Interviews// Tim Schafer - Brutal Legend

Tim Schafer is without a doubt a doubt one of the nicest guys in the games industry. But despite that, he enjoys full-blown legend status, having cut his teeth at LucasArts on the much-revered point-and-clicks Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, before veering off to form developer Double Fine Productions and make 2005’s Psychonauts, the cult smash which won a selection of awards.

Psychonauts

Now his latest epic, Brutal Legend, is poised to hit the shops, published by Electronic Arts. And it’s certainly not your average game: it celebrates Schafer’s lifelong love of heavy metal, stars Jack Black as a roadie bringing rock to a primitive world, and features the vocal talents of Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy and Schafer’s ultimate musical hero, Judas Priest front-man Rob Halford.

In the flesh, Schafer is hairy, approachable and endlessly affable, with no trace of ego. He clearly cares passionately about his craft. We caught up with him at GamesCom, where he talked us through Brutal Legend, argued that games need to be personal, not marketing-led, projects, discussed the pitfalls of humour in games and revealed Lemmy’s love for the Game Cube.

SPOnG: How would you describe Brutal Legend’s gameplay?

Tim Schafer: The core of the game is using your axe, your guitar and your car. And you’ll be able to upgrade your axe, your guitar with new strings, and you’ll get to add weapons to your car, so it drops land-mines and so on. You can change its paint-job. You get all these different things when you talk to Ozzy.

SPOnG: What about the natives – at first, you meet these Neanderthal types.

Tim Schafer: They are the Headbangers. That’s the first group you liberate – they’ve been working as miners, but they haven’t been given any tools; they’ve just been forced to use their heads to smash against the rock. So they develop these big muscles. That’s the idea: That Eddie Riggs [Jack Black’s character] has come to this land where the elements, the icons of rock are being created – this is where headbangers come from.

SPOnG: There’s a real rock meets Neanderthals thing going on – what are you trying to say with that?

Tim Schafer: Well, those guys in particular are maybe not the smartest characters in the game, but they have a lot of heart – they’re very dedicated and they have never heard heavy metal before until Eddie comes to their world and plays it to them. So it just blows their minds, and they follow Eddy everywhere.

SPOnG: How did Brutal Legend come about – your love of heavy metal is well documented? When Psychonauts was a hit, did someone say: “Go and do what you want”?

Tim Schafer: All the different parts of the world – the music, the visuals and the gameplay – had been in my head for years. You know, the idea of doing a music-based world, and heavy metal lyrics coming to life.... At the end of Psychonauts, I was trying to figure out what to do next, and we had all these opportunities to do other games.

I was talking about them to the team, and they were saying: “That’s kinda cool.” Then I was saying: “There’s this other weird idea about where you’re battling through a heavy metal world,” and everyone on the team got excited. The artists got excited because of the visuals, the programmers got excited because of all the cool tech they could do to make this streaming world happen.