Brütal Legend image courtesy of Double Fine Productions.

TS: Our games are really trying to do stuff that hasn't been done before. We try to be original, we really care about the story and characters, and we try to make them as funny as possible.

SFBG: If you had to try to convince someone who had never played a video game before to play one of your games, what would be your pitch, what would be your tactic?

TS: Well, I always hear, or I often get fan mail thats like, “my girlfriend hates games, but she saw me playing yours and it was the first time she ever stopped and looked at them, and gave them a shot.” I think humor is one way to reach people that other games don't use. It's a turn off to walk by a game and hear a lot of shooting and screaming. It just seems like a physically unhealthy thing to do, and seems like a waste of time to people who don't play games, but then when they come by and it's dramatic and cinematic and it feels like an emotional story being told, it pulls in more people. So I would say that not all games are the same in that way.

SFBG: On the other side of the coin, are there people who one can't reach using story and character or humor?

TS: Definitely, and people have different moods, like when you sit down and play a game, sometimes you just feel like doing something really physical, or doing something really twitchy, because you don't want to think about anything. Sometimes you're in a mood that's like tucking in with a novel or something before you go to bed -- people want to engross themselves in this different world, this fantasy. There's a lot of differences between players, and within those players there are differences in what mood their in. Sometimes you just want to go online with your friends, and you want the game to take a backseat, and have a social time with your friends, laughing and shooting each other, and you don't want the game to be in your face with the story -- that's obnoxious. But often when you're playing by yourself, you want a complete fantasy experience.

SFBG: Something that I've noticed – both from playing your games and reading other interviews you've done -- is that you talk about creating balances in your games, between writing and programming, or between the story and the gameplay, between comedy and tragedy, between the character's motivation and the player's motivation. Would you say that doing a good job creating this balance is maybe your personal talent or defining talent, creating that perfect mixture?

TS: Yeah, I mean I would suggest that all game designers are trying to do that, and we're definitely trying to do that. It's either balancing it or mixing it together. I think that story and gameplay can be completely mixed together, so that the puzzles are mixed in with the character, so that the character defines the interaction that you're having. There are many different tools that we use to get the player into the game, and they're all balanced really well, and that is something that does take time. We have a big team, and it's very collaborative, and in Brütal Legend's case it took four years. It was like crafting an object with many hands, polishing it in places, and constructing areas, and knitting them all together. It really takes a lot of elbow grease ... is elbow grease a term? It takes a lot of work.

SFBG: When you have to tweak something to balance it in that way, say between story and gameplay, is there something that tends to be tweaked more, or is it just sort of a case by case basis?

TS: A lot of times, it's what's easier. If something hasn't been recorded yet, and a gameplay element has to change, I'll say “well, I'll just rewrite the dialogue for it.” Other times, the dialogue has been recorded, and it's someone that's hard to get like Ozzy [Osbourne], and we'll say “look, we have the dialogue, we're going to have to work around this, or cut it.” You really have to be on your toes, the whole production, and your opportunities to fix things or improve things might be in the dialogue, or might be in the art. Like if you put up a sign, and you explain that people have to turn left here. Or you might not be able to put up a sign, because you're out of memory in that area, so we have to have dialogue.

SFBG: I read an interesting quote of yours about [the 1998 game]Grim Fandango, about how you saw Dias de Los Muertos skeletons that reminded you of cheap texture mapping, and it sort of spawned the visual aesthetic of that game. Do you have other stories about accidental design decisions?

TS: I'm trying to think. Back in '96, I really hated the look of 3D art, because it just looked like someone just screenprinted something onto a nylon stretched over a cardboard box -- people's faces would look like that. When I saw those calavera statues, they had bones painted on the outside – instead of modelling all the bones in papier maiche, they'll just make a tube and paint the bones on the outside, and I was like, “This is just like bad 3D art, this is great!

