When it’s time to pull off a stylish two-person heist by way of stealthy rooftop entry, there are only two garments appropriate for the job: a black and green 2HB logo t-shirt, and a pair of dark sunglasses.

Black, because you’re going to want to keep a low profile as you dodge lasers and do that thing where you hide on the ceiling of the elevator and your nemesis doesn’t notice you’re there even though you’re literally inches above his head and he could probably hear you breathing. Green, for the color of all that cash you’re going to possess after this job goes precisely according to plan. And dark sunglasses, because have you seen how sunny it is in San Francisco right now? Just look at this picture.

Welcome back to the Weekly Double Fine Action Sale of the Week, where we discount one item from the Double Fine Shop from Monday to Friday. This time it’s 25% off the black and green 2HB T-Shirt. And I don’t know if you noticed this, but that baby has TWO heads, so this is a pretty sweet deal.

GO GET IT.

One dangerous thing about working at Double Fine is that we’re constantly tripping over all of the awards people keep giving us. We keep most of them on the floor because we ran out of award cases, and because sometimes awards come in the shape of little statues and walking over them makes me feel like a huge monster rampaging through a crowded metropolis.

Anyway, we just got awarded a couple more times. Neither of these awards are the little statue kind though.

Game Informer gave us two Best of E3 awards for The Cave, Best Adventure Game and Best Downloadable Game. They only gave us one plaque, and they didn’t tell us which award it corresponds to, so I guess we’ll just have to decide which award we love more and hope the other award doesn’t grow up and become bitterly estranged.

When choosing how to display this award, we took heed of that old saw, “If you run out of space on the floor, hang it from the ceiling on a piñata.”

Plus, how about this? G4 has named Psychonauts the 79th best video game of all time. We talked to some of their tech guys about the empirical method they used to determine this figure, and most of it was pretty complicated, but they did explain that the calculation has a margin of error of 78.

Thanks a bunch to everyone at G4 and Game Informer! You guys are awesome!

As you may have noticed, we were out at E3 last week! Well, I wasn’t. I was here. SOME people have real work to do. (I’m referring specifically to me, who wasn’t at E3, but was here at the office.)

Ron was at the show with producer Matt Hansen to show off The Cave, and pretty much everyone agreed that The Cave is a hilarious video game of inestimable quality. And we can prove it! A bunch of websites said so, and the internet is never wrong. Read all about it! Huge thanks to everyone who stopped by to see the game—it went over really well, and Ron had a great time.

Tim was there too, with producer Greg Rice and project lead Brad Muir, doing super secret stuff that I don’t think we can’t talk about. They ran into a lot of Double Fine Adventure backers, who were all incredibly nice. It’s always great to meet backers and fans—you guys are actually the best fans, considerably moreso than the fans of those OTHER game companies. We gave out a bunch of pins as an acknowledgement of that fact.

Oh, and we pretty much CONQUERED THE WORLD, also. The Guiness Book of World Records gave us a certificate for most worlds conquered. (The record is currently 1, set by us.)

Don’t squint too hard at the text on that certificate though, because the words are pretty small and you might damage your eyes. But trust me, it’s for the thing I said it was for.

Now that your head has exploded from the greatness of that honor bestowed upon us, please acquire a replacement head in order to peruse this gallery of images documenting Double Fine’s E3 antics and shenanigans:

Tim hangs out with Billy Mitchell and Walter Day, the actual guys who were in The King of Kong, which you have obviously seen because it’s great.

Hey, it’s Wil Wheaton!

This was taken literally seconds after the previous picture.

This photograph was digitally blurred to protect the identities of adventure game legends Ron Gilbert and Al Lowe.

This photograph was digitally enhanced to clarify the identities of Kickstarter success stories Brian Fargo and Tim Schafer.

“Boy, it sure is nice hanging out at the Hotel Figueroa’s poolside bar. Good thing Chris isn’t here, and is instead ensuring the Double Fine office doesn’t burn down or anything.”

Flower and Journey designer Jenova Chen is known for the rich sensory experience evoked by his games. Now that Tim has destroyed one of his five senses, the sense of smell, he will have a diminished reservoir of experience from which to gain inspiration. But hey, creativity is all about constraints.

Pictured here: Brad, Matt, and a man who tore out all of our hearts and stomped on them.

Here you can see Matt, Ron, Greg, and Brad getting lost in LA, and never ever finding their way back to Double Fine, where the REALLY cool people stay even when E3 is happening. The end.

Psst. Hey, buddy. Over here. Don’t let ‘em see you. We’ve got a new weapon to take down the bots. Get a load of this.

What? Okay, yeah, it’s a t-shirt. We found it in the long-decayed rubble of a company that used to make something called “video games.” It must be made out of pretty high-quality fabric to have survived all that. But check it out—there’s a robot blueprint on there! We got bots of our own now! We can win this thing!

