May 31, 2018 • 27 mins
TechStuff listener Juan asked that we talk about Tim Schafer, a computer game designer famous for making clever, quirky adventure games. In this first episode, we look at his years working for LucasArts games and the early days of his own Double Fine Productions.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
how Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
tech stuff. Listener one asked that I do an episode
covering an important developer and businessman in the video game world.
(00:27):
He cut his teeth working on games for George Lucas's
video game company, and he went on to create some
of the most innovative, quirky, and beloved games you can
find on store shelves. His name is Tim Schaefer. My
first experience playing a game that Tim Schaefer worked on
was The Curse of Monkey Island, which was the third
game in the Monkey Island series. I had heard of
(00:49):
the previous two games and even played them a little bit,
and those were ones that Tim Schaefer had worked on
more extensively, but I didn't own those games at the time.
But the world of Monkey Isle, with its goofy protagonist
Guy Brush Threepwood, the numerous comedic, pirate radical stereotypes in
the bizarre puzzles caught my attention and delighted me. But
for many years I didn't know much about Schaefer, who
(01:12):
gets a credit for a quote additional design end quote
on the game. So this episode is all about Schaefer
the game developer and Schaefer the businessman, and we start
in California in nineteen sixty seven. Timothy John Schaefer grew
up in Sonoma, California. He has four siblings, all of
whom are older, with a four year gap between him
(01:34):
and the next youngest. The age gap meant Tim didn't
get the opportunity to play a lot of board games
his siblings had played. His brother was nine years older
still is in fact nine years older than he is,
and a fifteen year old boy doesn't really want to
sit down and play games with a six year old.
But luckily for Tim, something came along that made it
easier to play games on your own video games. Tim
(01:56):
told us Gamer in an interview in that he remembered
visiting arcades with his dad back in the early seventies.
His earliest memory involving video games was of an arcade
game called Space Race, which he discovered at a summer
camp called Blair Camp Blue. Space Race was a simple
two player game in which each player controls a rocket ship.
(02:17):
The screen is divided into two vertical panels side by side,
and your job is to pilot your spaceship on your
side from the bottom of the screen to the top. Meanwhile,
obstacles like asteroids would fly across the screen left or right.
You could only make your rocket move up or down
the screen, and if you got a hit, your rocket
would reappear at the bottom after a short delay. Getting
(02:38):
to the top would score a point. Rounds would last
a certain amount of time variable. According to the arcade
game owner and little Tim Shafer found the game fascinating.
He soon learned to love other arcade games. His dad
shared a fascination with the technology and would take Tim
with him to visit various arcades and other places that
had arcade cabinets. In that same US gamer piece, Shaefer
(03:01):
said that earlier arcade machines that he loved included Night Drive, Atari,
Stunt Cycle, which had a handlebar type controller, and Space Panic.
Things really changed for Shafer when his family purchased a
Magnavox Odyssey game console. This was the first home video
game console to become commercially available. It officially hit the
(03:24):
market in nineteen seventy two. The Odyssey was pretty limited,
all right, Well that's an understatement. It could not create sound.
It was monochromatic. It could display four whole elements on
screen at once. Two of those would be dots or
bars that the players could control using the Odyssey controllers,
(03:44):
which were little boxes that had dials for user input.
The third element was a dot that the Odyssey itself
would control, such as the ball in a game of pong.
So the two dots that the players could control would
be the paddles, the dot that the computer is controlling
is the ball. And the fourth element it could display
was a vertical line, and that would serve as different
(04:05):
things for different games. It could act as the center
line of a game of pong, so it's sort of
like the net in tennis, or it could serve as
the edge of a handball court. You had a little
dial that you would use to adjust where the vertical
line was supposed to appear on the screen, and all
games were really just some sort of variation on pong. Ultimately,
Shaver found the technology really interesting, and he also liked
(04:29):
the overlays that came with the Odyssey. You would get
these clear plastic overlays with designs on them, and you
would put those on your TV screen and they would
stick to it due to static cling, and the overlays
would create visuals that the odyssey couldn't produce on its own.
So you might have one that looks like a castle,
for example, and then you're, I don't know, playing Pong
(04:49):
inside a castle. The magic of video games. A little
bit later, the family purchased an Atari twenty hundred. Shaver
talked about how he would love to play a game
without even looking at instructions, and that the period of
confusion he would experience while trying to suss out the
game was one of his favorite experiences. It would become
one of the elements of his own game design philosophy,
(05:12):
to build in elements into games that would require the
player to try different things, to adopt and abandon various
approaches in order to progress through the game, and to
include consequences for those actions that would be almost as
entertaining as finding the right solution. So he did something wrong,
you at least knew that you had done something, as
(05:32):
opposed to just randomly pushing buttons. Schaefer, like many of
his video game designer appears gradually began to not just
play games, but also learn how to build code and programs.
Schaefer's first work was on an Atari eight hundred, the
home computer that Attari had put out, and that used
the six five oh two assembly language. Not exactly an
(05:56):
intuitive programming language. Assembly language falls to a category called
low level programming language. That means it's not that far
off from basic machine code. That's the language that a
computer actually quote unquote understands the problem with machine code
is that it's not easy for humans to work with,
(06:16):
so we humans have designed various programming languages to help
create an abstract way to manipulate information in order to
make processors do what the programmer wants the processor to do.
