Tim Schafer does not do things the normal way.
He is a man who wrote his cover letter in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure when applying to his first job as a programmer in the early '90s. His breakthrough came when he was assigned to the the position of lead writer for "The Secret of Monkey Island"—the placeholder dialogue he inserted into a then-serious pirate adventure was so funny that the game was redesigned as the comedy classic. Over the last two decades, this type of creativity has given Schafer a reputation for taking risks and making games that no one else would.
So when he turned the entire financial structure of the industry on its ear this past week, nobody should have been too surprised.
Unable to find funding for his passion project, an old-school graphic-adventure game in the vein of "Monkey Island" or "Broken Sword," Schafer went directly to the public. He posted his idea to a relatively new crowd-sourcing website called Kickstarter, which allows anyone to pledge their own money to see a project to fruition. Shooting for the stars, Schafer initially set a wild goal to raise the $400,000 necessary to fund the game within 34 days.
Instead, he raised it in eight hours.
By the end of the first day, fans had pledged in excess of a million dollars. At the time of publishing, that total has nearly doubled. And three weeks are still left in the campaign.
Schafer is generally acknowledged as one of the luminaries of the video game industry, having put out classics like "Day of the Tentacle," "Grim Fandango," and "Psychonauts." A quick look at Metacritic shows that his games have accumulated an average "metascore" of 89, but have—more importantly—pushed the bounds of what a video game could be. It's no surprise then that many of Schafer's games have become go-to examples for the argument that games can be works of art.
Yet for all of his creative and critical accomplishments—and perhaps because of them—Schafer has consistently run into issues funding his games. After all, how exactly does one market something like "Psychonauts," a game about about a summer camp for psychically-gifted children inspired by Freudian conceptions of the human mind? For the original publisher Microsoft, the answer was that you don't.
Initially planned as a flagship title for the original Xbox, Microsoft rebranded their image following the success of Halo, and pulled the plug halfway through the game's development. As a result, "Psychonauts" was banished to production hell for years while Schafer's studio, Double Fine, struggled to secure new funding. By the time the game was finally released, it was backed by almost no advertising despite wide critical acclaim, and in the end, it sold fewer than 100,000 copies.
"Psychonauts" fate is a telling one.
The video game industry is, in many ways, creatively stagnant. As games continue to push the limits of technology, the associated costs of production increase exponentially. Even before advertising, budgets for high-end games for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 range in the tens of millions of dollars, rivaling Hollywood blockbusters. However, unlike the film industry, which between theatrical distribution, DVD sales, television syndication, and market branding has multiple avenues to recoup costs, the video game industry is almost solely reliant on an initial run of production. In comparison to other entertainment industries, very few video games ever turn a profit. The result is that publishers attempt to mitigate risk by almost exclusively sticking to proven success, copying games that have sold well and innovating little. Every single one of the 10 best-selling games of 2011 was a sequel.
The high risk inherent in video game development has long stymied the creation of an art house scene equivalent to the one that exists in the motion picture industry. While the recent push toward digital-distribution services like Steam and Xbox Live Arcade has enabled the creation of indie darlings like "Limbo," "Braid" and "Flower," this model is only viable for tiny developers (often only one or two people) working on shoestring budgets. Double Fine, on the other hand, is a large-scale studio that has worked on AAA games. In the past, they would have been entirely dependent on finding a publisher willing to pony up the cash to support their projects.
This is why Schafer's Kickstarter experiment is so significant. Rather than continue to fight an uphill battle against a deeply entrenched system, Double Fine circumvented it entirely. Despite initially setting out only to create a small-scale game, the company found a way to fund something much larger. After only a week, the Kickstarter project has already exceeded the production budgets of some of Schafer's most beloved titles. The end result is something nearly unheard of in the industry: a developer with complete artistic freedom.
Other game designers have already taken notice. Within days of Double Fine's success, David Jaffe, the creator of "God of War" and "Twisted Metal," announced interest in using Kickstarter to fund his next title. Many have since followed suit.
More importantly, publishers now have evidence that there is a fervent desire for games featuring more than edgy, testosterone-fueled space marines. Tim Schafer is obviously a special case, and crowd-sourced funding may not be a viable alternative for every game studio. However, the overwhelming fan reaction on Kickstarter clearly demonstrates that somewhere in their desire to avoid risks, publishers lost the pulse of the public they thought they were catering to. The big companies are not likely to topple as a result of Schafer's rebellion, but maybe now they will be more willing to fund games they might otherwise have overlooked.
If Tim Schafer has proved one thing, it is that the current way of doing things is not the only option. Kickstarter might not be the impetus for a sea change in the industry, but it is not hard to see one coming.
After all, I know at least 50,000 people willing to put up the cash to make it happen.