My Inspirations: Too Much Mario Regrets

My latest inspiration is, admittedly, an inspiration I barely know that well, so this could be a short blog. His name is Tim Schafer, arguably the most famous video game writer in the industry. The reason I don't know him that well is, sadly, for much of my life, I was a console gamer, and Tim Schafer has until recently been a computer game designer. So I missed out on the Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle, and nearly all the other graphic adventure games. I did play the original Sam and Max, but I'm not sure that Tim was even involved in that one.

I did play Grim Fandango, though. And that one was indeed pretty awesome. But the first of his that I really loved was Psychonauts. It's not his fault it took so long. Honestly, I just never was mentally that attuned to the graphic adventure games. Grim Fandango took regular visits to Gamefaqs for me to visit. Sam and Max was a bit better, but not much. At least it had its own guide included with it.

Psychonauts, though, wasn't a graphic adventure. It was a platform game that sort of wanted to be a graphic adventure. And despite the sales suggesting otherwise, the combination worked wonderfully. Yes, occasionally, the platform descended into cliche (the collecting of some hundreds of weird items left something to be desired,) but, surprisingly, it often vanished completely at later levels so the hero could platform-game his way through a puzzle. Whether it involved telekinetically moving the parts of a board game or figuring out how to fool government agents using common household objects, you could practically see the "verb/noun" system running behind the scenes.

But it was the characters that made the game really shine. The game takes place in a summer camp for psychic children, and thus the game's cast is full of imaginative, weird, and hilarious characters. The only downside is that, as the game approaches its second half, these characters fade away. To make up for it, though, the game's levels take on a new, darker turn. The first half of the game's levels take place in the minds of psychic teachers, who are eccentric but not inherently crazy, but the second half takes place in the minds of mental patients. Learning what these people are really motivated by is both funny and tragic, and learning these back stories are the core of these later puzzles.


My affection for Tim's writing began here, but it continued as I learned more about him and his character-generating methodologies. He actually had a podcast about how he made Psychonauts, for example. This includes delving into the mindsets of his characters and the elaborate systems he used. For example, he would even created accounts on social sites for all of his characters, letting him think about what their favorite bands would be, what pictures they would use, how they are feeling from day to day, and so on.


That character planning is where my motivation comes from. As a result of works like Tim's, I have become much more deeply embedded into the mindset of my characters and struggled to give them voices unique to each of them. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, of course, and I haven't gotten to the point of making a myspace for a character or anything. On the other hand, I have made Miis for a lot of them and have some of them vote as I imagine they would in the near-daily polls, so the way of the Schafer has been taken at least somewhat to heart for me. These days, I can imagine the voice of a character much faster, at least as far as I can tell. And I have Tim to thank for that. Now if only karma would make his next game a success, because the poor guy's due.