Double Fine
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When a certain Tim Schafer left LucasArts he decided to put together his own developement team named Double Fine Productions in July 2000. It's founding members consisted of former Grim Fandango staff and new talent.
The first outing from the developer was the game Psychonauts released in 2005. Despite the games unique premise and huge critical praise, the sales were unfortunately poor. Psychonauts is often referred to as "one of the greatest games you've never played" and features on countless best game lists. Four years later Double Fine released Brutal Legend. The game was a dream project for Schafer and a love letter to the music he grew up enjoying. Despite a positive reception, its sales were not the huge success the game's producer EA had wanted. Nonetheless a sequel was apparently green lit...
...Until it wasn't. EA cancelled the sequel and Double Fine was left in serious financial trouble. Facing layoffs or even the end of his beloved company Schafer took action. Prior to releasing Brütal Legend, he had seperated Double Fine's staff into four teams and had each create their own game idea. All four demo's created were pitched as new games and somehow all of them were picked up by producers. Tim Schafer later described the turn of events saying "Trying to kill us made us multiply." The new titles will be smaller budget games with some set to be downloadable whilst others will see a retail release. The games to come of this so far are Costume Quest, Stacking, and Iron Brigade.
Their website also features small flash games and webcomics made by various staff members, usually showcasing the developer's silly sense of humor.
Wanting to create an old-school point-and-click adventure game, but knowing that publishers would never sign off on it, Double Fine tried to raise funds entirely by money donated by fans through Kickstarter, calling the project "Double Fine Adventure". They asked for a fairly small 400,000 dollars and set a deadline of a little over a month - the fanbase reached that goal in about eight hours. Then hit a million before the first day was even over. By the time the fundraising ended a month later it had raised over 3.3 million dollars with the additional money used to give the game extra polish and take it multiplatform.
On top of this, Minecraft creator Notch has expressed interest in a possible Psychonauts 2 (which no doubt encouraged his game's fans to contribute to "Double Fine Adventure"), and has even suggested he could foot the multi-million dollar bill for the game himself.
The name Double Fine refers to the double fine zone of the Golden Gate Bridge.
- Psychonauts - 2005
- Brütal Legend - 2009
- Costume Quest - 2010
- Stacking - 2010
- Iron Brigade (formerly Trenched) - 2011
- Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster - 2011
- Happy Action Theater - 2012
- "Double Fine Adventure" project - future