Please Don't Let Tim Schafer Read This

After watching the huge Double Fine documentary about Psychonauts 2, I wanted to go back and watch the Broken Age one again. My memory no longer exists. I feel like I now have intimate knowledge of the development studio (I don't), especially since both documentaries constantly reference earlier footage. Those callbacks also established a history that I found increasingly bizarre. Yet, no one I've seen online has ever touched on it. Most people rave about how amazing it is to get dozens of hours of in-house footage and stop the train of thought there. To be fair, both documentaries are peerless and that praise is deserved.

There is, still, a vision of a studio you can get from seeing it being documented from its literal inception, which you'd otherwise only get from working there. A lot of times, the argument about criticism around studio culture is that "we're not seeing the full picture." Here, we kinda are getting the full spread of things. With every new scrap of footage and callback, there was a certain sentiment that kept being reaffirmed to me that I just need to get off my chest:

I think Tim Schafer might be a shitty boss?

You'll be able to use your pitchforks at the end; I understand. For now, let me explain my thought process. I don't mean that Double Fine is the same like the horror stories you hear from working at the nightmare factories of Blizzard or, heaven forbid, Ubisoft. In fact, I mean the literal opposite of that.

Schafer is an idealist, through and through. The man is all vibes and vibes are great. I think everyone would agree that Double Fine might be the best place to work in video games. Hell, there are several times that an employee relocates and Schafer finds a way to keep them on payroll. There are beer parties, free cake; the works. And that's not as in "pizza party" distraction bullshit; raises are included as well. I… It's all in the documentary that you should've watched before getting here.

There is, however, a limit to how much that spirit is benevolent or doesn't flip to being harmful. A lot of Schafer's management style centers around potential, rather than the tangible. There's a lot of wishful thinking of what could be, imagination on where a game will be down the line and a reluctance to look at a deadline realistically. At the same time, not every Double Fine game lives up to that initial dream. Brütal Legend notoriously wasn't what people expected. Broken Age is a pillar of documented compromises. We'll touch on Spacebase later. Massive Chalice, which I love, was criticized for its lack of depth. Rad; well, I think most people forgot it even exists.

The decades of wide eyes, big heart and its resulting development struggles reminded me of the infamous Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Peter Molyneux that starts by asking if the studio head is a pathological liar. Go back and read that harrowing interview, please. See how many parallels you'll find.

There are several times where Schafer laughs that every game they've ever made has been late, over budget, poorly scoped and so on. There's a lot of coping with humor. Psychonauts was so close to going over a cliff that the studio almost crumbled. Amnesia Fortnight, the in-house game jam, was born out of people working on Brütal Legend for so long that they needed to do anything else. Broken Age was first split up, then the second part got pushed back and then it got pushed back even more, as the studio scrambled to find more money than their legendarily successful Kickstarter campaign of over $3 million possessed. From the interview, Molyneux states:

"If you go back and look at every single game I've ever worked on, ever, other than Fable 3, they've all taken longer."

Hell, Molyneux even used Double Fine as a crutch in that same interview. At one point, Schafer shows off his notebook with ideas. In the book are several different pages with hundreds upon hundreds of names, before getting to Broken Age. The process, like every step in the founder's playbook, took ages to get to a conclusion. It takes so long that some episodes feature a mock logo. Perfectionism works great for an end result, but I'd argue that you don't need to write down hundreds of names to come up with something as elegantly simple as Broken Age. It's no Grim Fandango, I get it, but what is?

At the same time, this idealism burns through more good will than I've ever seen. Double Fine, at the time, set a record for Kickstarter successes to fund Broken Age. After that momentum collapsed, Kickstarter became much harder to fund projects. You barely ever hear from a crowdfunding success story anymore. Double Fine made out, but every developer behind them had to live in the wake of its success and the resulting "Kickstarter fatigue" its gold rush instigated.