Assembly languages do this, but at a pretty low level,
something close to the original machine language. Each assembly language
is specific to a particular style of computer architecture, so
(06:40):
you can't poured it over from one type of computer
architecture to another. The literal architecture of the computer will
not understand that assembly language. Schaefer's interest in computers and
programming stuck with him throughout his childhood, and he graduated
high school and then was accepted into the university of
California at Lee and chose computer science as his major.
(07:03):
He would later say that he most enjoyed several of
the classes that were outside the realm of computer science,
such as creative writing, English literature, and anthropology, and while
he was attending class at the university, he happened to
see a job opportunity posted at the school's career center.
The opportunity was to apply to be a playtester for
(07:24):
Lucasfilm Games, which would later become Lucas Arts and Yes
it's George Lucas. Longtime fans of Tech Stuff will know
that we once did a full episode about being a
playtester many many years ago. Playtesters have a job that,
on first glance, sounds like it would be a lot
of fun. You play video games for a living, and
(07:45):
better yet, you play games that are so new they
aren't even available for purchase. You get to play them
before anyone else does, while it's still being built, and
you get paid for it. That sounds like a dream job, right.
It's only can be fun at times, but play testing
can also be frustrating and repetitive, particularly if the game
(08:06):
has design flaws. Play Testers are supposed to look for
bugs and glitches as they play. Are there any game
breaking problems? Are there issues with the game engine? Is
it possible to get stuck somewhere just because of level
design or some other issue. Is the game's path a
clear one? Is it playable? Is it fun? It might
(08:28):
mean playing the same section of the same level dozens
of times for several hours as you poke and prod
testing a game to make sure it will hold up
once it's released, and even the best play tester may
overlook something. The goals define as many problems as you
can before you ship, so you can fix them. Because
once it's out in the wild, you have hopefully thousands
(08:51):
or millions of people playing your game, and at that scale,
people are bound to find bugs and glitches, so your
best hope is to weed out the most preval ones
in an effort to deliver the best game possible. Schaefer
decided to apply for the position and landed a phone
interview with David Fox, one of the founding members of
the game company, and it was a bit of a
(09:12):
rocky interview. How well, I'll tell you, But first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So there's
Tim Shaefer and he's on the phone with David Fox.
Fox had worked on games like Labyrinth, Zach McCracken and
(09:33):
The Alien Mind Benders, and Rescue on fractal Us, among others. Schaefer,
in an effort to present himself as an enthusiastic potential employee,
stated that he had really enjoyed playing the Lucas Arts
game ball Blasters, and there was problem number one. Ball
Blasters was a pirated version of a game released by
(09:56):
Lucas Arts. The official game SAME's name was ball Blazer,
but in nine three, Lucasfilm Games had handed over an
early build of ball Blazer to Atari. After that someone
had mysteriously pulled the code off the game and uploaded
it to a bulletin board system or BBS. Soon copies
(10:19):
of the game began popping up on other bb s
s and people were downloading it for free, and it
was this version that Shaefer had played. The pirated version.
It's awkward moment Number two happened when Schaefer admitted he
had not played Zack McCracken. That was awkward because David
Fox had actually been the lead on Zach McCracken. Again,
(10:43):
Schaefer walked out of the interview, or rather hung up
the phone convinced that he had totally blown it. He
had not been prepared, he had admitted to piracy, and
he may as well have said Star Wars stinks. But
Shaffer decided to at least have a little on with
his experience. He was invited to send in his resume
(11:04):
and cover letter, and instead he drew up a cartoons
strip slash text adventure style document on paper, so he
illustrated it, but it was done in the style of
an old text adventure game where he as a character
was trying to land a job at Lucas Film Games,
(11:26):
and through the process he makes all the right decisions
and he ends up getting the job, and he sent
that to Lucasfilm. Whether Fox was secretly amused by this
interview or the comic strip gave him insight into Shaffer's character,
he decided to hire Schaffer for the position to play tester,
and Shaffer's first gig was beta testing Indiana Jones and
(11:48):
The Last Crusade, the action game, but soon he was
tapped by a designer named Ron Gilbert to learn the
game engine that Lucas Film Games had been using at
that time. The game engine had the name Script Creation
Utility for Maniac Mansion or SCUM, so Schaefer became a scumblet.
(12:12):
The team was working on a port of Maniac Mansion
for the Nintendo Entertainment System or in ne S. The
game originally came out for home computers in nine and
featured a point and click interface to navigate through the world,
explore environments, and solve puzzles. The game included many innovative features.
(12:33):
For example, in the game, you can choose two companions
from a pool of six potentials to help you in
your missions. Who you choose affects the way you must
complete the game, and so player choice actually had an
impact on how the game plays out. After working on
the port, Schaefer got an invitation from Gilbert to work
(12:53):
on the next project, which was a pirate themed adventure game.