Limitations in design metrics always inspire more creativity. I think Sam Raimi or someone had a quote about how if you need a way to have a girl float in from off-screen when she's a ghost, and you have no money, you'll figure out an amazing way to do it with camera angles and stuff. If you have all the money in the world, you'll just buy anti-gravity boots, and it's over. Having that adversity actually forces you to think about something more, and come up with something that's more clever than if it had been easy, with no obstacles.

SFBG: With that in mind, and with the pace of technology, particularly game design technology, just having this inexorable and rapid ascent, when the anti-gravity boots have been developed, how do you fight the temptation to use them when they are at your disposal?

TS: Well, enough obstacles always come up, especially in production. You don't usually have to worry about it in games. Yeah, you have the anti-gravity boots -- that's like getting the 360 or the PS3, the power, the processor, the memory – but then you tend to fill it up again, you use it and immediately you want more, either by making the game more complicated, or more beautiful looking. We use anti-gravity boots, and then its such a given to have anti-gravity boots that we're having trouble because we're flying into ceiling fans. New problems rear their heads.

SFBG: The character in [2005's] Psychonauts, Boyd, was an interesting example I encountered in my research of a combination of your two backgrounds, in writing and programming. I was actually just curious if still you see that guy around.

TS: He was half-imagined, but also very inspired by a guy who used to sweep up the alley [by our offices]. He was a homeless guy, and he would come by the office to get some money. Sometimes he would just be on a rant about a certain thing, a kind of thing where the government would be trying to read his mind, using satellites, or using the broken glass in the streets to bend their optics around. They were always trying to figure out his position. He just produced great quotes: “I don't want to be liquid, I want to be a turtle with rockets strapped to my back!” Boyd's dialogue was a mixture of things that that guy said, some new things for Boyd, and some actual hints for what you're supposed to do in the game. You're looking for the Milkman, this mythical creature, and he kind of gives you some hints about where the Milkman's hiding. I had an actual flowchart, like a programmer would have, for his conspiracy theories. He constructs it by coming up with a conspirator, with what their plan is, with what the victim of it is, and strings it all together with a bunch of coughing and stuff. So it's all procedurally generated conspiracy theories.

SFBG: That character seems sort of paradigmatic, both of your combination of programming and writing, but also in the way that you describe him as kind of a combination of real and imagined. The games you design are all very imaginative, but they have this basis in reality, or in an extant thing, and you sort of take it and run with it or you take it and expand on it. Why do you think you're drawn to that model, rather than creating worlds out of whole cloth?

Brütal Legend image courtesy of Double Fine Productions.

TS: I've never really thought about that. When you write, you always draw on your personal experience, for inspiration. It triggers something in you. And you're always looking for specifics when you're writing. Instead of having a character who's a guy, who's a strong guy, you think about where he was born, what's his age, what kind of music does he like, what were his parents like, what was his childhood like. You think about all these things, and you're always looking for material for specific cases of the human experience, so you pull from a lot of your friend's lives, and you use these little nuggets to make something go from being generic to being really unique.

SFBG: Let's talk about heavy metal. There's a quote of yours I found: “The great thing about heavy metal is that it's both serious and awesome, but pretty ridiculous and over the top at the same time. You can make fun of it and at the same time pay a very loving tribute to it.” What is it about heavy metal that makes this possible? It seems to me that metal is really the only genre for which this is true, but could you point to things that give it that quality?

TS: I feel like at different ages, there were different things that I liked about it. As a teenager, I liked that it was just really weird, and dark, and powerful, and it spoke to the things I was going through at the time -- the songs were often about alienation, feeling kind of estranged from the world, like Diary of a Madman [by Ozzy Osbourne] or whatever. But later you get into it because there's a lot of musicianship to connect to, like if you listen to Diary of a Madman, Randy Rhoads' guitar solos on that album are just amazing solos, and still really fun to listen to. There's incredible energy, like in the drums in the intro to “Painkiller” by Judas Priest, just the crazy skills of the musicians involved. That gets combined with the really unique singing styles of guys like Ozzy, or the powerful singing of Rob Halford, or the really authentic style and grit of Lemmy [Kilmister, of Motorhead].

