Tim Schafer’s first professional game credit was as a playtester, on the NES version of Maniac Mansion. Within a few years he was co-writing The Secret of Monkey Island, and by 1998 he had led three of LucasArts’ best-known adventures. The games were comedies, and the jokes were mostly in the writing. He then left to start his own studio, Double Fine, which spent the next quarter of a century being dropped by publishers, rescued by other publishers, and finding new ways to pay for its games. One of them, a 2012 appeal to players on Kickstarter, started a rush of crowdfunded games.
Fast facts
- Born: 26 July 1967, in Sonoma, California.
- Education: a degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
- Lucasfilm Games / LucasArts: 1989 to 2000.
- Founded: Double Fine Productions, San Francisco, 2000.
- Known for: Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Broken Age.
Getting started
Schafer told Retro Gamer in 2005 that he first felt what a game could do as a child, in an arcade with his father: before he reached the Space Invaders cabinet he could hear it “going thump, thump, thump”, so deep “I could feel it in my chest”. He taught himself to program on an Atari 2600 with the BASIC cartridge, whose programs “were about 5 lines long”, and in a Radio Shack store, where he would break out of the backgammon program running on the demonstration TRS-80 and type in his own “really quickly” until the staff moved him on.
He joined Lucasfilm Games at Skywalker Ranch in 1989, straight after graduating from Berkeley. “The offices were cosy, wooden works of art with cobblestone fireplaces,” he remembered, and “lunch was catered”, though “it’s not all free lunch and wookies”. His first jobs were playtesting Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the NES Maniac Mansion. New staff learned to program the company’s adventure system, SCUMM, and Schafer was one of the trainees the staff called “Scummlets”.
The LucasArts adventures
| Game | Year | Schafer’s role |
|---|---|---|
| The Secret of Monkey Island | 1990 | Assistant designer, co-writer and programmer, with Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman |
| Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge | 1991 | Assistant designer, co-writer and programmer |
| Day of the Tentacle | 1993 | Co-project leader and co-designer with Dave Grossman |
| Full Throttle | 1995 | Project leader, designer and writer |
| Grim Fandango | 1998 | Project leader, designer and writer |
Ron Gilbert, who was assembling the Monkey Island team, liked Schafer’s writing and paired him with Dave Grossman. Gilbert approved the jokes by playing them: “if he didn’t laugh we’d be crushed and we’d cut that part, but if he did laugh, maybe some people would gather around to see what was so funny.” Schafer said the game took nine months to make. He also admitted that he had argued against Gilbert’s idea of insult sword fighting at first: “I thought people would feel so ripped off! But he was right.”
After the sequel, the core of the Monkey Island team made Day of the Tentacle, the follow-up to Maniac Mansion. Schafer and Grossman were co-project leaders; they designed it together and each wrote half the dialogue. His first project on his own, “with about 30 other people”, as he told Edge, was Full Throttle (1995), a biker adventure for which he both designed the game and wrote all the dialogue. Edge gave it nine out of ten.
Grim Fandango (1998) sent Manny Calavera, a travel agent in the Mexican land of the dead, on a story spread over four years of his afterlife. Schafer told Edge that its influences included Chinatown, Casablanca and The Big Sleep, and it was the most ambitious story he had yet attempted: “It’s like a four-year road trip.” It left SCUMM behind for a new 3D engine that used the Lua scripting language. Retro Gamer later called it a huge critical hit whose sales did not match the acclaim.
Leaving LucasArts
Schafer then spent a year on a spy game for LucasArts that was never released. What pushed him out, he said, was losing control of what he had made. “MTV wanted to discuss making a Full Throttle cartoon, and I wanted to do it, but Lucas management didn’t,” he told Retro Gamer. “Much later, I heard about a sequel to Full Throttle being made, and no one had even asked me about it!” He put it to Edge more plainly: “George Lucas owns it. And he paid me for it, it’s fair! … but I can start my own company.”
Double Fine
Schafer founded Double Fine Productions in San Francisco in 2000, with other former LucasArts staff. Its first game, Psychonauts, sent a boy called Raz into a summer camp for psychics and then into the minds of the people there; Wireframe traced it to an idea dropped from Full Throttle. Microsoft signed it as an Xbox game, then dropped it after its champion, Ed Fries, left the company, and Majesco rescued it for release in 2005 on the Xbox, PlayStation 2 and PC. It was well reviewed and sold, by Wireframe’s count, around 100,000 copies. Seven years had passed since Grim Fandango. When Psychonauts was announced, Schafer said, “the story in the press was ‘Tim Schafer returns to games!’ And I felt like John Travolta when Pulp Fiction came out. I was like, ‘Hey! I was here the whole time.’”
Brütal Legend (2009), a heavy-metal action and strategy game starring Jack Black, had a harder road. Vivendi signed it; after Vivendi’s games business merged into Activision the game was dropped, and Electronic Arts picked it up and published it. It sold around 125,000 copies at launch.
While it was being made, Schafer tried something borrowed from the film director Wong Kar-wai, who had broken off a long production to make two films in a fortnight. He called it Amnesia Fortnight: “We split the company up into four groups, and each group made a game in 14 days. It was a huge morale boost.” When the planned Brütal Legend 2 was cancelled, those prototypes kept the studio alive. “We had nothing else for the team to do,” Schafer told Edge, “and no money coming in.” Double Fine polished four of them, took them on a “pitching roadshow” and signed all four. They became Costume Quest (2010), Stacking, Trenched and Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, and by the end of 2011 a studio that had taken four years to make one game had released four smaller ones in a year.