He would join another up and coming star at Lucas
Art's named David Grossman, and originally the game was meant
to be a pretty serious homage to Treasure Island. It
was more or less a straight laced pirate tail, kind
of grim and gritty. Schaefer was brought on as a
(13:16):
programmer and a writer for the project. While building the game,
Schaffer and Grossman started to insert temporary placeholder dialogue just
so that something was there. It wasn't meant to represent
the final game, and their impish sense of humor meant
they threw in a lot of jokes. Pirates who were
meant to be scurvy dogs who inspired fear, and all
(13:38):
who met them transformed into odd ball characters with silly
names and dialogue options. Schaefer's temporary dialogue with such a
huge hit, so much so that Gilbert actually decided to
change directions with the game and make it a comedic
action adventure set in the pirate world, and thus The
Secret of Monkey Island was born. In the game, you
(14:00):
play as guy Brush three Wood, a bit of a
dweeb who wants to become a pirate. Three woods nemesis
is the evil pirate Lachuk. There was a series of
weird adventures, odd puzzles, and lots of jokes. The player
eventually faces down Lachuk and through the power of carbonated beverages,
stands triumphant. The game received good reviews and a positive
(14:23):
response from players, and so the same creative team got
together to work on a sequel, The Secret of Monkey
Island to La Chuck's Revenge. Grossman and Schaefer worked well
together and impressed the executives at Lucas Arts, so the
two were given the opportunity to act as project co
leeds on a new game, a sequel to Maniac Mansion
(14:43):
called Day of the Tentacle. This was a comedic time
travel adventure and it too received positive response. Schaefer's work
on the Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle
convinced Lucas Arts that he should be allowed to work
on a project of his very own. Schaefer decided to
create a game that would incorporate one of his favorite
(15:03):
genres of music, heavy metal. That game was called Full Throttle,
which was released in nineteen and it featured an outlaw
biker accused of a crime he didn't commit, but still
contained a lot of humor as well. One of Schaefer's trademarks,
you might say and Schaefer acted as lead developer on
(15:24):
Full Throttle, writing and programming much of the game himself.
It was one of the earliest games to feature a
fully voiced game script, meaning every line was spoken by
a character in the game, delivered by a voice actor
up to that point, most games relied heavily on text,
which wasn't nearly as resource intensive and obviously did not
(15:47):
require voice actors. You might spice up a cut scene
or something like that with a little voice acting, but
it was extremely rare to find a game that included
voice acting all the way through, and the voice actors
included some folks you'd recognize at least by voice, if
not by name. Maurice LaMarsh and Tress McNeil both provided
voices for the game, as did the Jedi Master himself,
(16:09):
Mark Hamill. Full Throttle also made use of licensed music,
something that was new for Lucas Arts. The music came
from a San Francisco rock band called the Gone Jackals.
Gameplay was in a two D playing field and featured
the point and click interface adventure gamers were used to it.
Will also had a pie menu, which is a circular
(16:30):
pop up that lets you pick different interaction options when
you interact with some sort of object or character. For example,
he might be able to pick up, push taste, or
talk to something by selecting different options on this pop
up menu, and you're highlighting a specific object or character.
In addition to the adventure portions of the game. There
were action sequences in which you'd try to fight off
(16:53):
rival bikers while writing on your motorcycle. That created a
certain arcade element in Full Throttle. The game received generally
positive reviews, though by any measure it was a pretty
short game, requiring only about four hours to complete, and
that's if you're not even rushing. After Full Throttle, Schaefer
created a game that I think is a real masterpiece,
(17:14):
not just for Schaefer but for video games in general.
I really think it's something special. It's called Grim Fandango.
It's another point and click adventure game, and it came
out in Grim Fandango. Unlike the other adventure games in LucasArts,
did not use the Scum engine. Instead, Shaffer's team developed
(17:35):
a new game engine called grim E and a scripting
language called Lua. Actually they didn't develop Lua, but they
used it. Rather than pointing and clicking to move your
character around, you could use keyboard controls to move about
the environment in a tank like control scheme, meaning you
could use certain keys that would allow you to pivot
left or pivot right, and other keys would make you
(17:56):
walk forward or backward. The game's setting was the Land
of the Dead, inspired by the folklore of Mexico with
a strong film noir motif. The player takes control of
a Department of Death employee named Manny Calavera, who must
investigate a mystery that suggests there's some high level corruption
going on in the world of death. The game is quirky,
(18:18):
it is challenging, and it's filled with tons of nods
to classic film noir cinema like Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon.
It received critical acclaim and in TWI it was the
subject of a remastered edition, which has updated controls, graphics,
and a commentary track featuring Tim Shaefer and other members
(18:40):
of the development team. And if you haven't tried it out,
I recommend giving it a go. It can be a
little frustrating at times, but that's Schaefer's style to present
the player with a tricky situation that requires a lot
of adaptation to figure out how to get out of it.
In fact, Shaefer has talked at length about the tragedy
of creating computer tutorials for every single game. He said
(19:03):
a lot of fun he had as a player was
learning how the game worked and how you interacted with it.
And trying to figure out ways to solve puzzles, but
that a lot of games these days kind of spell
everything out, giving you step by step instructions on what
you need to do in order to get through a section.
He says, well, where's the fun in that? If I
walk up to a puzzle and then the computer says, hey,
(19:25):
why don't you try picking up this thing and using
it with that thing? It takes the joy of that
discovery away from me. So Shaefer goes with an approach
where he specifically tries to design games that are a
little confusing, but intriguingly confusing, not frustratingly. So that's his
goal at any rate. However, after Grim Vandango went gold
(19:47):
and got tons of critical acclaim, he found himself in
a bit of a tricky situation. And I'll explain more
in just a second, but first let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. Schaefer's next project that Lucas Arts,
(20:08):
never saw the light of day. It was a project
meant for the PlayStation two, but never really emerged from
early development. I don't even have a name for this
game or what it was supposed to be about. It
really didn't get very far at all. But around that
same time, there was a shift in LucasArts away from
the adventure style games that Schaefer had really cut his
(20:29):
teeth on, and Schaefer himself wanted to try something new
and develop his own company with his own identity and culture.
