Tim Schafer Quotes

We want playing our games to entertain people on many different levels. Deeper down, I want to make a connection with the player, and it's the way, to me, of saying to the person playing the game that they're not alone in the world.

I always think the recipe for success for a game or any sort of a fantasy experience is to think of a character that hasn't really been explored before, who is unique and has special abilities that not everybody has, and plop them into whatever is the most interesting situation to plop them into.

A huge part of what a kid learns when they're growing up is social and emotional development. As adults, we take it for granted that other people have emotions that are different from ours, and we can identify what they are, but those are skills that children have to learn.

If you're not loyal to your team, you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you, and it just won't be there.

People talk about games and loneliness - it's a lonely activity. I didn't understand that. 'Gears of War' was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn't sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house.

For every character, I think about who they are, their story, what they are, and who they were before their game started. What was their life like? Where did they grow up? What were their parents like?

I've always seen this overlap between medieval warfare and heavy metal. You see heavy metal singers and they'll have like a brace around their arm and they'll be singing about Orcs. So let's just make a world where that all happens. That all gets put together, the heavy metal, and the rock, and the battling, actually does happen. Let's not flirt around with this let's just do it.

If you're a lumberjack, you know what to do. You see trees, and you still have a job! If you're a writer, you see a blank page. You don't know if you still have a job. You might have great ideas - you may have no ideas.

When you have a programmer-founded company it often gets really techy, if you have a producer or a business-person, it all really sets the flavor of the company, just the priorities and the way you deal with everything.

Oh yeah - you have to write every day. Or every weekday. Because writing is a job. It's not eureka moments over and over. It's grueling work, panning for gold. You just keep at it and eventually you get a few grains. Or flakes. Or whatever gold looks like in rivers. Or maybe it's like fishing. Who cares? You just have to do it every day because you never know which day is going to be your productive day.

I've always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn't matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is 'Tetris,' one of the greatest games ever made.

I'm a dad now, so now I just don't care what I look like. Once you've created life, you just don't care what anyone thinks.

There was a 'magic rock' my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as 'Pikmin' - I wanted to go into that world.

I would like to reach non-gamers. It's always great when guys come up to me who are gamers and represent my usual audience, but they'll say, 'You know, Psychonauts is the only game I can actually get my girlfriend to play with me.'

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

I enjoy everything. I actually do listen to everything. In high school, I listened to a lot of metal and punk rock.

When I'm playing 'Rock Band,' I'm like, 'Man, someday, later on in life when I'm a famous rock star ... ' Which gets a little harder to convince myself of as I reach middle age, but it still happens a lot.

I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you.

Adventure games are all about details - if you happen to take this one object and use it with this other object, in a really weird place, at a weird time. If you happen to write a really funny dialogue line for that, even if it didn't solve the puzzle, people will appreciate that.