been a 'Full Throttle.' If I did a 'Full Throttle' sequel, there wouldn't have been a 'Grim Fandango.' It's important to make new stuff up.
I always think the recipe for success for a game or any sort of a fantasy experience is to think of a character that hasn't really been explored before, who is unique and has special abilities that not everybody has, and plop them into whatever is the most interesting situation to plop them into.
The last time I really got into new music that wasn't heavy metal was probably like... TV on the Radio? I think that was it. That's the last time.
When I'm playing 'Rock Band,' I'm like, 'Man, someday, later on in life when I'm a famous rock star...' Which gets a little harder to convince myself of as I reach middle age, but it still happens a lot.