Then, there's Spacebase DF-9. After crowdfunding one way for Broken Age, Double Fine shifted to Steam Early Access, which was new at the time. While Spacebase is developed in tandem with Broken Age, it isn't explicitly mentioned in the documentary. Well, the project anonymously shows up once: A "game" gets canceled and twelve people get fired as a result. That game is Spacebase. Double Fine had gotten all the money they were going to get from Early Access and had to make the call to can it. This decision came at the cost of consumer dissatisfaction, but more importantly, the jobs of a dozen people. That's not just under-delivering; it's being plain reckless. The move was aptly criticized by the developers of Project Zomboid, who pointed out that everyone else will suffer, while Double Fine can once more just wash its hands of it all:

Failures tarnish the reputation of the entire model, so a failure (particularly a high-profile failure) is potentially damaging to the very developers who need this model the most.

For Psychonauts 2, crowdfunded in yet a new avenue to prevent the previous ties, the company brought in Zak McClendon as a more practical producer, to remedy the game trailing to infinity. Think of him as The Benz. Somewhere over the middle point of development, McClendon is fired for not gelling with the team's creative spirit. The producer mentions that he is seen as a "stepdad" and that he "could" put his foot down on creative decisions to speed up the process, but he didn't want to fall out of step, for what good that eventually does him. The documentary paints Zak's storyline as a villain and, as transparent as the footage gets, the man's exit is shuffled behind closed doors. You see what they want you to see, after all. It really feels like McClendon gets the short end of the stick, as the whole reason they exist is to prevent what will eventually happen to Psychonauts 2 and every other Double Fine game: Everyone is waiting on Schafer to get his head out of the clouds and settle on what actually needs to happen. Schafer is not the one that will budge. That's the perk of being at the top. Eventually, the crowd money evaporates, again, leading the company to get acquired by Microsoft, to once more prevent them from going broke over not getting a product up and ready. That's a pretty crazy turnaround, when you put the firing and the delay side to side.

Schafer just seems incapable of time and/or resource management, which cuts both ways. At the start of Broken Age, he mentions that it's too early to be thinking of what isn't possible, leaving the game in a fugue state. That stretch lasts for years. For Psychonauts 2, one of the designers mentions that the game is constantly in the last four months of development, for years, which puts people in a near-constant pressure cooker. The same employee gets put through a "trial by fire" when first starting, as admitted by McClendon. The entire level that the designer was asked to create gets scrapped and remade, as do others, while the studio figures out what they want to achieve. Throughout its existence, the sentiment of the studio is that it's always at the precipice of catastrophic closure and it's time to sink or swim. For Psychonauts that execution was avoided with heavy crunch. Broken Age crunched to the point that someone caught pneumonia; eventually signing publisher deals the studio was initially against. Psychonauts 2 solves its issues by becoming part of the Xbox ecosystem.

You'd think that this last, permanent solution would put Double Fine out of its misery, before its string of troubled actions would come to a head, the same way it did for Molyneux. The former Bullfrog founder now makes NFT garbage, by the way. Yet, this is the hurdle that I fell on. I just don't live in this idealistic world. You can only assume Double Fine can now dream endlessly, as it always has, until Microsoft puts its thumb on the studio. The platform holder not only can, but has historically already cut throats, when it comes to their products not meeting expectations.

In 2014, Microsoft made a big deal about announcing the return of their multiplayer game, Phantom Dust. Initially, the remake was going to cost $5 million, but that's before the execs wanted to add a singleplayer campaign and even talked about it being a "JRPG" of sorts. A bloated scope is a universal game dev experience. Only a year later, Phantom Dust was canceled and the studio behind it had to fire everyone. In an interview, one of the developer's employees stated that they asked Microsoft for $2 million more to make what they themselves had pitched, but that the company wouldn't budge and just callously canned everything instead. In the scale of things, $2 million isn't that much, especially for a company that throws around a $68.7 billion acquisition. Hell, it's less than either of Double Fine's crowdfunding efforts. And that's for a game that Microsoft made a big stink about. It would be delusional to think that this crush wouldn't also eventually happen to Double Fine, if they don't rectify decades of indecision.

Of course, I can only feel this dread because Double Fine allows us to peer behind the curtain to a lot, though not all, of its goings-on. You could read this and think the studio could just as easily rescind this courtesy. I'll refer to the interview one more time. You really should go back to read it all, as it is uncanny in its similarities: Molyneux threatens to no longer talk to the press. The interviewer responds:

There's a massive gap between not overpromising and taking your ball and going home.