He had worked for Lucas Arts for a decade and
so he thought, maybe it's time to strike out on
my own, and so Schaefer, along with a few other
LucasArts employees, left to found a new game studio called
Double Fine Productions in June two thousand. The first game
(20:53):
to come out of Double Fine was Psycho Knots a
few years later, and that's a platforming game in which
you play as as a psychically gifted young boy who
infiltrates a special summer camp for kids with superpowers, and
the real purpose of the camp is to train kids
to become special agents called Psycho Knots, which is a
(21:14):
job that Raz would really like to have. He discovers
there's something hinky going on at the camp and the
story unfolds from there and again it received really great reviews,
but sadly sales were a little lackluster. The next title,
from Double Fine and Schaefer was Brutal Legend, and Brutal
has a really good name for the process of what
(21:36):
the company went through in trying to bring this game
to life. A Brutal Legend is a real time strategy
action adventure game that had a heavy metal soundtrack, an
extensive one. Schaefer wanted to combine elements of fantasy and
heavy metal, largely because a lot of heavy metal albums
feature artwork that's inspired by fantasy genre. Just look at
(21:59):
any Ally Hatchett album cover and you'll know what I'm
talking about. And there were even tons of songs in
heavy metal that dealt with fantasy concepts. As Schaefer said,
there's heavy metal songs about fighting orcs. Why can't we
bring these two things together in a video game? So
he thought they were a really great match. And if
you want to talk soundtracks, Brutal Legend has got to
(22:20):
be up there. I mean, the game has more than
a hundred licensed heavy metal tracks from bands like Motorhead,
Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Kiss, among others. The protagonist
of the game is voiced by Jack Black of Tenacious D,
and there's even a Tenacious D song on the soundtrack
as well, and there's even a track from the cartoon
(22:42):
death metal band Death Clock in there. His company developed
the game, but they found it difficult to get a
publisher too many companies had misgivings about the real time
strategy elements. Originally, Sierra Entertainment, which was part of Vivendi
Games at that time, was going to publish Brutal Legend,
(23:02):
but then Activision acquired Vivendi and Activision backed out of
the agreement. According to Activision CEO Robert Kotick, dropping the
game was not done just on a whim, but rather
because the team was falling behind on deadlines. They were
missing those deadlines and he felt that the game didn't
(23:24):
look like it was going to be any good. So
I guess there was nothing personal. It was just business.
But the story goes that Double Find didn't find out
about their game being dropped by Activision until they saw
a press release for upcoming titles from Activision that failed
to have Brutal Legend on it, and that's how they
found out their game was not going to be published.
(23:45):
Schaefer was not allowed to talk about the status of
the game while his team looked for another publisher. They
eventually found one, an Electronic Arts or e A, but
then Activision sued Double Fine, saying that the company had
invested millions of dollars in this game and that some
other publishers shouldn't be able to just sweep in and
become the benefactor for the company and thus realize all
(24:10):
the profits out of the investment from Activision, And anyway,
Activision and Double Fine were still in negotiations to publish
this game in the first place. Double Fine counter suit Activision, saying, no,
you dropped this game. It severed all obligations because you
pulled your support, and things got really heated. Schaefer was
(24:32):
clearly affected by the situation in a really negative way,
and before the matter could receive an official court decision,
the parties settled out of court under a private agreement.
Brutal Legend published under e A again. The game got
great reviews, but sales just didn't follow suit. Part of
the problem may have been in the marketing. Schaefer's team
(24:54):
had set up from the beginning to create a real
time strategy action adventure game, but aren'ts games were a
bit in a bit of a lull and e A
seemed less inclined to market a game that was in
that genre, so instead, marketing focused on Jack Black's involvement
and the heavy metal angle, but not so much on
(25:15):
the actual gameplay inside the game, and gamers may not
have known what the game actually was like, and therefore
they just never bothered to pick it up. The first
two titles from Double Fine were praised for their design,
their story, their execution. The problem was people just weren't
buying the games. Morale was at a low point for
a Double Fine, and Schaefer was feeling it too. Actually,
(25:37):
during the production of Brutal Legend and before its publication,
Schaefer made a decision. The game's development had taken much
longer than anticipated. The delays were really wearing the team down.
The publishing woes were incredibly stressful, and what had started
out as a passion project about heavy metal and fantasy
had become a source of stress and anxiety, and Schaefer
(26:01):
instituted what he called the Amnesia Fortnight's. The Amnesia Fortnits
was a type of work retreat. Everyone at the company
was to stop work for two weeks. They were all
to divide up into four different teams and each team
was to come up with an idea for a game.
(26:21):
This exercise was meant to be a fun distraction for
Double Find employees. It would turn out to be a
solution to save the company. But I'll talk more about
that in our next episode about Tim Schaefer. For now,
it's time to say goodbye to all our company. But
if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
(26:41):
whether it's a technology, a person in tech, maybe there's
someone you want me to interview on the show. I
would love to get Tim Schaefer on here to talk
about his philosophy and game design and the challenges that
he's faced. That would be fantastic. But if you have
suggestions for people I should talk to or subjects I
should cover, please let me know. Send me an email.
