22 Facts About Tim Schafer

Timothy John Schafer was born on July 26,1967 and is an American video game designer.

Tim Schafer founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts.

Tim Schafer 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.

Tim Schafer was born on July 26,1967 in Sonoma, California, the youngest of five children.

Tim Schafer's father was a doctor and his mother was a nurse.

Tim Schafer opted for a similar course, interning to help develop databases for small companies while trying to position himself for an opening in a larger corporation such as Atari and Hewlett-Packard, but he was rejected by these.

Tim Schafer saw an offering at Lucasfilm Games, looking for programmers who could write game dialog, which piqued his interest.

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 Tim Schafer to submit his resume for further consideration.

Tim 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.

Tim Schafer went on to design the highly acclaimed Grim Fandango, a noir adventure game set in the Aztec afterlife featuring characters similar to the papier-mache skeleton decorations from the Mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos.

Tim Schafer worked on an unannounced PlayStation 2 action-adventure game at LucasArts, but it never entered production.

Tim Schafer was approached by his colleagues with the idea of leaving the company to develop PlayStation 2 games on their own; Tim Schafer was initially wary of this believing he felt secure in his position at LucasArts.

Tim Schafer left the company in January 2000, to found Double Fine Productions, where he created the platform game Psychonauts.

Tim Schafer led the development of Double Fine's next game, Brutal 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 titles helped to keep Double Fine financially stable, and Tim 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 Tim Schafer.

On February 1,2012, Tim 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, Tim Schafer launched a crowdfunded project for an unnamed adventure game via the crowd-sourced Kickstarter, using the placeholder title "Double Fine Adventure"; Tim 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.

Tim 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.

Tim 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.

Tim 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.

In October 2006, Tim Schafer received a BAFTA video game Best Screenplay award for Psychonauts.

Tim Schafer received a BAFTA Fellowship as "a true pioneer of game design, who has pushed the boundaries of the medium through his extraordinary talents" at the British Academy Games Awards in April 2018.