To put it bluntly, I think it will be hard for Schafer to come to a realization before it's too late. The man has operated a certain way for decades and even when other employees, like McClendon (but not limited to him) try to shift direction, it isn't the founder that's left holding the bag. Old dogs, new tricks. Additionally, the games that do end up hitting are quickly seen as ends justifying the means. Everyone loves Psychonauts, so the process is all water under the bridge. And, if not, then just leave and work somewhere that isn't all bar crawls and free dinners. Sink or swim. Just like at Blizzard or Ubisoft. Roll with the punches of a tyrant or a lovable goofball that scribbles in a notebook, like a child draws on a school desk, until a deadline forces progress. Work under the sword of Damocles, because that's a poetic endeavor or whatever. I only see a marginal difference there. I see the same quixotic behavior that Molyneux was railed for, except that he didn't make an excellent series of documentaries about it.

I love that the documentaries exist. Unfortunately, as much as Schafer's idealism skews positively, my thoughts point decidedly negative. It would be great if the current world of massive, industry-wide layoffs and economical crises didn't ruin the end of the rainbow for me. I just don't see a lot of scenarios where Schafer's lengthy history of going over budget, over scope and past date doesn't eventually come crashing down and not in the way that makes for a throwaway joke at a later date. You could argue that this time has already occurred for the turnover of employees that are no longer there. Should that happen, there's always more good will to burn. The man is very charismatic; dreamers often are.

If you are Tim Schafer and you read this: I'm sorry, sir. I do love Double Fine and I think the games are unlike any other. To make matters worse, you just mentioned that going to DICE gave you COVID, despite wearing a mask. My timing is as awful as my train of thought. Get well soon, Tim.

Making games is hard.

I'm calling Tim Schafer right now and telling him to read this.

Really though, is it more likely that Microsoft would shut down the studio or put a functioning adult in charge?

Interestingly enough, on the latest No Clip podcast while gushing over the access and footage in this documentary Danny can’t help but make the same observation. But that’s not the interesting bit - he then goes on to say this is exactly the kind of thing the Giant Bomb audience would’ve needed to see as well to ever understand how the site truly operates.

He never got too specific - though he does mention that nobody outside the office could have any idea how awful his working relationship with Mary Kish was - and I doubt he intended for the tangent to inspire much speculation…but it’s also not an off hand remark, he returns to the comparison a handful of times during the half hour. Really caught my ear.

I wouldn't call Tim a shitty boss, but it's no secret that he isn't a great project manager. Double Fine feels like a company that could really use two heads, like their logo. Tim's a great idea guy, establishes a fantastic culture, and cares about his employees. But there isn't someone equal that can get things done on a timely basis. It's cool that he wants to do the creative stuff, but running a business or a project requires a different set of skills. He can do it, just not as well as his creative side.

He's moved away from leading projects, and it feels like Zak was brought in to shore up Tim's own weaknesses. Problem with Zak is he had no soft skills. It wasn't so much the creative spirit, he just didn't seem like a collaborative leader that anyone wanted to work for (talking over people, shutting down feedback, saying some pretty boneheaded things occasionally). I have no doubt that Zak's a driven, passionate person, but maybe next time around they'll find someone that fits the team better.

The other issue with DF is that they aren't a big studio, and anytime someone left it was really impactful. Psychonauts 2 was a fairly ambitious game, on top of the other projects in the works at the time. With Microsoft's oversight, ideally they'll get better resources, more people, better managers onboard. The game came out great but there's no chance that DF wants to repeat that process. Going with smaller projects might help, but I'll assume that Microsoft wants them to make games on par or better than PS2.

In conclusion, Tim does the best he can. But he's wearing a ton of hats that all come with unique pressures. Hopefully MS allows him to focus on creative as much as he really wants to, with other leads managing the day to day stuff.

@daavpuke: Thanks for this, was a fun read, and I tend to agree with you. McClendon does get the short end of the stick, and Schafer seems like a good creative who isn't a particularly good manager or project director, likable as he may be. Like you, I was struck by that comment made near the end that the team constantly thought they were in the last four months of development for years on end. I get that making games is an iterative process, and that the level of iteration will vary depending on the time and money available to you, but there comes a point when you cross a line into self-indulgence and financial irresponsibility that could be avoided with better planning and direction.