Kickstarter and Broken Age
On 8 February 2012 Double Fine asked players on Kickstarter for $400,000 to make a point-and-click adventure. It passed the target within a day. By the end of the 35-day campaign 87,142 backers had pledged $3,336,371, and Retro Gamer put the total with other contributions at $3.45 million. Other veterans followed at once: Brian Fargo raised almost $3 million for Wasteland 2, and Al Lowe took his Leisure Suit Larry remake to the site. Megan Carriker of Spark Plug Games, whose own Kickstarter was struggling, told Edge that few could copy it: Double Fine had “a beautiful mix of nostalgia, brand recognition, serious cult following”, and the timing was perfect. The game became Broken Age, released in two acts in 2014 and 2015. Wireframe judged it “good-but-not-great”, and its campaign more important than the game.
The studio also went back to its past. Schafer bought back the rights to Psychonauts, which went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies, and Double Fine released remastered versions of LucasArts adventures including Grim Fandango. In 2014 it started a publishing label, Double Fine Presents, for other studios’ games. Ron Gilbert joined for one game, The Cave (2013).
Microsoft, and independence again
In June 2019, at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, Double Fine was announced as part of Xbox Game Studios. Psychonauts 2, the sequel to the game Microsoft had dropped, came out in August 2021 with Microsoft as its publisher. The studio followed it with Keeper (October 2025), directed by Lee Petty, and the multiplayer game Kiln (April 2026).
In July 2026, under Xbox’s new chief executive Asha Sharma, Double Fine left Xbox Game Studios and became independent again, laying off 23 people in the process. Schafer told Kotaku that for the staff who stayed “it’s like a creative awakening”, and that “no one puts Double Fine out of business except for me”.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, pp. 38–43, “Tim Schafer” profile: Space Invaders, the Atari 2600 and Radio Shack, joining Lucasfilm Games, playtesting Last Crusade and the NES Maniac Mansion, working with Gilbert and Grossman, insult sword fighting, co-leading Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, the spy game, the MTV cartoon and the Full Throttle sequel, and founding Double Fine in San Francisco in 2000.
- Edge issue 30, March 1996, p. 44: Schafer as project leader at LucasArts, a “Scum-let”, assistant designer on Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle with Grossman, and Full Throttle (“with about 30 other people”; designed it and wrote all the dialogue; nine out of ten).
- PC Player (Germany), November 1999, p. 53: his Berkeley degree and joining LucasArts in 1989; assistant designer and programmer on the first two Monkey Island games.
- Retro Gamer issue 105, August 2012, p. 13: born 26 July 1967.
- Edge issue 55, February 1998, pp. 50–53: Grim Fandango, Manny Calavera, its film influences and four-year story.
- Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, pp. 72–79, “SCUMM Origins”: Grim Fandango’s new engine and Lua.
- Edge issue 221, December 2010, pp. 79–80: Monkey Island in nine months; Amnesia Fortnight and Wong Kar-wai; the cancellation of Brütal Legend 2 and the four signed games.
- Edge issue 232, October 2011, pp. 138–140, studio profile of Double Fine: founding in 2000 after leaving LucasArts, the Full Throttle sequel and “I can start my own company”, Microsoft and Majesco, Vivendi, Jack Black, Activision and EA, the Amnesia Fortnights and four games in a year.
- Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, p. 8: the Kickstarter campaign (8 February, $400,000 target, 35 days, 87,142 backers, $3,336,371, $3.45 million in total), Wasteland 2 and Leisure Suit Larry.
- Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 11–12: Double Fine’s Kickstarter and Megan Carriker of Spark Plug Games on it.
- Wireframe issue 30, January 2020, pp. 50–53, developer profile “Double Fine”: founding in 2000 with LucasArts alumni, Psychonauts’ origin, Microsoft, Ed Fries and Majesco, about 100,000 copies; Brütal Legend, Vivendi, Activision and EA; Costume Quest and Amnesia Fortnight; the rights to Psychonauts and 1.5 million sales; the LucasArts remasters; Double Fine Presents; The Cave; Broken Age; the 2019 Microsoft purchase.
- Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, p. 41: Psychonauts 2 released in 2021 with Microsoft as publisher and owner.
- Ethan Gach, “Tim Schafer Calls Double Fine Leaving Xbox A ‘Creative Awakening’”, Kotaku, 4 September 2026 (web, secondary): independence from Xbox, the 23 lay-offs, Keeper and Kiln, and Schafer’s quotes. https://kotaku.com/tim-schafer-calls-double-fine-leaving-xbox-a-creative-awakening-ashas-not-going-to-shoot-my-dog-2000731428
- Wikipedia, “Tim Schafer”, “Double Fine”, “Keeper (video game)” and “Kiln (video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): birthplace; the Microsoft purchase announced on 9 June 2019 at E3; Broken Age’s two acts; Psychonauts 2 on 25 August 2021; Keeper on 17 October 2025, directed by Lee Petty; Kiln on 23 April 2026; independence on 6 July 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fine