One of the interesting things about these guys is that we think of it as heavy metal, but they describe it as rock 'n' roll. All their favorite bands are the Beatles, the older guys in metal. To them they're just rocking out, they're not trying to be weird, or scary. Maybe in the early Black Sabbath days they were purposely trying to imitate horror movies.

SFBG: Do you think that's an important shift in metal, when it went from the bands who were just naturally rocking out to bands that started from the outset and said “we're going to be a heavy metal band, we're going to be really, really heavy and really, really metal?”

TS: Definitely. There's that second generation of guys who just went in to be as hard as possible, and some of them rejected the theatrics of it. That became a thing to make fun of, because you can make fun of the dramatic side, and say we're just going to be really plain, and thrash really hard, though a lot of people were still really theatrical about it, just trying to get as scary as possible. There's just that time, when you're a teenager and you want to be the scariest person in the room. In some ways it helps you deal with the all the scary things that are out there. If you're going to high school and you're scared for the first day in high school, and you're the scariest person, it's not as scary.

SFBG: Have you kept up with the flow of metal throughout the years – obviously, the game is grounded in the classics – but do you listen to new, up-and-coming metal bands? Do you still go to metal shows?

TS: I do, especially when we started this game, because the classic metal stuff definitely had the biggest impact on me, in my formative years. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal is still my favorite style. I do like some new acts like 3 Inches of Blood – there's some of that in the soundtrack – but I'm also dismayed about the current state of pop metal. The intro cutscene to the game really expresses a lot of my reaction to...I don't want to name any bands, but its pretty obvious: corporate-sounding metal. I got some expert help when I made the game. A lot of my taste was rooted in that Ozzy, Priest, Sabbath era, and our music director, Emily, listened to a lot of metal and filled in the rest of the parts. People in the game listen to different types of music: there's the black metal area, the industrial metal area, the hair metal area.

We went to Aquarius records, down on Valencia Street. One of the owners is a guy named Alan, who's just one of those crazy, really smart metalheads who has an encyclopedic knowledge of metal, and he mixed up some songs for us to listen to – some newer stuff, but also some 80's cult stuff that I hadn't heard. I was embarrassed to say that I hadn't heard of Brocas Helm before, this really important local band that was incredibly influential. Also great songwriters, like them, or the Lord Weird Slough Feg. That was one of the great things about making this game: finding out about a lot of bands that I should have known about but didn't. People who play this game will also find out about a lot of bands that they didn't know they liked.

Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal. Brütal Legend image courtesy of Double Fine Productions.

SFBG: Do you have any good war stories as a concert attender in the Bay Area throughout the years – when you were in college, or when you were at LucasArts?

TS: I've gone to a lot of Ozzfest shows. Back when I used to go to shows in the city in the early days, I used to go to the old Mabuhay Gardens – that was more of a punk rock establishment. It's been closed for a while. War stories, let's see. I have never seen Motorhead. I've tried to see to Motorhead. My friends and I went down and we got into town, and there was a sign on the door – it was at the Warfield -- and the show had been canceled because Lemmy broke his foot. He broke his toe – I don't know why he couldn't play with a broken toe. [Editor's note: this interview was conducted before Motorhead's October 5, 2009 concert at the Warfield, which Schafer attended.]

SFBG: Could you tell me a little bit about the events that led up to the founding of Double Fine? I'm curious about the history of Double Fine as a San Francisco company, and why you chose to found it here, and whether you considered anywhere else?

TS: No, because I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up in Sonoma, so S.F. was always the town I would come to for shows, the town I would come to for anything exciting at all, so I always had this dream of living in the city. Working for Lucas, I would still go to the city all the time, and I finally got to move here in '99. I just thought, “I really want to start a company in the city.” I worked for Lucas for ten years, and there were a lot of companies that would go set up shop out there in Novato, and they'd be in an industrial park, and it was just staid and quiet. Industrial parks are so boring – to work at a company where you can look out the window and see the city outside is just so inspiring. It's not just about having great restaurants at lunch, though that's part of it. Being surrounded by the energy of the city attracts people who want to work in a city. A lot of people say that in job interviews, that they just always wanted to work in a city. People get tired of the suburbs.