@atheistpreacher: thank YOU for reading this lengthy piece.

@csl316: Wonderful comment, thank you! I do disagree that Double Fine can still use the scrappy underdog card after decades of being held on a pedestal. Like Molyneux, I think that rope is just at the end of its length. If they were, then their history should've taught them to reel in some of that ambition, instead of riding the wave. I think the doc(s) mentions having your cake a few times. I'm sure that, for now, Microsoft is willing to inject their resources into them, I just don't think they're doing that out of creative altruism, ya know? But I enjoyed disagreeing with this perspective, totally valid!

@nodima: Just listened to it from your comment. That was very interesting, thank you! I had listened to the first part, when they were only a couple of episodes in, so I enjoyed hearing how that evolved as well.

@borgmaster: Warren Spector pushed back on the tendency of people to attribute games to singular celebrity devs. Schafer is in that shortlist of celebs. That's who Microsoft is buying. I don't think Microsoft would bother to operate a house without that name, especially as the brand they're trying to grow isn't Double Fine, it's Xbox.

I don't agree with your piece entirely, but I think this gives little credence to how difficult game development is.

Double Fine is painfully honest with their development. They announce games when they start development cycles whereas most major studios don't. We don't know their funding failures, or their development hells, we only know a few here and there from what did get announced or leaked.

And it also brings up the question of what is success. Is it a big game that meets expectations and sales? Or is it running a development studio that limits layoffs as best it can while fostering a welcoming and stable environment?

I don't think you're entirely off. I just think you're not giving some credit where it might be due. Yes, Tim is worthy of plenty of criticism. You don't become the head of a game studio without a lot of ire headed your way. Especially when it comes to crowdfunding and Fig. However, in a world of constant bullshit it's hard to convince me that the criticism leveled at Schafer is worthy of calling him a bad boss.

I just checked out that part of the podcast, and I really enjoyed it. At the risk of beating a long-dead horse, that part solidified why speculation around this stuff is such a waste of time. We don't know the details about why or how anything happens. Those details don't exist online. Everything we know about Giant Bomb and Double Fine and anywhere else is what the people involved choose to put on the record.

We don't know the interpersonal dynamics, we don't hear the private conversations, and we aren't privy to misunderstandings or grievances. And we probably never should. As a consequence, the narratives that forum people rush to put out there are over-simplifications of situations we don't even understand the first place.

I could almost see the wheels turning in Danny's head to produce a "The Story of Giant Bomb" doc at some point. He might be the right guy to do it. I suspect that would be a few years off, though.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out Schafer and Molyneux have regular catch-up chats, where they rely on each others' various setbacks to prop one another's egos. I don't mean this in an overly negative way, we all have support networks, but the parallels just feel rather like they both think it's all okay as long as the other is acting the same.

Sadly, I think this is where I fall and that's a brutal indictment of the videogame industry. Missed deadlines, overbudget, and games not being worthy of their own hype sounds bad from the outside, until you read about the conditions of places like Ubisoft, CD Projekt (the supposed golden children of the industry), Riot Games, Activision, and the fact that the list goes on and on just makes my point: Schafer continues to run the ship without lay-offs, without scandals involving harassment and assault, and with a non-repetitive, VERY creative output.

I think he's probably a bad manager, but I actually don't think he's a bad boss.

@broshmosh: Molyneux seems too sociopathic to need or foster such an arrangement. He seems like the type who just continuously tells himself that the world is wrong and he's the only one who can see it.

This was my takeaway from watching the series too. Tim's head is in the clouds, which is not an inherently bad thing as a creative artist, but isn't great regarding the practicalities of management. No one is perfect, and no job is without problems. I think the loyalty Tim has with those around him, and the love that remains even among those that leave speaks volumes towards his good intentions even when he falls short as a boss. And that is so goddamn rare in the industry that I think, when it's all said and done, Tim's good outweighs his bad. But that's just my interpretation on it.