(27:02):
The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The
handle it both of those is tech Stuff H. S W.
And don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I
will talk to you again really soon for more on
(27:23):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
how Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
tech stuff. Listener one asked that I do an episode
covering an important developer and businessman in the video game world.
(00:27):
He cut his teeth working on games for George Lucas's
video game company, and he went on to create some
of the most innovative, quirky, and beloved games you can
find on store shelves. His name is Tim Schaefer. My
first experience playing a game that Tim Schaefer worked on
was The Curse of Monkey Island, which was the third
game in the Monkey Island series. I had heard of
(00:49):
the previous two games and even played them a little bit,
and those were ones that Tim Schaefer had worked on
more extensively, but I didn't own those games at the time.
But the world of Monkey Isle, with its goofy protagonist
Guy Brush Threepwood, the numerous comedic, pirate radical stereotypes in
the bizarre puzzles caught my attention and delighted me. But
for many years I didn't know much about Schaefer, who
(01:12):
gets a credit for a quote additional design end quote
on the game. So this episode is all about Schaefer
the game developer and Schaefer the businessman, and we start
in California in nineteen sixty seven. Timothy John Schaefer grew
up in Sonoma, California. He has four siblings, all of
whom are older, with a four year gap between him
(01:34):
and the next youngest. The age gap meant Tim didn't
get the opportunity to play a lot of board games
his siblings had played. His brother was nine years older
still is in fact nine years older than he is,
and a fifteen year old boy doesn't really want to
sit down and play games with a six year old.
But luckily for Tim, something came along that made it
easier to play games on your own video games. Tim
(01:56):
told us Gamer in an interview in that he remembered
visiting arcades with his dad back in the early seventies.
His earliest memory involving video games was of an arcade
game called Space Race, which he discovered at a summer
camp called Blair Camp Blue. Space Race was a simple
two player game in which each player controls a rocket ship.
(02:17):
The screen is divided into two vertical panels side by side,
and your job is to pilot your spaceship on your
side from the bottom of the screen to the top. Meanwhile,
obstacles like asteroids would fly across the screen left or right.
You could only make your rocket move up or down
the screen, and if you got a hit, your rocket
would reappear at the bottom after a short delay. Getting
(02:38):
to the top would score a point. Rounds would last
a certain amount of time variable. According to the arcade
game owner and little Tim Shafer found the game fascinating.
He soon learned to love other arcade games. His dad
shared a fascination with the technology and would take Tim
with him to visit various arcades and other places that
had arcade cabinets. In that same US gamer piece, Shaefer
(03:01):
said that earlier arcade machines that he loved included Night Drive, Atari,
Stunt Cycle, which had a handlebar type controller, and Space Panic.
Things really changed for Shafer when his family purchased a
Magnavox Odyssey game console. This was the first home video
game console to become commercially available. It officially hit the
(03:24):
market in nineteen seventy two. The Odyssey was pretty limited,
all right, Well that's an understatement. It could not create sound.
It was monochromatic. It could display four whole elements on
screen at once. Two of those would be dots or
bars that the players could control using the Odyssey controllers,
(03:44):
which were little boxes that had dials for user input.
The third element was a dot that the Odyssey itself
would control, such as the ball in a game of pong.
So the two dots that the players could control would
be the paddles, the dot that the computer is controlling
is the ball. And the fourth element it could display
was a vertical line, and that would serve as different
(04:05):
things for different games. It could act as the center
line of a game of pong, so it's sort of
like the net in tennis, or it could serve as
the edge of a handball court. You had a little
dial that you would use to adjust where the vertical
line was supposed to appear on the screen, and all
games were really just some sort of variation on pong. Ultimately,
Shaver found the technology really interesting, and he also liked
(04:29):
the overlays that came with the Odyssey. You would get
these clear plastic overlays with designs on them, and you
would put those on your TV screen and they would
stick to it due to static cling, and the overlays
would create visuals that the odyssey couldn't produce on its own.
So you might have one that looks like a castle,
for example, and then you're, I don't know, playing Pong
(04:49):
inside a castle. The magic of video games. A little
bit later, the family purchased an Atari twenty hundred. Shaver
talked about how he would love to play a game
without even looking at instructions, and that the period of
confusion he would experience while trying to suss out the
game was one of his favorite experiences. It would become
one of the elements of his own game design philosophy,
(05:12):
to build in elements into games that would require the
player to try different things, to adopt and abandon various
approaches in order to progress through the game, and to
include consequences for those actions that would be almost as
entertaining as finding the right solution. So he did something wrong,
you at least knew that you had done something, as
(05:32):
opposed to just randomly pushing buttons. Schaefer, like many of
his video game designer appears gradually began to not just
play games, but also learn how to build code and programs.
Schaefer's first work was on an Atari eight hundred, the
home computer that Attari had put out, and that used
the six five oh two assembly language. Not exactly an
(05:56):
intuitive programming language. Assembly language falls to a category called
low level programming language. That means it's not that far
off from basic machine code. That's the language that a
computer actually quote unquote understands the problem with machine code
is that it's not easy for humans to work with,
(06:16):
so we humans have designed various programming languages to help
create an abstract way to manipulate information in order to
make processors do what the programmer wants the processor to do.
