Tim Schafer is interviewed!
The good people over at Gamers With Jobs were lucky enough to bag a conference call interview with Mr. Tim Schafer of Double Fine. And not only do they interview Tim Schafer, they also talk about the new online game, Warhammer Online, playing World of Warcraft on a Mac Airbook. Another interesting point they talk about with WoW is some crazy new thing that Blizzard is doing with some type of short download streaming client thing a user can use to play WoW without actually downloading all of the like 4 gig worth of game from the internet. It actually sounds pretty cool and the guys at Gamers With Jobs explain it way better than I do!
But, if you don’t want to hear anything but the guys talking to Tim, you might want to forward the podcast to about 44:10 where they actually start talking to Tim. If you just want to hear him talk about Brütal Legend, go ahead and forward to about 45:55.
For the first few minutes, Tim talks about how to be funny and how hard it is to actually BE funny. If you’re trying to be funny and come off as not being funny, it’s horribly bad. Especially in the gaming world. Good thing for Tim, that man’s got a lot of funny in him and we can definitely see it in some of his earlier games: Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. You know, all of his works at LucasArts.
When he gets to the the part where he talks about Brütal Legend he starts making some comparisons of this game to other games he’s been involved with. Tim really compares a lot of the game to Full Throttle and says that the main charater, Eddie, is kind of dark and serioues like Ben from Full Throttle. But that doesn’t mean the game won’t have Schafer’s humor in it.
We’ll also get to hear about a little bit of the development of the game is going and how Tim puts together an epic game like Brütal Legend. Specifically, what was interesting about him talking about Brütal Legend is when he talks about how they put together dialog for characters and how much they don’t actually know the character until the voice actor comes in and makes the character their own. For example, Tim didn’t even have most of the lines for Eddie scripted until he heard Eddie’s voice actor, Jack Black in action.
Now, where are they at with Brütal Legend? About 3/4 of the way done. Tim doesn’t have all the dialog written, but he’s getting there. The game definitely won’t be ready this year, though, which kind of sucks. But hey, at least they’re going to be making an awesome game.
And of course there is a ton more stuff I couldn’t possibly write here, so the best thing to do is to listen to it here.
[Image courtesy of Double Fine.]
