After the Credits: Tim Schafer talks Brutal Legend

• by Dave Rudden
• December 04, 2009 10:28 AM PST

Brutal Legend mastermind Tim Schafer shares his thoughts on metal, multiplayer, getting Iron Maiden for Brutal Legend 2, and how originally pitching the game's crazy concepts was more difficult than if it were centered around country music.

Tim Schafer's heavy metal opus, Brutal Legend, has been rocking with fans while rolling with the punches about some of the game's flaws. We chatted with the Double Fine founder about the game's humor, music, and hidden puzzle roots.

GP: What are your thoughts on how Brutal Legend has been received, both by critics and the consumer base?

Schafer: For the most part very happy, it's very interesting and a new experience for me to be talking to players directly. We're online with our headsets battling, and they're telling me exactly what they think about the game and it's a whole new experience for me. It's really fun to be playing on a team with other players swapping strategies and going head-to-head with people who are better than me at my own game.

GP:Have you been able to see how Brutal Legend has performed with the NPD numbers? What are your thoughts on its performance so far?

Schafer: I don't look at those things for awhile; I like to give it time, you know? I think many people look too soon but a lot of games I've worked on have succeeded based on word of mouth. With Brutal Legend's multiplayer, people need to play it and talk about it, so I usually don't look at the sales number for a month or so. Definitely not 'til after Christmas.

GP: Speaking of the multiplayer, how did coming from a background of almost exclusively single-player games affect the creation of the multiplayer stage battles?

Tim Schafer

Schafer: We hadn't done multiplayer before so that's what we started on first because we were so nervous about it, and we worked on it nearly exclusively for almost two years. There were a lot of unique characters and abilities to create and balance, but mostly we just dove right into it and attacked the challenge head-on. It was a lot of fun because I'd never made a game people in the office actually wanted to play. I know that sounds horrible, but most people don't play adventure games after they know all the puzzles and they usually don't sit around playing with their friends, especially if they've been working on one for years. With Brutal Legend we had people playing each other in the office for fun, and that was unique.

GP: For something that was a large part of the game, the stage battles weren't introduced to the media until late in development. Why was that aspect of the game not shown earlier?

Schafer: We wanted to emphasize that the game's main story was a wish fulfillment for this character. It's about a roadie who wanted to live in an earlier time when the music was real in a medieval combat fantasy. That's our story, and we wanted people to understand that was what you'd be doing in this game: swinging an axe, playing a guitar, driving your car around and eventually commanding an army of headbangers. You can't tell people that whole package at once; when we pitched the game to publishers a lot of times the meetings would end with a series of stunned looks, because that's a lot to digest at once. We had to mete out the different features, and it made sense to start with the simplest aspects and build up to more complex ones. When it was time to announce it we had this huge press event, which I'm sure you came to... didn't you?

GP: The multiplayer event? Yeah, yeah we were there.

Schafer:Yeah, I was interviewed on G4, Morgan Webb called it out as an RTS game and everything. It was late, but we definitely got it out there. When we pitched the game a lot of publishers were fearful of the letters "RTS" and when we were with Vivendi the marketing plans were never going to say RTS ever. At first we weren't sure how we felt about that, but as our game developed and we started changing it, simplifying it and removing RTS elements we started to feel okay about that because we realized that if players come to the game with the expectation of it being an RTS and look for RTS controls, it would actually make the game less fun. So from a creative position we were totally fine with not releasing that info first. In the very first pitches for the game, publishers didn't want to talk about heavy metal or roadies at all, they thought it should be about something more popular. Like country.

When we showed the game to EA, they were interested but wanted to test the concept. In focus tests, the stage battles rated high. What's interesting is the people in those groups aren't told anything about the game and have no expectations for it. One of the things you notice looking at Metacritic ratings is that the highest scores come from those who really enjoyed the stage battles, and when you get down to the critics who didn't like the stage battles those reviews often center around their expectations about what we were going to make, instead of looking at the stage battles for what they are in a fresh way.

GP: One of the achievements/trophies in the game is earned from playing against you online...

Schafer: That was because I'm lonely, and I wanted to have people to play with me. I've used that in a couple of invites, like "play with me and you'll get an achievement!"

GP: How has it been logistically?

Schafer: It spread around really fast. It always sounds like an STD when you talk about it, but I gave it to my testers who gave it to the programmers who gave it to the press and pretty soon everybody had it. For the first few weeks I was playing online every night, and it was fun to talk to someone and get their opinion on the game and hey, then they get an achievement for playing with me! Logistically it turned out to be fun because I wanted to get online, play the game and find out what people were thinking about it.

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