Assembly languages do this, but at a pretty low level,
something close to the original machine language. Each assembly language
is specific to a particular style of computer architecture, so
(06:40):
you can't poured it over from one type of computer
architecture to another. The literal architecture of the computer will
not understand that assembly language. Schaefer's interest in computers and
programming stuck with him throughout his childhood, and he graduated
high school and then was accepted into the university of
California at Lee and chose computer science as his major.
(07:03):
He would later say that he most enjoyed several of
the classes that were outside the realm of computer science,
such as creative writing, English literature, and anthropology, and while
he was attending class at the university, he happened to
see a job opportunity posted at the school's career center.
The opportunity was to apply to be a playtester for
(07:24):
Lucasfilm Games, which would later become Lucas Arts and Yes
it's George Lucas. Longtime fans of Tech Stuff will know
that we once did a full episode about being a
playtester many many years ago. Playtesters have a job that,
on first glance, sounds like it would be a lot
of fun. You play video games for a living, and
(07:45):
better yet, you play games that are so new they
aren't even available for purchase. You get to play them
before anyone else does, while it's still being built, and
you get paid for it. That sounds like a dream job, right.
It's only can be fun at times, but play testing
can also be frustrating and repetitive, particularly if the game
(08:06):
has design flaws. Play Testers are supposed to look for
bugs and glitches as they play. Are there any game
breaking problems? Are there issues with the game engine? Is
it possible to get stuck somewhere just because of level
design or some other issue. Is the game's path a
clear one? Is it playable? Is it fun? It might
(08:28):
mean playing the same section of the same level dozens
of times for several hours as you poke and prod
testing a game to make sure it will hold up
once it's released, and even the best play tester may
overlook something. The goals define as many problems as you
can before you ship, so you can fix them. Because
once it's out in the wild, you have hopefully thousands
(08:51):
or millions of people playing your game, and at that scale,
people are bound to find bugs and glitches, so your
best hope is to weed out the most preval ones
in an effort to deliver the best game possible. Schaefer
decided to apply for the position and landed a phone
interview with David Fox, one of the founding members of
the game company, and it was a bit of a
(09:12):
rocky interview. How well, I'll tell you, But first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So there's
Tim Shaefer and he's on the phone with David Fox.
Fox had worked on games like Labyrinth, Zach McCracken and
(09:33):
The Alien Mind Benders, and Rescue on fractal Us, among others. Schaefer,
in an effort to present himself as an enthusiastic potential employee,
stated that he had really enjoyed playing the Lucas Arts
game ball Blasters, and there was problem number one. Ball
Blasters was a pirated version of a game released by
(09:56):
Lucas Arts. The official game SAME's name was ball Blazer,
but in nine three, Lucasfilm Games had handed over an
early build of ball Blazer to Atari. After that someone
had mysteriously pulled the code off the game and uploaded
it to a bulletin board system or BBS. Soon copies
(10:19):
of the game began popping up on other bb s
s and people were downloading it for free, and it
was this version that Shaefer had played. The pirated version.
It's awkward moment Number two happened when Schaefer admitted he
had not played Zack McCracken. That was awkward because David
Fox had actually been the lead on Zach McCracken. Again,
(10:43):
Schaefer walked out of the interview, or rather hung up
the phone convinced that he had totally blown it. He
had not been prepared, he had admitted to piracy, and
he may as well have said Star Wars stinks. But
Shaffer decided to at least have a little on with
his experience. He was invited to send in his resume
(11:04):
and cover letter, and instead he drew up a cartoons
strip slash text adventure style document on paper, so he
illustrated it, but it was done in the style of
an old text adventure game where he as a character
was trying to land a job at Lucas Film Games,
(11:26):
and through the process he makes all the right decisions
and he ends up getting the job, and he sent
that to Lucasfilm. Whether Fox was secretly amused by this
interview or the comic strip gave him insight into Shaffer's character,
he decided to hire Schaffer for the position to play tester,
and Shaffer's first gig was beta testing Indiana Jones and
(11:48):
The Last Crusade, the action game, but soon he was
tapped by a designer named Ron Gilbert to learn the
game engine that Lucas Film Games had been using at
that time. The game engine had the name Script Creation
Utility for Maniac Mansion or SCUM, so Schaefer became a scumblet.
(12:12):
The team was working on a port of Maniac Mansion
for the Nintendo Entertainment System or in ne S. The
game originally came out for home computers in nine and
featured a point and click interface to navigate through the world,
explore environments, and solve puzzles. The game included many innovative features.
(12:33):
For example, in the game, you can choose two companions
from a pool of six potentials to help you in
your missions. Who you choose affects the way you must
complete the game, and so player choice actually had an
impact on how the game plays out. After working on
the port, Schaefer got an invitation from Gilbert to work
(12:53):
on the next project, which was a pirate themed adventure game.