@undeadpool: Some time ago I feel like I would've been inclined to agree, but Molyneux has recently shown some level of self-reflection. That reflection ultimately amounted to "I won't make big promises to the press before my games come out anymore", rather than a more preferable reconsideration of how he handles media altogether (at one point Molyneux just swore never to talk to the press again, which was odd). Being at least capable of considering past actions to be incorrect or unwise indicates he's at least not totally sociopathic. Then again, this all gets put into perspective knowing he's jumped on blockchain nonsense sooooo....

I am personally of the opinion that every great creative lead needs a killer business lead. I wish I knew more about Supergiant Games because I want to know if my theory is correct. That is a studio that always creates games they can handle, publish without major bugs, and they set reasonable expectations. Their consistent hard work and clever use of limited budgets lead to Hades (which is one of the greatest games of all time. Fight me, ha ha.)

Doublefine seems like it should be a Supergiant. Tim Schafer is no fool. He's a very clever person and an excellent writer. Something is not connecting on ledger with him though. He's definitely not a "money guy". Now I personally like that about him. But you should have a "money guy" co-heading your studio. Now I'm not saying his games need DLC or microtransactions. I'm saying that they need a realistic budget and feature expectations. They need to maybe focus their attention on one or two projects were one is always a fun little indie jaunt and the other is a more ambitious game like Psychonauts 2. I'm a finance guy myself, so I hope I'm not coming of like I know his studio better than him. I don't. I do, however, know how to budget time and money and how to say no to expenses when something is just too damned much.

So is Tim Schafer a "bad boss"? I have no idea. Being a good boss has absolutely nothing to do with being a good producer or a good executive. Being a good boss is about creating a place where people love to come to work. I have a feeling he's not a great person to be making money calls, though.

I've played Tim's games since I was a kid. Full Throttle is LITERALLY in my blood (I have a Ben the Biker tat). I don't care if he crashes a hundred games to bring me the next Psychonauts 2. However...I would hate to see him or his wonderfully creative team unemployed due to mismanagement. I hope they can square the books up and keep doing what they do best for years to come. I have the same love of Obsidian games as well, and so many of the "love of gaming" studios that still put out games free of the overwhelming greed that has dominating the industry since the 360 era.

Obsidian is currently batting 100 with Pentiment, so you're golden right now. I think a lot of those 360 era studios may have closed, at this point. Not a lot of below AAA left. Or at least not nearly as much as there was.

RIP Alphadream

@daavpuke: Pentiment is top tier. I was a little worried while playing it that it was "too nerdy" to be popular, but I know they have that first person Elder Scrolls-like set in the Pillars universe coming soon. That is going to have broad appeal.

@auspexao: I'd say, on this account, you may have either not watched the entire Psychonauts 2 documentary yet or used it as background noise because Double Fine does have a lot of Money People on the team. Giant Bomb regular Greg Rice was one of them, though Caryl Shaw and Andy Alamano probably play bigger roles in the thing overall and are constantly on producers to get their teams to focus down on actually producing results.

Shaw in particular spends a lot of the last 12 or so episodes (roughly two years) constantly reminding designers that she isn't saying specific dates out loud as some kind of motivation tactic - they will ship this product at this time and they'd better be figure out how to be happy with what's getting shipped on that date. But both before and after she becomes a more common voice in those meetings, you often notice her in the background of pretty much every production meeting, and before the Starbreeze debacle Greg is usually somewhere in the room as well.

In fact it's hard not to consider the Starbreeze situation in all of this, because that was completely out of Double Fine's control and it's clear from the documentary that much of the time in between Starbreeze and Microsoft is essentially Double Fine trying to find any reason at all to continue to justifying having employees. It's never expressly said but there's a lingering feeling at times during those episodes that everyone expects the studio to fold, Psychonauts 2 to never ship, and all their work to be for nothing. And why wouldn't there be? So they're scrambling to cut content, but whatever they can trim the game down to isn't at all what they wanted to ship so why would they want to scramble to ship it anyway?

Then Microsoft swoops in and not only shores up their budget, but extends it! That's not really on the money people, or Tim. They want the bosses back in the game, they want the levels to reach their full potential, they want Double Fine to produce the game that's in all the product pitches and concept art they were poring over in while deciding to buy the damn thing in the first place.

