Schafer: 'It's not that stressful to get a whole bunch of money all of a sudden'
You might be surprised to hear it, but Double Fine head Tim Schafer isn't feeling too much pressure after receiving over $3 million from fans for his upcoming adventure game. "I don't know if I could describe it ... it's kind of relaxing," he told a crowd of attendees at a New York University-hosted forum last evening, much to the crowd's delight. Answering seriously, Schafer said, "It hasn't really felt that way," referring to the stress. "It just felt like, the whole thing, all the backing just felt like a big wave of goodwill and support. It was very emotionally ... it was a big happy moment for the company."
Beyond his jokes about stress and receiving enormous piles of cash, Schafer said that he was "actually terrified of making a game for just $200,000." (The final Kickstarter aimed to raise $400,000.) He questioned whether he was still capable of producing a project for such scant resources, having spent the last decade making successively larger projects – at least until Brutal Legend launched. Thankfully, fans raised well over the original target, meaning Schafer, Ron Gilbert, and Double Fine "can actually put a real team on it now and have a whole year to make it." So there you have it, folks: expect that adventure game at some point in early 2013.
As for Kickstarter itself, Schafer spoke highly of the new avenue it provides game creators who want to self-publish. He stopped himself short of calling it anything beyond that, however. "I think it's a great new way to make things happen that couldn't happen before," he said. More specifically, he thinks of it – symbolically – like the Sundance Film Festival. "That changed the [movie] business a lot, but it didn't destroy all of it," he said. "It made Hollywood better. It made more diversity in the kind of movies getting made, what kind of actors were in them – it made the whole art form richer I think. I think a similar thing could happen in gaming."
