Double Fine was founded in 2000 by Tim Schafer, who had a big hand in such adventure game classics as The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango. All of those games were created at the interactive division of LucasArts, which he left to create Double Fine. He had a small team that he had already worked with and they started on a demo for their first game. That game was Psychonauts, an extremely creative action-platformer.
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| The creative and weird cover of Psychonauts |
The gameplay consisted of mostly platformining and action. It's most notable for its creative setting, memorable characters, and hilarious clever writing, which have been stables of Tim Schafer and of the company as a whole. The game released in 2005 to almost unanimous praise from critics and fans alike.
Sadly though, the game never sold very well and is seen as a failure. But, it has since grown a strong and devoted fan following and massive interest and request for a sequel. Me personally? I love this game, it's in my top three favorite games, and I suggest it to anyone who will listen. If your interested, the game is rare and a new copy goes for a hefty price on Amazon alone. Luckily, there are alternatives. If you have an Xbox 360, you can buy it on "Games on Demand" for $20, or for the PC users, you can buy it on the free service Steam for just $10 (which if you don't have Steam and play games on the PC, you NEED this service, it's free so there's no reason for you not to have it).
While the game was a failure, and Double Fine did loose its publisher, they moved ahead with their next project, a heavy metal inspired open world, hack-n-slash, Real-Time-Strategy game that would hopefully be their huge hit. The game? Brutal Legend. It had an original art style and story, an all-star voice cast including Ozzy Osborne, Tim Curry, and Jack Black playing the main character and accidental look-alike, Eddie. Did it do well? Let's not get ahead of our selves, and instead talk about the game itself.
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| Brutal Legend''s hectic game cover |
The game released in 2009 to, once again, glowing reviews, which praised the presentation and criticized the gameplay. Sadly, once again, the game had what was considered bad sales, but has since sold 1.4 million copies as of February 2011, 4 months after its initial release. My opinion? I like it, while it could've done without the RTS sections, it's still a fun and funny game that's somewhat of a guilty pleasure for me.
One interesting thing that came out of this was the experimental moral booster called Amnesia Fortnight. During the development of Brutal Legend, the game had to change publishers after Activision acquired the rights after buying original publisher, Vivendi Games, and stopped development of the game. They eventually went with Electronic Arts, or EA for short.
During this time, Tim Schafer was inspired by a moral boosting activity originally done by Asian film director Wong Kar-Wai, who took his film crew to Hong Kong during the three year filming of Ashes of Time and shot footage for fun, but this lead to the creation of the films Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, which are considered the director's best movies. So Schafer split his staff into four teams for two weeks. They were instructed to forget all about Brutal Legend (where the "Amnesia" comes from) and develop a prototype for the other groups to review. All four games were praised by the groups and the whole thing was such a success that they did it again near the end of development of Brutal Legend and made four other prototypes.
After the team was told to stop production on Brutal Legend 2 by EA, Schafer started looking at the success of downloadable games such as Geometry Wars, he also started thinking about those eight prototypes. He decided to, once again, split the company into four groups, but this time they had the intention of making full fledged downloadable games with the best received prototypes. They all found publishers, Costume Quest and Stacking went with THQ, Iron Brigade (originally called Trenched, but changed due to legal problems) was picked up by Microsoft, and the fourth game was picked up by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and turned into a game for the Xbox 360's Kinect. The game was Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, it originally had nothing to do with Sesame Street, but the team felt that the show fit well with the idea.
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| Schafer having a serious meeting with Cookie Monster |
Now, to talk about the big news. Back in early February, Double Fine teamed up with 2 Player Productions, who had filmed the documentary on the smash hit game Minecraft, and started a fundraiser through the website Kickstarter. The idea behind it is to make a traditional 2D adventure game, reminiscent of Schafer classics like Secret of Monkey Island, it would be self published and developed by Double Fine, since adventure games were considered a niche genre and no publisher wanted to release that type of game. 2 Player Productions would film the whole process of making the game and make a documentary of it. Over all, their goal was $400,000, 100,000 for the film crew, 300,000 for the game, which would be released on mobile devices, PC, and Mac. $300,000 is the smallest budget Double Fine has worked with, and Schafer thought that would be the minimum they could make a game with. If you are at all confused, or want a good laugh, you can watch the video Schafer made to get people to donate to the project right here.
Was it a success? Well, the project reached its goal in just nine hours. How much did it make after the first day? Over $1,000,000. In just 24 hours. This caused a media firestorm, everyone was talking about the amazing success of the project, speculations were thrown all over the place and from everywhere, and tons of Kickstarter projects were made, and a lot of them failed. What a lot of people failed to realize was that Double Fine was so successful because it had a built in and devoted fan base of not just the company, but of the Adventure game genre itself. The fundraiser closed March 13 with a total of $3.3 million dollars from more than 87,000 backers.
This showed just how successful Double Fine has become, with devoted fans who would donate over $3.3 million just to see a game from the company, and they deserve it. They've been making games for over a decade and have never made a bad or uncreative game. They're masters of comedy, gameplay meshing, and delivering on promises. The future looks bright for Tim Schafer and gang, with not just the Double Fine Adventure coming out, but a new adventure game called The Cave, which had a well received showing at this years E3. I hope they do well, and I will continue to support and love Double Fine, like I hope you will too.
Missed the last YMNK? Check it:
http://newandclassicreviews.blogspot.com/2012/06/kairosoft-ymnk-3.html
Did you miss the last reviews as well? Man, you're slacking off. But I'll throw you a bone:
http://newandclassicreviews.blogspot.com/2012/06/summer-of-101-movies-94-manchurian.html
http://newandclassicreviews.blogspot.com/2012/06/prometheus-nr-26.html
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