I started the company kind of naively, after being at Lucas for ten years, and I wanted to have more control over the IP I was making. I would come up with a character, and they would talk about making a sequel without me, and I would think, “What! You can't make a sequel to my idea! Someone else can't do that!” But they could, because they owned it. Also, we couldn't control how we treated our employees on the team. One of the guys wanted to come in three days a week, or he was going to quit, and I wanted to keep him, but it was a big company, so I couldn't make that decision, and the guy quit, which was a bummer.

We started, and at first it was just me in my living room in a bathrobe and flip-flops on the phone, calling up game publishers and telling them about my game idea, trying to get a contract, and we ended up in Hayes Valley, in this space that used to be a leather, purse, and clock shop, on the corner of Fell and Laguna – it's now a hair salon. We were there for a while, but people didn't like us there because we always pulled the shades down and people didn't know what we were doing in there. They wanted more foot traffic, and the neighbors complained and we eventually got kicked out.

Then we moved to this unheated warehouse between Fifth and Sixth, South of Market. It had no air conditioning or heat, and it had rats. The way it was zoned down there, it was zoned for live/work, so all the live/work spaces got rented up, and everyone was flushing their toilets. But the sewer lines were like eight inches around, just really small, so whenever it rained, the toilet in our downstairs bathroom would overflow, back up, and flow into our office. It was really gross. Human waste would flow into our office space. We were working in crunch mode, on some really hard deadline to get ready for the publisher, and we had to jump over this ocean of human waste.

So we moved from there and the great thing, well, it wasn't great for everybody, but the great thing was when the dot com crash happened, we were paying four dollars a square foot for the warehouse, and when we had to move we looked around, and there were all these dot-com companies going out of business, and the spaces were all beautiful, and renovated, and there were all these Aeron chairs, and we went and got a place for a dollar a square foot that was much nicer than the warehouse. We sublet it from someone who was paying 18 dollars a square foot. It was a crazy time when all the dot com companies moved out, and a bunch of game companies moved in South of Market: Flagship, and Secret Level, and Three Rings were in the SOMA area. We really benefited from the dot com bubble bursting, in a strange way.

Brütal Legend image courtesy of Double Fine Productions.

SFBG: Does it make you unhappy when people describe your games as quirky?

TS: [Laughs] Well, it would be nice if there were so many games that had an original visual style to them that they ... I wish there were so many like that that my games didn't seem that quirky. They don't seem that quirky to me.

Tim and I continued our conversation the next week in his SOMA office.

SFBG: You described seeing calaveras and being inspired to create Grim Fandango. Were you down in the Mission?

TS: I came to the Day of the Dead street parade. There are also some galleries on 24th Street that have some cool art in that style.

Grim Fandango's Day of the Dead-inspired hero.

SFBG: When you were working on the game, did you have artists who were versed in that style already?

TS: No, none of us were experts in Day of the Dead -- we all just did tons of research in books. It was a mix of Day of the Dead and also folklore. And a mix of folklore and film noir, which was very unusual. The game looked really original, because there had not been a lot of Mayan or Aztec art mixed with Art Deco. There's an Aztec theater, out in the Midwest somewhere. Also, here in town, there's a place where my doctor is – 450 Sutter, it's all Art Deco and Mayan inside with gold, and crazy ornate Mayan designs.

SFBG: Is Brütal Legend the most personal game you've ever made?

TS: Yeah. The thing that steered me toward it was that I had always loved heavy metal, since I was a kid. I got to make all these personal choices -- I wanted to have “Mr. Crowley,” the song, and I wanted to use songs I liked that I didn't think people were expecting us to use. I really put in a lot of things that I've loved, that have appeared in old games that I've made -- I've had hot rods before, and I've had roadies before, and a couple metal songs. This is the game where I was like, “let's really focus on the stuff I like, and do a bunch of it”

SFBG: Was there something you wanted to do in this game that you weren't able to?