He would join another up and coming star at Lucas
Art's named David Grossman, and originally the game was meant
to be a pretty serious homage to Treasure Island. It
was more or less a straight laced pirate tail, kind
of grim and gritty. Schaefer was brought on as a
(13:16):
programmer and a writer for the project. While building the game,
Schaffer and Grossman started to insert temporary placeholder dialogue just
so that something was there. It wasn't meant to represent
the final game, and their impish sense of humor meant
they threw in a lot of jokes. Pirates who were
meant to be scurvy dogs who inspired fear, and all
(13:38):
who met them transformed into odd ball characters with silly
names and dialogue options. Schaefer's temporary dialogue with such a
huge hit, so much so that Gilbert actually decided to
change directions with the game and make it a comedic
action adventure set in the pirate world, and thus The
Secret of Monkey Island was born. In the game, you
(14:00):
play as guy Brush three Wood, a bit of a
dweeb who wants to become a pirate. Three woods nemesis
is the evil pirate Lachuk. There was a series of
weird adventures, odd puzzles, and lots of jokes. The player
eventually faces down Lachuk and through the power of carbonated beverages,
stands triumphant. The game received good reviews and a positive
(14:23):
response from players, and so the same creative team got
together to work on a sequel, The Secret of Monkey
Island to La Chuck's Revenge. Grossman and Schaefer worked well
together and impressed the executives at Lucas Arts, so the
two were given the opportunity to act as project co
leeds on a new game, a sequel to Maniac Mansion
(14:43):
called Day of the Tentacle. This was a comedic time
travel adventure and it too received positive response. Schaefer's work
on the Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle
convinced Lucas Arts that he should be allowed to work
on a project of his very own. Schaefer decided to
create a game that would incorporate one of his favorite
(15:03):
genres of music, heavy metal. That game was called Full Throttle,
which was released in nineteen and it featured an outlaw
biker accused of a crime he didn't commit, but still
contained a lot of humor as well. One of Schaefer's trademarks,
you might say and Schaefer acted as lead developer on
(15:24):
Full Throttle, writing and programming much of the game himself.
It was one of the earliest games to feature a
fully voiced game script, meaning every line was spoken by
a character in the game, delivered by a voice actor
up to that point, most games relied heavily on text,
which wasn't nearly as resource intensive and obviously did not
(15:47):
require voice actors. You might spice up a cut scene
or something like that with a little voice acting, but
it was extremely rare to find a game that included
voice acting all the way through, and the voice actors
included some folks you'd recognize at least by voice, if
not by name. Maurice LaMarsh and Tress McNeil both provided
voices for the game, as did the Jedi Master himself,
(16:09):
Mark Hamill. Full Throttle also made use of licensed music,
something that was new for Lucas Arts. The music came
from a San Francisco rock band called the Gone Jackals.
Gameplay was in a two D playing field and featured
the point and click interface adventure gamers were used to it.
Will also had a pie menu, which is a circular
(16:30):
pop up that lets you pick different interaction options when
you interact with some sort of object or character. For example,
he might be able to pick up, push taste, or
talk to something by selecting different options on this pop
up menu, and you're highlighting a specific object or character.
In addition to the adventure portions of the game. There
were action sequences in which you'd try to fight off
(16:53):
rival bikers while writing on your motorcycle. That created a
certain arcade element in Full Throttle. The game received generally
positive reviews, though by any measure it was a pretty
short game, requiring only about four hours to complete, and
that's if you're not even rushing. After Full Throttle, Schaefer
created a game that I think is a real masterpiece,
(17:14):
not just for Schaefer but for video games in general.
I really think it's something special. It's called Grim Fandango.
It's another point and click adventure game, and it came
out in Grim Fandango. Unlike the other adventure games in LucasArts,
did not use the Scum engine. Instead, Shaffer's team developed
(17:35):
a new game engine called grim E and a scripting
language called Lua. Actually they didn't develop Lua, but they
used it. Rather than pointing and clicking to move your
character around, you could use keyboard controls to move about
the environment in a tank like control scheme, meaning you
could use certain keys that would allow you to pivot
left or pivot right, and other keys would make you
(17:56):
walk forward or backward. The game's setting was the Land
of the Dead, inspired by the folklore of Mexico with
a strong film noir motif. The player takes control of
a Department of Death employee named Manny Calavera, who must
investigate a mystery that suggests there's some high level corruption
going on in the world of death. The game is quirky,
(18:18):
it is challenging, and it's filled with tons of nods
to classic film noir cinema like Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon.
It received critical acclaim and in TWI it was the
subject of a remastered edition, which has updated controls, graphics,
and a commentary track featuring Tim Shaefer and other members
(18:40):
of the development team. And if you haven't tried it out,
I recommend giving it a go. It can be a
little frustrating at times, but that's Schaefer's style to present
the player with a tricky situation that requires a lot
of adaptation to figure out how to get out of it.
In fact, Shaefer has talked at length about the tragedy
of creating computer tutorials for every single game. He said
(19:03):
a lot of fun he had as a player was
learning how the game worked and how you interacted with it.
And trying to figure out ways to solve puzzles, but
that a lot of games these days kind of spell
everything out, giving you step by step instructions on what
you need to do in order to get through a section.
He says, well, where's the fun in that? If I
walk up to a puzzle and then the computer says, hey,
(19:25):
why don't you try picking up this thing and using
it with that thing? It takes the joy of that
discovery away from me. So Shaefer goes with an approach
where he specifically tries to design games that are a
little confusing, but intriguingly confusing, not frustratingly. So that's his
goal at any rate. However, after Grim Vandango went gold
(19:47):
and got tons of critical acclaim, he found himself in
a bit of a tricky situation. And I'll explain more
in just a second, but first let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsor. Schaefer's next project that Lucas Arts,
(20:08):
never saw the light of day. It was a project
meant for the PlayStation two, but never really emerged from
early development. I don't even have a name for this
game or what it was supposed to be about. It
really didn't get very far at all. But around that
same time, there was a shift in LucasArts away from
the adventure style games that Schaefer had really cut his
(20:29):
teeth on, and Schaefer himself wanted to try something new
and develop his own company with his own identity and culture.