I know, I know—it’s all aluminum foil and cardboard and stuff. But it’ll work! I swear! Hey, buddy, where’re you going? Come back! Just gimme a chance!

GO GET IT.

Yes, it’s another Weekly Double Fine Action Sale of the Week, where we discount one item from the Double Fine Shop from Monday to Friday. This time it’s the Costume Quest Robot T-Shirt, which is already a pretty amazing deal because it contains the blueprint for a robot that you can build. And now it’s 25% off! (Temporarily!) If you took advantage of last week’s sale, you’ll be building up a pretty sweet robot occupation survival kit at this point.*

*Double Fine Productions makes no guarantee as to the efficacy of any of its products in combating a ruthlessly efficient robotic enslavement of your, or any, species.

My friends, it is a dire time. Photographic evidence of truly catastrophic events has been transmitted to the Double Fine offices from the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Witness this meeting of Tim Schafer, Brad Muir, and Ron Gilbert, and tremble.

“Why, those are just the talented project leads of Double Fine Adventure, Iron Brigade, and The Cave respectively,” you say, “set against The Cave’s tastefully decorated booth.”

But have you ever asked yourself why these formidable forces of game development have been kept in charge of separate projects? The truth is that we have always gone to great effort and expense to keep them apart—for when they join, woe betide humanity, and also emus. Observe Ron’s glowing eyes and steely gaze—his dark transformation is already underway.

Only one man, The Cave producer Matt Hansen, pictured here with appropriately dramatic underlighting, has the strength and sheer willpower necessary to do battle with this fearsome trio.

Don’t worry, Matt. You’ll do fine. Go get ‘em.

(We’ve been showing The Cave at E3 and it’s been fun. Have you seen the trailer?)

Picture the scene. The internet is down, the power is out, that EMP shockwave has disabled all smartphones—right when you were in the middle of logging the day’s meager rations and munitions that will, with a pinch of luck and a healthy serving of fighting spirit, win the resistance one more day of precious freedom. We’ve all been there. But while the Fourth High Robotic Conclave may have squashed all network communication, there’s one thing they didn’t count on: Double Fine Floaty Pens. Advanced ballpoint technology allows these writing utensils to function without any external power source, even when our species is facing its darkest hour. Also, they are floaty.

GO GET THEM.

Welcome to the Weekly Double Fine Action Sale of the Week. Every Monday through Friday, one item from the Double Fine Shop will get a deep discount, so mark your calendar. Mark every single Monday on your calendar, until the end of time. Or until our world is subjugated by the cold immutable logic of the machines.

When the guys from Humble Bundle said they had a way to make the Most Excellent Game Psychonauts even more excellent, we were dubious, because it’s already (obviously) the Most Excellent Game. But then they told us their idea: to bundle Psychonauts in Humble Indie Bundle V with games from other awesome independent developers: Bastion, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Limbo, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. And they said all the games would be DRM-free on Windows, Mac, and Linux, with soundtracks included. And this would all benefit charity somehow.

So we realized they were right, and this was even more excellent, which proves that the Humble Bundle guys are wizards, and the laws of nature are basically meaningless.

Go get it.

Hey, check out that byline. Yeah, this post is BY me, Tim Schafer. And I ain’t line. Get it?

Double Fine Trivia: All of these amazing posts so far on this news page have been by me, Tim Schafer. But not by choice. I used to dream about having a lot of different people post to the news here, and having different bylines from different authors. Artists, programmers, tall people, bearded ladies… such a crazy dream! But whenever somebody who wasn’t me tried to post to the Double Fine Action News I would get jealous and have them killed! (Yes, that is one of the powers of the CEO. It’s a horrible duty, but someone has to do it.)
I was hoping Erik Wolpaw would start posting back when he worked here, but he just made one post and then said he needed to lie down because all the typing made him fainty. (After I went to all the trouble of finding out how to recreate ugly, Old Man Murray colors in FrontPage!) Then he saw how jealous I was getting so he sneaked out to save his own life.

But now the dream is finally a reality. Like most dreams, it has been made possible by our new community manager, Chris Remo. He has hacked a byline in there, using Unix and imaginary numbers, and soon will start making posts. Then I will get jealous and start making more posts of my own, or take other measures! I haven’t decided yet!
Exciting!

New Whispering rock shirts in PINK and GREEN!

Green for the lush grass and evergreen pines of Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp!
Pink for the blood of our ancestors, who died to keep Whispering Valley free, plus snow!
See, snow is white.
Combined with the red blood of our ancestors, that makes pink.
Actually, none of my ancestors died there. But still, it’s a good rule to remember: don’t eat pink snow.
I’m not sure if I’m helping to sell T-shirts right now, so I’ll stop talking.