Top 19 Tim Schafer Quotes

Adventure games are all about details – if you happen to take this one object and use it with this other object, in a really weird place, at a weird time. If you happen to write a really funny dialogue line for that, even if it didn’t solve the puzzle, people will appreciate that.

The last time I really got into new music that wasn’t heavy metal was probably like… TV on the Radio? I think that was it. That’s the last time.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

I enjoy everything. I actually do listen to everything. In high school, I listened to a lot of metal and punk rock.

People talk about games and loneliness – it’s a lonely activity. I didn’t understand that. ‘Gears of War’ was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn’t sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house.

What I learned at LucasArts was, you don’t make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.

I think when you play ‘Psychonauts,’ you are kind of playing inside of my head.

I’ve now met, I would say, almost every single one of my rock idols. I feel like I should just drive off a cliff now.

Kinect is such a great new entry into the field because it takes away one of the big barriers to little kids to playing a game, which is the controller. You can’t hand a basic video game controller to a child and expect them to understand what a left bumper is and to click in the right stick.

I’ve always hated superheroes. I cannot stand them. I love Norse mythology, but I hate superheroes. They ruined movies, then comics, and now games.

I always think the recipe for success for a game or any sort of a fantasy experience is to think of a character that hasn’t really been explored before, who is unique and has special abilities that not everybody has, and plop them into whatever is the most interesting situation to plop them into.

There was a ‘magic rock’ my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as ‘Pikmin’ – I wanted to go into that world.

I guess I didn’t have a lot of friends, so that’s what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can’t surprise you; there’s no AI. But videogames play back with you.

I would like to reach non-gamers. It’s always great when guys come up to me who are gamers and represent my usual audience, but they’ll say, ‘You know, Psychonauts is the only game I can actually get my girlfriend to play with me.’

For every character, I think about who they are, their story, what they are, and who they were before their game started. What was their life like? Where did they grow up? What were their parents like?

I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn’t matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is ‘Tetris,’ one of the greatest games ever made.

I like any good game. I don’t care what the genre is.

Publishers are very risk-averse, so they lean towards licenses and sequels. But the fact is that even those are not guaranteed hits. So, if ‘playing it safe’ does not guarantee hits, they might as well leave it up to the really creative, risk-taking people, because they couldn’t do any worse.

If you’re not loyal to your team, you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you, and it just won’t be there.