As part of our Psychonauts 2 cover story, we had the chance to talk to more than a dozen people who had a hand in the history of Double Fine Productions. This article originally ran in Game Informer issue 336, but we're republishing it on our website in anticipation of Psychonauts 2's upcoming August 25 release. To see more of our exclusive coverage, make sure to check out our rapid-fire interview with Double Fine founder Tim Schafer, a new Psychonauts 2 level, and our inside look at how the game is handling conversations around mental health.
Tim Schafer was on a glacier somewhere in Nepal, thinking he was going to die, when he decided to quit his job and found his own company.
Not too long before, some friends (he doesn’t say who) suggested they all leave their positions at LucasArts, the game division of Lucasfilm, to start a new company. But Schafer, who doesn’t like “worrying about buying printer paper and toilet paper,” says he was hesitant to take them up on the offer.
“I just want to make the games; I don’t want to worry about the building and all that stuff,” he says, laughing.
Three weeks in Nepal later, after a “grueling journey,” as he puts it, Schafer started to change his mind. “Something on that trip, I was like, ‘I think when I get back, I’m going to quit and I’m going to start my own company,’” he says. “It was also maybe because I was sick, and I lost 30 pounds on that trip, and I was just marching all day long.”
There was also the fear of death, a quick help in the decision-making of any person.
“I thought I was gonna die on this glacier because we took this pass you’re not supposed to take in the winter and it was snowing,” Schafer recalls. “We’re on this glacier that had these sinkholes in it. It was like, ‘I guess we’re gonna die up here.’ But we made it. And then I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to start my own company.’”
Whether or not the story is embellished, 20 years later, it’s a fitting origin for the company Schafer founded: Double Fine Productions, which has had its fair share of close calls with closure over its two-decade history. But it’s also become a mainstay in the game industry, consistently putting out cult classics, such as the original Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, Broken Age, and nearly two dozen other games. While Double Fine has never released a quote-unquote blockbuster – quite the opposite, in a lot of cases – it’s made a name for itself creating quirky, inventive, and off-beat titles. And it did all that while remaining independent. That is until 2019, when Microsoft purchased the company.
To tell the storied history of Double Fine, we talked to over a dozen people from the company, including Schafer himself, the people who have been with the studio since its inception, and the newer employees. This is the often-rocky story of Double Fine, as told by those who were there.
[Ed. Note: To avoid confusion with other articles, all job titles reflect people’s current positions on Psychonauts 2]
Monoxide
In numerous ways, the creation of Psychonauts, the first game Double Fine developed and released, was hazardous to the developers’ lives.
Double Fine didn’t begin in an office, but rather a garage made into an office in the SoMa district of San Francisco, Calif., in 2000 (after a four-month stint in a “haunted” clog shop). It wasn’t great. Rats filled the space. It was below sea level, so when it rained excessively, the sewer would overrun, overflowing the toilets. While working in a garage provided employees with parking, according to people that worked there, it also meant constantly breathing in carbon monoxide.
Photo Credit: James Spafford // Double Fine Productions
“You would drive into the office, and like, pull up right next to somebody’s desk and turn your car off,” says Nathan “Bagel” Stapley, a senior concept artist for Double Fine.
“There was no heat, either,” says senior animator Ray Crook. “And so, in the wintertime, we would just hang up big sheets of plastic and had these little space heaters that would blow the circuits if you had more than, like, three of them going.”
The neighborhood, at the time, wasn’t always safe, either. Writing in a 2015 postmortem for Gamasutra, Caroline Esmurdoc, Psychonauts’ executive producer, described the office as what “started as punk-rock charm soon became depressing, disgusting, and dangerous.”
“One night, a woman from the transient hotel next door jumped out a fifth floor window and landed on our roof, breaking her leg and knocking a hole in our ceiling,” Esmurdoc wrote. “Another day, there was a dead body in the doorway across the street, apparently the victim of an overdose.”
They weren’t ideal – or perhaps even always legal – working conditions, but with the bad is also the good. Talking to developers that were there at the time, there’s an almost garage-band quality to the early days of Double Fine. They threw parties in the office, decorated the walls with interesting art, and overall enjoyed the company of their coworkers. For a little while, Schafer even made and painted every employee’s desk. “That seemed like a cool startup thing to do,” he says.
Predictably, the interview process at Double Fine was also atypical. Lead programmer Kee Chi says that when he interviewed with the company, he talked about Zelda for an hour rather than answering any technical programming questions. Instead of going through the process of talking to recruiters and human resources, Levi Ryken, now a senior artist with Double Fine, had to speak to every single person at the company – to get hired as an intern.
“Obviously, these things are all nicer to think about from a distance,” Chi says. “And now that we have functioning toilets, we can look at it [like], ‘Ah, remember the time when things were like that?’ But it’s also a time when all of us got to know each other and parts of the game came together. There was a lot of DIY feeling at the old office, that the new offices [don’t] quite have. But it also could either be just fond memories of different times or the carbon monoxide poisoning we got at the time. It’s one of those things.”
Coincidentally, Psychonauts was initially being developed for Microsoft, which was getting ready to release the original Xbox around the same time as Double Fine’s founding. While pitching the game, Schafer gave a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference about character design. It caught the ear of Ed Fries, then vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, who signed the game. At the time, Microsoft handed out ping pong balls with the Xbox logo on it, which Fries gave Schafer when they first met. Two decades later, Schafer says he had the ball sitting on his desk when he signed the paperwork for Microsoft’s acquisition of Double Fine in 2019. “I had it on a table in a little stand like a little ceremonial thing to bring the whole thing full circle,” he says.