15 Inspirations for Psychonauts with Tim Schafer
In honor of the 20th anniversary of Psychonauts Tim Schafer sat down in the Double Fine Action Studio to recount the different pieces of media that helped shape the game.The Fly II...? Sure, why not.
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Published: April 29th 2025
Episode Transcript
Hi, everybody! It's Tim Schafer. And we are here to talk about Psychonauts.
Psychonauts 2, you say? No, Psychonauts 1.
Because this month is the anniversary.
The 20th anniversary, if you can believe it,
of shipping Psychonauts into the world, the very first game,
our very first game here at Double Fine Productions.
And we are celebrating in a lot of different ways
and sharing a lot of things on doublefine.com,
but today we are talking about inspirations
that led to the creation of that game.
These are mostly my inspirations.
There was a big team involved, and everyone had their own inspirations,
but these are the ones that came to mind when I was thinking about
how this crazy game came together.
Going back in time,
I was at LucasArts for a whole decade making point-and-click adventure games.
And one of them I made was Full Throttle.
And I've told this story a few times,
but there was a scene I wanted to put in the game
where Ben Throttle was going to take peyote
and then have an interactive peyote trip
that was gonna be something the player would go through
and they would navigate these visions,
and mysterious symbols,
and use that information to solve a puzzle.
But I kind of decided not to try and force that through,
because it seemed like at that time it would not have flown
in that family company.
No one censored it, but I don't think the world was ready
for this idea quite yet.
But I've loved the idea of dream sequences, even back then,
and interactive dream sequences were just really interesting.
Dreams as a way of understanding your mind in a better way than you can
when you just look at your conscious mind.
And then, I was pitching into later times of my career at Lucas a spy game.
I wanted to make this spy game
that was influenced a lot by Hong Kong martial arts movies
I was seeing at the time.
So, there was a lot of martial arts fighting,
and also heavy meditation part of it.
And you were going to do things like
intercept a killer drone that was trying to kill you,
and then meditate on it,
and use that meditation to go into a vision quest inside your own brain.
And that vision quest would have puzzles in it.
And you'd use that information to identify where the drone had come from.
That was the idea I had for that game.
I was pitching that around, talking to people about it.
And someone came into my office like:
"Tell me about that game where you go into other people's minds."
And I was like: "No, no, no. You don't go into other people's minds.
You go into your own mind."
And then I was like: "But wait a second..."
And I just kind of thought about that like:
"Huh, that could be better."
But I kind of put that aside for a long time
and kept working on my spy game.
But I think that's really interesting to think about how a lot of times
creative ideas come from someone misunderstanding.
Like, you read something, you read it wrong, and it sounds--
"Wait, I like that idea better."
You never know where creative ideas come from.
And sometimes they come from a misunderstanding like that.
Now I gotta talk about movies.
Let's talk about Dennis Quaid.
1984. The classic film Dreamscape.
If you've never seen, you should watch it. It's a lot of fun.
And it's about a guy who has the ability to go into people's dreams.
So, someone is sleeping there...
It's a little-- It's a little creepy, but...
...someone is sleeping there, he can lay down next to them,
and go into their brain,
and experience their dream as they are having it.
And you can see, there is, obviously, a lot of overlap
with the ideas of Psychonauts,
being able to explore someone else's unconscious mind.
But this was specifically while they were asleep.
And there are some weird things that happen in that movie
that I'm not gonna defend.
But there is a great scene where he goes into the mind of this boy
who is having really bad nightmares,
and he sees that the boy is being chased by this cobra monster.
This hideous cobra monster is trying to kill him.
And Dennis Quaid is running around with him,
trying to help him, keep him safe from this cobra monster.
And they run through his house, and at the dining room table
his dad is sitting there not doing anything.
And the little kid goes: "Oh, that's just my dad. He never helps."
And they run through it.
That's my dad. But he won't help us.
The little bastard's right.
And I thought that was so kind of sad to see
how the boy saw his dad in his own mind.
And you can see that play out in Psychonauts.
Raz's relationship with his father, I think,
got a lot of inspiration from that, so.
Basically I just stole that whole thing.
Sorry, Dennis Quaid.
But it's a fun movie. Kate Capshaw is in there.
And, uh... it's worth checking out.
There is a book I wanted to mention.
Haruki Murakami book called
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
Which is a book about, among other things,
a man finds out that he is slipping into his own unconscious mind.
And he is going to eventually become trapped inside his unconscious.
And he won't be able to experience the outside world anymore.
He is gonna be trapped in this other part.
And half the book is set inside this little village
that is really just a construct inside his mind.
And there is all this symbolism,
all these shadows, and a library,
and people he meets there.
