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Timothy John Schafer (born July 26, 1967) is an American video 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 . 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.
During his application process for the job, he had a somewhat disastrous phone interview with David Fox in which he mentioned being a fan of Ballblaster. Fox informed him that the Lucasfilm Games title was Ballblazer, and that only the pirated version was known as Ballblaster, but despite the misstep, Fox asked Schafer to submit his resume for further consideration. Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts pg. 54 To make up for the phone interview, Schafer sent in a comic of himself applying for and getting the job at Lucasfilm Games, drawn as a text adventure.
Schafer was hired by LucasArts in 1989, and his first position was as a "scummlet", a programmer who helped to implement features and ideas proposed by the lead game developers within the LucasArts SCUMM engine. He, alongside Dave Grossman, helped to playtest and implement the NES version of Maniac Mansion. Schafer and Grossman, along with two others, were taught by Ron Gilbert as part of a "SCUMM University" on how to use the engine to set up rooms and puzzles.
Later, Gilbert approached Schafer and Grossman, offering them the chance to work on his new project, which would ultimately become the pirate-themed adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island.
According to series creator Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman were responsible for about two thirds of the game's dialogue. The Secret of Monkey Island became one of the most acclaimed games of its kind. The same team created the sequel, .
In his first lead role on a game project, Schafer co-designed (with Dave Grossman) Day of the Tentacle, a time-travel comedy adventure and the sequel to Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion. Schafer's first solo project, the biker adventure Full Throttle, was released in 1995. He went on to design the highly acclaimed Grim Fandango, a noir fiction adventure game set in the Aztec afterlife featuring characters similar to the papier-mâché skeleton decorations from the Mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos. Grim Fandango won many awards, including GameSpot's Game of the Year award of 1998, and Computer Adventure Game of the Year at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.
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 Adobe 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.
Schafer led the development of Double Fine's next game, Brütal Legend, released on October 13, 2009, after a tortuous development route due to having its original publisher Vivendi Games drop the title following its merge with Activision in 2008 to be picked up later by Electronic Arts. The game was Schafer's tribute to the music and art of heavy metal and featured voice acting from actor/musician Jack Black and cameos from rock musicians including Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford. Schafer said "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."
During Brütal Legend development, Schafer had Double Fine's staff take two weeks away from the game's development to participate in Amnesia Fortnights once a year starting in 2007. This was an internal game jam where the company was split into four teams to make a pitchable game prototype, an idea he compared to what film director Wong Kar-Wai had used previously. After Brütal Legend release, the game had generally positive reviews but did not perform as well as expected, and Electronic Arts cancelled the preliminary work Double Fine had started on the sequel. To keep Double Fine above water financially, Schafer went back to the past Amnesia Fortnight projects and selected games they could reasonably expand into full releases. From these, four smaller games were picked up by publishers, and were the first games in Double Fine's history to have project leaders other than Schafer: Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade and . The titles helped to keep Double Fine financially stable, and Schafer has continued to implement the Amnesia Fortnight as a yearly process; most of the games that result from these are led by someone other than Schafer.
On February 1, 2012, Schafer returned to the role of director in the Kinect-based Double Fine Happy Action Theater, a game concept he devised based on Once Upon a Monster 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 crowdfunding project for an unnamed adventure game via the crowd-sourced Kickstarter, 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 . 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.
Schafer and Double Fine had been able to negotiate with The Walt Disney Company, who acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, to obtain the rights to three of the titles that Schafer had directed there: Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango, by 2014. Double Fine subsequently released remastered versions of all three games over the following years.
Schafer stood in support of Anita Sarkeesian and other game developers that were being harassed by supporters of Gamergate, a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, that started in August 2014.
Schafer hosted the 2015 Game Developer’s Choice Awards on March 5; during the event one of his jokes referenced the #NotYourShield tag connected to the harassment Campaign. Gamergate supporters claimed #NotYourShield was used to demonstrate women and minorities supported their cause, but Schafer's remarks spoke to the wider assessment that the tag's use was largely composed of sockpuppets. Following the event, Gamergate supporters targeted Schafer for harassment by claiming he had been making a joke that mocked the minorities using this hashtag.
Gamergate supporters also found other opportunities to target Schafer for harassment, including a decision to expand the scope of Broken Age after its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign raised far more than the amount asked for, and a later decision to seek additional funding for the studio by offering the game's first half for sale on early access. Since then he continues to be an occasional target of harassment from either GamerGate supporters or those who were swayed by the campaign's claims.
Schafer joined with other industry leaders with crowdfunding experience to help create the crowdfunding platform Fig in August 2015, serving on its advisory board until March 2020. Through Fig, Schafer announced the sequel Psychonauts 2 in December 2015.
In June 2019, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Double Fine as part of Xbox Game Studios. Schafer stated that while he had not been looking to be acquired, he found the opportunity in his talks with Microsoft to be promising; the acquisition would not affect Double Fine's independence and would still allow the company to publish its pending titles on its own choice of platforms, and would provide the financial security needed for Double Fine to be able to concentrate on developing a quality product. Through this support, Double Fine was able to retain several gameplay elements within Psychonauts 2, which was eventually released on August 25, 2021, to critical praise.
"Often, the world is the initial inspiration for the game. One day I was listening to someone tell me their stories of spending the summer in Alaska. They had hung around this one biker bar, with these people with names like Smilin' Rick and Big Phil. And I thought, 'Wow, what a crazy world that is.' It's so apart from everybody's life, and yet it's right there, it's so mundane in a way. And that's where Full Throttle came from."
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