Man, the documentary is so good. There's a reason I blew through it in, like, four days and started a thread about it where I wrote several thousand words that sadly went nowhere. Like I said in my first post in this thread, I find it generally agreeable that Schafer likely doesn't look as good in this documentary (or the original DFA) as fans of his might hope or expect, but I also don't think the documentary presents a series of problems that would be easily solved by a "money guy", because there were money guys and they did, frequently, put their feet down about what needed to happen with this project to succeed.

But when you've got about a year left on your timeline to certification and suddenly all the money completely disappears thanks to chicanery occurring on the other side of the damn planet resulting in the complete absence of said money...what's the money guy supposed to do about that?

So I wake up today and notice that MinnMax has been absolutely freaking out about this documentary all week long and it culminated in exactly what you'd have hoped for: an hour with Tim doing a post-mortem on the doc and his perception of himself after the documentary.

And I'm only a half hour in as I click post, but man does this really iron out a lot of things that you don't necessarily see about Tim as a boss from the documentaries. This guy cares about the emotional well being of his employees a lot, is really considerate of their privacy when they need it, eager to own up to mistakes he's made when he's made them and even if it seems like he's a really off the cuff, seat of his pants kind of guy it seems like he's actually very, very deliberate about the choices he makes...even if those choices lead to a sort of free form chaos.

I also can't wait to watch the press analysis of this because you can tell early in this interview that Ben's time at Game Informer left him absolutely stunned by how open this documentary was about the studio's process, and they drop a lot of hints that Jason Schreier's response to this doc was a lot like yours: Tim Schafer sucks! Haha. I think it'll be fun to see that discussion out of order with this one, but I suppose I'll go ahead and embed that as well in case anybody who finds these things through this thread would rather go chronological. There's also interviews with the 2 Player crew (Danny did one over on No Clip but it's a little more in the weeds about production since they're essentially the competition and all that) and a general rave/spoiler-athon out there as well if you can't get enough discussion of this thing like me.

@nodima: I've already watched all of those, as I'm still insatiable for any documentary talk. It was nice to see Tim own up to a few mistakes, some not so much. Thank you for linking them here. Those two in particular are the two I would want people to watch the most.

You're gonna be in for a time when you see what Jason Schreier had to say that elicited 3-4 comebacks from Tim.

And for the record, I love Tim Schafer, the person. Just so there's no misunderstanding here. He definitely is a very caring individual and you can see that caring for the people under him takes up a lot of his time.

Is Tim Schaefer a bad boss? Yes, I think he is. But one of the things I've come to believe, and this documentary reinforces, is that all bosses are bad in their own way. But the fact that they're bad isn't usually due to some deliberate campaign to make people miserable, it just that people have different personalities and experiences, and prefer different management styles. The result is that no one person can manage in a way that makes everyone happy.

Take Zak, for example. He clearly learned his management style at places with more centrally organized, top-down "you have been given a task so do the task we don't need your opinion" culture. I can absolutely see why that clashes with the more democratic chaos-energy of someplace like Double Fine and how employees might take some of the things he says personally. At the same time, I totally get where he's coming from. From his perspective, he's in charge of a project that is significantly tied to the company's future. Deadlines need to be hit and milestones reached. If that means cutting off discussion and hurting someone's feelings so the project can move forward, well, too bad. The game's gotta ship if everyone wants to keep their jobs.

In Tim's specific case, the problems come from leaning too much into the democratic chaos-energy. He clearly cares about his people a ton and seems at times almost desperate for them to achieve some sort of career self-substantiation. He's obviously wants his team to have a lot of ownership over what they're doing, and clearly worries that inserting himself too much will take that sense of ownership away from them. I can totally see why that generates a lot of loyalty and why people seem to love working at Double Fine. But the other side of that is that he's so mindful of not disrupting other people that he ends up being an absentee leader at points. How many times in the documentary did someone say something like "I wish Tim were more involved," or "This problem wouldn't have gotten as bad if Tim had known about it earlier"?

One of the most fascinating/horrible to watch parts of the documentary is that so many of these problems come from a good place.