But it really just stands
for this kind of prison inside his own mind.
And that was just that idea of constructs inside your head
and different places you can go,
and different locations you can go to that are in your unconscious,
that are not the real world, but they are inside your head,
I thought was really interesting, and I think that kind of persisted
in my head ever since I read that book in the 90s.
1994.
The New Legend of Shaolin.
I was watching a lot of Hong Kong movies in the 90s.
And this one is a Jet Li classic.
And it's one of the two movies he made
with a child actor who could match a lot of his moves,
and they did a lot of martial arts together.
Like, Jet Li and this kid.
The other one he made was My Father is a Hero
which is a great, like, cop movie.
But this is an old Shaolin-style movie.
And it's got this little kid in it who is just amazing.
He's got kind of, like, a little mohawk,
and is just very intense, no-nonsense little kid.
He is not, like, doing a lot of precocious little things.
He is, like, a kung fu master.
And he is just really serious.
And he is, um...
He is still a kid, but he is just so intense.
You might not think of Raz when you watch that, but to me...
It was like-- I'd never made a game about a kid before.
You know, Day of the Tentacle, or Full Throttle, or Grim Fandango,
they are all adults.
And this was the movie I was like:
"Oh, it would be fun to do a game about a ten-year old,
but who's, like, got a really adult mind.
Because they are really dedicated.
They are focused, and they are committed."
And that's what, I think, Raz is like when he shows up at camp.
And he is like: "I want to be a Psychonaut."
So, he is just driven to that task.
And I think that was very much inspired by the kid from The New Legend of Shaolin.
Also really fun martial arts movie.
I have Fly II on my list.
Because we were thinking about like: "What is the setting for this?"
And someone threw out: "What about the Fly II?"
And I said: "There was a Fly II? I didn't know there was a Fly II."
And it's Eric Stoltz as the child of Brundle, like, the Fly character.
And he is being raised in, like, a scientific research facility.
So, it was a facility where they had all these, like, kids with psychic powers
kind of trapped, and they are experimenting on them.
I think this has been done many times since.
And, like, Stranger Things has a setup like this too.
Firestarter.
But this facility had a bunch of kids together.
And it was gonna be really scientific.
The main character was gonna be named X2,
I remember that.
And you were later gonna meet his friends X3 and X4.
But then maybe you'd meet X1.
And maybe later on meet X0. It would be like Racer X.
I'm giving up being a racer.
And from now on I will be a full-time international secret agent
without a name or a country.
Goodbye, Speed.
I don't know. I had all these ideas for it.
But the slogan was gonna be: "X2...
Raised by science. Loved by no one."
Way more dramatic than--
Anyway.
That was one of those little dead-ends that we didn't go down.
But it did kind of evolve like:
"I don't think that research facility will be as fun to explore."
And then, in doing free-writing after that I'm like:
"What if it's in a summer camp?"
So, it became a summer camp which is, like, a little lighter of a setting.
But still a gathering of a bunch of kids together
for purposes of, like, science and stuff, and training.
Now, I bring up-- Like, Nightmare Before Christmas.
1993.
People always refer to Psychonauts, or they did at the time, as...
...Burton-esque.
And I think, like, anything that's creative
or interesting looking always is called Burton-esque.
And it's kind of a sad commentary on how few things there were back then
that were interesting and creative.
Because I don't know if you would say-- Like, you look at Psychonauts,
you wouldn't say it's exactly like Nightmare Before Christmas.
But it definitely was on our minds a lot.
Like, that movie had a lot of impact on people who watched it back then.
It was so creative and such a well-crafted movie.
And if we had our way,
we would have probably made the game look a lot more stop motion.
We kind of were like: "What if it looked like stop motion?"
I was really fascinated with claymation and, like:
"What if we had a shader where you have moving thumbprints?"
Kind of like a Will Vinton claymation at the time.
Like, you would see the thumbprints of the animator moving around every frame.
I was like: "What if we could do that?"
I didn't even know what a shader was back then.
But, you know, I had this idea.
And basically, like... We just didn't know how to do that.
So, I don't know would that have been better or worse
but Psychonauts might have had that real Nightmare Before Christmas
puppet kind of look.
But I think you can look at Black Velvetopia
and see a lot of inspiration for that
in the Oogie Boogie scene at the end of Nightmare.
Where just the coolness-- it's something I've always liked,
is the way the black light looks,
and how it moves,
how it's dark, but it's bright at the same time.
So, Black Velvetopia, I think, owes a lot to Oogie Boogie.
We are gonna do our best. We are gonna do the best we can!
Edit that so I got that quote right.
I'm gonna do the best I can.
We are gonna do the best we can.