TS: No, the only problem was that we had too much. We had enough material for about three games, and it would have taken us about ten years to make. So we really had to cut the game down.

SFBG: What was the thing that surprised you the most, creating the game?

TS: I was really shocked that we were able to get Ozzy. I think that came as part of the snowball effect of getting Jack Black, and then Lemmy and Rob Halford.

SFBG: The main character in the game smokes cigarettes. Are you worried about being attacked by the anti-smoking police, who now want every movie with smoking in it to receive a mandatory “R” rating?

TS: God, I so hope that someone raises a stink about it. That would be the greatest thing to ever happen to our game. To get it on the news. Getting banned by some Senator's wife. Let's try to get us in trouble.

SFBG: Brütal Legend features a real-time-strategy multiplayer mode. Have you always been a fan of RTS games?

TS: I love the very first one, which was called Herzog's Swei – it was a console game. People say you can't do RTS on consoles, but you could. Few people have heard of this game. You're a jet, flying around on a battlefield, and you can pick up your tanks and put them other places and give instructions, take over these bases, and also morph into a transformer and stomp around and take care of business.

I loved Warcraft and Starcraft, obviously. When it got down to the point where you had one guy, I wished I could just do something to try and turn the tide, like a Hail Mary play to turn the game back around. In our game, you can fly over the battlefield on wings. You have these resource points along the way to capture, and you can take over your enemy's base, but you can also land, and mix it up, getting your battleaxe out and using the same mechanics of the single player game. You really feel like you're this powerful character, and even if you're losing you can still say “I'm going to take this army out.”

SFBG: This brings up a theme of wish fulfillment. Is this a game that allows you to do all the things you've wanted to do in other games and haven't been able to?

TS: It is. All games are wish fulfillments, you know. All games are about fantasy. This one is more close to mine. I've been making games for a long time, and I've been making games that are all about satisfying someone's wishes, and this is a game where I've been able to make my own wish fulfillment. I would like to go back in time with a cool car and a battleaxe. While listening to heavy metal.

Brütal Legend image courtesy of Double Fine Productions.

SFBG: How would you say that this experience is different from working on a game that doesn't fulfill your personal wishes?

TS: I've had a really lucky career, and I've always been able to just make up something that's cool to me. Like with Grim Fandango, I was going through a really intense film noir phase at the time, and really got to just act on that, so I've really been lucky enough to just pursue what I am most interested in.

SFBG: Were you seeing those noir movies at the film noir festivals around town?

TS: I love the Noir City Film Festival. I saw a lot of them at the Lark Theater, in Marin, they had a big film noir festival. The Castro always has a great film noir festival. There's that Dark Passage house up by the Filbert Street steps, up by Coit tower. If you're walking down the Filbert Street steps there's a house that was Lauren Bacall's house in the movie Dark Passage. There's a cardboard cut-out of Humphrey Bogart in one of the windows.

SFBG: Is there a connection between adventure games and detective stories?

TS: Detectives are always picking up a thread that leads to a string that leads to a rope. And it always seems hopeless, because they've only got one lead.

SFBG: When you were designing the puzzles for LucasArts games like The Secret of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, did you have to adapt to that way of thinking? The way of thinking that said, “Let's give the player a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, and have him use it to slide along a zip-line”?

TS: It was just me and Ron [Gilbert] and Dave [Grossman] in a room, sitting around and brainstorming puzzles. It was more like we were just making a game that fit how we already wired. There was the problem, the hints, and the solution, and it had to be funny, like the actual thing you had to do in the end had to be funny. When people were telling the story of the game, we wanted to have that be funny, like, “I didn't know how to make a costume shaped like a tentacle, so I went back in time and I took an anatomical chart of a tentacle and I put it in the Susan B. Anthony's suggestion box for the flag design...”