He had worked for Lucas Arts for a decade and
so he thought, maybe it's time to strike out on
my own, and so Schaefer, along with a few other
LucasArts employees, left to found a new game studio called
Double Fine Productions in June two thousand. The first game
(20:53):
to come out of Double Fine was Psycho Knots a
few years later, and that's a platforming game in which
you play as as a psychically gifted young boy who
infiltrates a special summer camp for kids with superpowers, and
the real purpose of the camp is to train kids
to become special agents called Psycho Knots, which is a
(21:14):
job that Raz would really like to have. He discovers
there's something hinky going on at the camp and the
story unfolds from there and again it received really great reviews,
but sadly sales were a little lackluster. The next title,
from Double Fine and Schaefer was Brutal Legend, and Brutal
has a really good name for the process of what
(21:36):
the company went through in trying to bring this game
to life. A Brutal Legend is a real time strategy
action adventure game that had a heavy metal soundtrack, an
extensive one. Schaefer wanted to combine elements of fantasy and
heavy metal, largely because a lot of heavy metal albums
feature artwork that's inspired by fantasy genre. Just look at
(21:59):
any Ally Hatchett album cover and you'll know what I'm
talking about. And there were even tons of songs in
heavy metal that dealt with fantasy concepts. As Schaefer said,
there's heavy metal songs about fighting orcs. Why can't we
bring these two things together in a video game? So
he thought they were a really great match. And if
you want to talk soundtracks, Brutal Legend has got to
(22:20):
be up there. I mean, the game has more than
a hundred licensed heavy metal tracks from bands like Motorhead,
Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Kiss, among others. The protagonist
of the game is voiced by Jack Black of Tenacious D,
and there's even a Tenacious D song on the soundtrack
as well, and there's even a track from the cartoon
(22:42):
death metal band Death Clock in there. His company developed
the game, but they found it difficult to get a
publisher too many companies had misgivings about the real time
strategy elements. Originally, Sierra Entertainment, which was part of Vivendi
Games at that time, was going to publish Brutal Legend,
(23:02):
but then Activision acquired Vivendi and Activision backed out of
the agreement. According to Activision CEO Robert Kotick, dropping the
game was not done just on a whim, but rather
because the team was falling behind on deadlines. They were
missing those deadlines and he felt that the game didn't
(23:24):
look like it was going to be any good. So
I guess there was nothing personal. It was just business.
But the story goes that Double Find didn't find out
about their game being dropped by Activision until they saw
a press release for upcoming titles from Activision that failed
to have Brutal Legend on it, and that's how they
found out their game was not going to be published.
(23:45):
Schaefer was not allowed to talk about the status of
the game while his team looked for another publisher. They
eventually found one, an Electronic Arts or e A, but
then Activision sued Double Fine, saying that the company had
invested millions of dollars in this game and that some
other publishers shouldn't be able to just sweep in and
become the benefactor for the company and thus realize all
(24:10):
the profits out of the investment from Activision, And anyway,
Activision and Double Fine were still in negotiations to publish
this game in the first place. Double Fine counter suit Activision, saying, no,
you dropped this game. It severed all obligations because you
pulled your support, and things got really heated. Schaefer was
(24:32):
clearly affected by the situation in a really negative way,
and before the matter could receive an official court decision,
the parties settled out of court under a private agreement.
Brutal Legend published under e A again. The game got
great reviews, but sales just didn't follow suit. Part of
the problem may have been in the marketing. Schaefer's team
(24:54):
had set up from the beginning to create a real
time strategy action adventure game, but aren'ts games were a
bit in a bit of a lull and e A
seemed less inclined to market a game that was in
that genre, so instead, marketing focused on Jack Black's involvement
and the heavy metal angle, but not so much on
(25:15):
the actual gameplay inside the game, and gamers may not
have known what the game actually was like, and therefore
they just never bothered to pick it up. The first
two titles from Double Fine were praised for their design,
their story, their execution. The problem was people just weren't
buying the games. Morale was at a low point for
a Double Fine, and Schaefer was feeling it too. Actually,
(25:37):
during the production of Brutal Legend and before its publication,
Schaefer made a decision. The game's development had taken much
longer than anticipated. The delays were really wearing the team down.
The publishing woes were incredibly stressful, and what had started
out as a passion project about heavy metal and fantasy
had become a source of stress and anxiety, and Schaefer
(26:01):
instituted what he called the Amnesia Fortnight's. The Amnesia Fortnits
was a type of work retreat. Everyone at the company
was to stop work for two weeks. They were all
to divide up into four different teams and each team
was to come up with an idea for a game.
(26:21):
This exercise was meant to be a fun distraction for
Double Find employees. It would turn out to be a
solution to save the company. But I'll talk more about
that in our next episode about Tim Schaefer. For now,
it's time to say goodbye to all our company. But
if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
(26:41):
whether it's a technology, a person in tech, maybe there's
someone you want me to interview on the show. I
would love to get Tim Schaefer on here to talk
about his philosophy and game design and the challenges that
he's faced. That would be fantastic. But if you have
suggestions for people I should talk to or subjects I
should cover, please let me know. Send me an email.
(27:02):
The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The
handle it both of those is tech Stuff H. S W.
And don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I
will talk to you again really soon for more on
(27:23):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com
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