Forget it. Forget I said any of that.
Okay, um...
Another artist I just wanted to call out
that I know a lot of our artists talked about a lot.
You know, our artists, Scott Campbell,
and Peter Chan, and Nathan Stapley,
at the beginning of that project were trying to figure out the look.
And a lot of the game is really, like, Scott Campbell's characters come to life.
But one of the inspiring artists we were looking at was named Joe Sorren.
Joe Sorren is an American artist who does a lot of really unique character shapes
and also character color schemes.
If you look at the faces of the characters in Psychonauts,
they are all faces you don't see in nature,
and, like, colors you don't see in nature necessarily.
Blue faces and green faces.
And it's one of the reasons that a lot of the characters' faces
in Psychonauts have a very odd, like, painterly, multicolored look to them.
That was very inspired by Joe Sorren,
but I thought looked neat.
In a creepy way. But I like it.
I named a bunch of video games here.
Because I was at LucasArts making point-and-click adventures.
Which were, like, you know, mostly they were 2D,
Grim was 3D.
But you would mostly click on an object, and then click to interact with it,
and the character's motion would be handled by the game.
And then I played Super Mario 64.
I remember that was the first one where I just, like, pushed the joystick
in the direction I wanted to go, and the character run that way,
and I was like: "Wait a second!"
As much as I love tank controls.
And then I, at the time, played a lot of games like Final Fantasy VII.
Maybe later, like, Ocarina of Time.
These games where you just drove the character directly and run around.
And you could still do things, and have a story,
and solve puzzles and stuff, but...
I think that was the moment where I was like:
"I don't think I want to make a point-and-click adventure anymore.
I think I want to make a console game.
I want to make a character-driven console game
that is just really immediate,
and has more action,
but, you know, has a lot of narrative and stuff.
And I think that was a big turning point for me
to leave behind what I've been doing
for the last ten years and try something new.
So, I would credit those games.
And another one...
Skies of Arcadia was the one that I played the most recently
before making Psychonauts.
And there are some actual mechanics from that game that showed up in Psychonauts.
Like the Chams.
These little buried Chams that kind of give off this vibration.
They are under the ground, you have to dig them up.
And I think that's where-- obviously, where Psitanium came from
in Psychonauts too.
So, thank you, Skies of Arcadia.
Shout-out Harper.
And then, I want to talk about figments.
So, figments are a collectible in Psychonauts.
They are these little 2D drawings that you can run through and collect,
and they help tell the story of the game.
And I think it's interesting, because there is different stories
about where those came from.
I was talking to people on the team.
And I remember this version,
that Peter Chan and Scott Campbell remember,
where we were looking at artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Klee.
Who both, among their other styles,
they also have this really squiggly line art drawing.
And Peter's thought was that:
"How do we differentiate the mental world from the physical world in Psychonauts?
You are in the campgrounds, it's physical.
You go in someone's mind, it's mental.
How do we make them look different?"
And one of the ways was: "Well, how about the world is kind of--
It's a thought, it's a memory, it's unconscious.
So, it's maybe half-finished.
So, we could have a solid tabletop.
But we could have a bottle that's a 3D model bottle.
But then we could have a line drawing of a bottle.
And a line drawing of something else.
And that would make the world look a little bit like a dream."
And that was something he was experimenting with at the time.
Now, Erik Robson, our lead designer is like:
"Let me tell you where figments came from.
We were doing the nightmare level
and I wanted to make it more scary.
And there was this game called The Suffering
which used to, like, flash up these images on the screen,
really scary visions just for a few seconds.
And so, I put up a child's drawing of a bunny in the nightmare level
and just flashed it on the screen.
And that Scott liked the aesthetic so much he was like:
"We could put this everywhere."
Everybody is, like, a hundred-percent sure that their version of the story is right.
And I think it's really interesting
because games are bringing together a lot of creative people.
And creative people collaborating on something is really interesting.
But there's this thing where ideas come from
is not always, like, one place.
And you might be a hundred-percent sure that it came from this one place,
but to someone else,
their start of that journey to that idea
where you met and had an idea together
could have started somewhere else.
And so, they think it came from here,
and you think it came from here.
And really, it was when you both described your ideas,
the overlap became the idea that got into the work,
and eventually comes to make something like a game,
like Psychonauts that we are here still talking about 20 years later.
So, I hope that was interesting.
If not, it's just me rambling.
But I'm excited to be talking about Psychonauts 20 years later.
I still love that game. I hope you like it too.
And thank you for joining us on this celebration
of the 20th anniversary of Psychonauts.
You guys gonna say anything?
We'll dub that in later.
Bye!
Channel Surf!