SFBG: How did you approach compiling the music for Brütal Legend?

TS: In the very beginning, I just had my personal favorite songs, my Ozzy, Sabbath, Priest, and Maiden stuff, and we had a couple guys on staff who were metalheads – there was a black metal guy, and we had this guy who was really into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Then we hired Emily Ridgway, and we put her in charge of the soundtrack, and she was like “Well, we have to get coverage through the whole game.” I don't think she would describe herself as a metalhead; she knew mostly about hair metal stuff like Skid Row. But she just dove into it, and listened to tons and tons of metal. And we just put together this awesome soundtrack. It fit every moment in the game perfectly, and also sent a message about what we're about, because we didn't want to have something that looked like it was forced songs by a record label, like “here's all new bands.” If you look at it, you can tell that people that know about metal cared about it, by picking the right songs.

SFBG: Were there bands you wanted that you had to leave out?

TS: Well some bands, you know, are just out of reach. But the fact that people can only point out a couple that are missing shows the fact that we got 98% of the ones that we went after. We did have to limit it down. Picking just four Sabbath songs was really hard. I could have scored the whole game with Black Sabbath. That's an idea ... we should've done that, it would have saved us a lot of time [laughs]. In my case, I just knew about classic heavy metal, and we wanted other genres, so it was an additive process. It was fun because we could respond to fans' comments in the forums. Once we announced that we had added Motley Crue to the game somebody would be like, “Well, I bet you won't have Viking Metal, like Enslaved.” And I'd be like, “I've never heard of Enslaved, lemme go look that up.”

SFBG: Do you have many local bands?

TS: Yeah! Testament's from Oakland, Slough Feg, Brocas Helm.

SFBG: Metallica?

TS: [sighs] The licensing was tricky. We don't have any Metallica.

SFBG: What's one metal band that everybody loves that you don't care for?

TS: [Laughs] I always try to stay away from saying negative things about metal bands, because people's taste is so intense, you know. Like, “the only metal is true metal and the only true metal is what I like.” That kind of thing.

SFBG: Do you think that the popularity of Guitar Hero affected the decisions of publishers, with regard to Brütal Legend?

TS: It did help a lot, because we actually pitched it twice to publishers. The first time we pitched they wanted us to change the genre of music, to make it about country or hip-hop or something. They were saying, “Why don't you open it to all music?” We were like, “Look: this is a game about epic battles, good vs. evil, Braveheart-type moments. And heavy metal is the musical genre that focuses so heavily on folklore. It sings about battles, about medieval combat. It really the only genre that makes sense for it.” We pushed forward and pushed forward and Guitar Hero came out after that, the very first Guitar Hero by Harmonix. It had “Iron Man” in it. A whole generation of teenagers was exposed to heavy metal and adopted it, like every generation has done so far, because it has these things that speak to people. They next time we pitched it, no one ever questioned us. There was a big resurgence of hard rock in the middle.

SFBG: Can you tell me a little bit about Ophelia, the main character's love interest in Brütal Legend?

TS: You meet Ophelia early on in the game, and she has kind of a mysterious past. Some of the characters don't trust her, because of her history. Her parents fought in this “Black Tear Rebellion,” and she's got these ties to this dark power. She has a hybrid relationship with Eddie that's really complicated, and there's a period where things turn a little ugly. She's one of my favorite characters in the game, because she has this other side to her.

She's also pretty hot. I've never really had sexy characters. I've usually had these funny, quirky girls in my games, but this game's about heavy metal, and album covers, and it wouldn't be true to the genre if it didn't represent hot ladies somewhere. The character's inspiration for me has always been Hong Kong movies, like Fong Sai Yuk, and Swordsmen II, which have these women in them who are attractive, but are also super-powerful, just like the guys. They're masters of kung fu, just like the guys are, and they go into battle with them, and they're not treated any differently, they're warriors. Feminism isn't about sexy or not sexy, it's about powerful or not powerful.

And, just for fun, an awesome old Sabbath video.

Brütal Legend is available now.