Double Fine Productions

Double Fine Productions

Type	Private
Industry	Software & Programming
Founded	July 2000
Founder(s)	Tim Schafer
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, USA
Key people	Tim Schafer, founder and game designer
Products	Psychonauts, Brütal Legend
Owner(s)	Tim Schafer
Website	www.doublefine.com

Double Fine Productions is an American video game developer founded in July 2000 by Tim Schafer after his departure from LucasArts. He started Double Fine with programmers David Dixon (Ocean of America, Capcom, LucasArts) and Jonathan Menzies (LucasArts) in what was once a clog shop in San Francisco. After several months of working on the demo for what would become Psychonauts, a mixture of personnel from the Grim Fandango development team and other new employees were slowly added to begin production.

The name "Double Fine" is a play on the Golden Gate Bridge being a "double fine zone" as Schafer drove from place to place around the Bay Area to meet with possible publishers for Psychonauts. The company is based in San Francisco. The official Double Fine website is also host to five webcomics, which are created by members of Double Fine's art team and are collectively referred as the Double Fine Comics.

Projects

Double Fine's first completed project was a multi-platform game titled Psychonauts. Critically praised, it was released for the Xbox, PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Windows. However, despite its acclaim, it did not sell well initially. It was later re-released on Xbox 360 under the Xbox Originals banner, as well as for Microsoft Windows via GameTap and Steam.

Double Fine's second project was Brütal Legend, a hybrid real time strategy, action-adventure game following roadie Eddie Riggs as he is transported to a fantasy world in which demons have enslaved humanity. The game appears to have been inspired by Nordic mythology and heavy metal music. Brütal Legend was published by Electronic Arts and was released in North America on October 13, 2009 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Amnesia Fortnight

During the development of Brütal Legend, publishing issue arose as Activision, having acquired the rights to the title through its merger with Vivendi Games, decided to drop it and forced Schafer to locate another publisher, eventually signing a deal with Electronic Arts. During this period, around 2007 to 2008, Schafer boosted the company's morale by engaging the team in an "Amnesia Fortnight". For a two-week period, the employees were split into four groups, told to forget their current work on Brütal Legend (hence the "Amnesia"), and tasked to develop a game prototype for review by the other groups. Each of the four ideas were successfully created and praised by the whole company. The process was repeated later near the end of Brütal Legend, providing an additional four prototypes. Schafer credits the concept of the Amnesia Fortnights to film director Wong Kar-Wai; during the long, three-year filming of Ashes of Time, Kar-Wai had taken some of his actors and film crew to Hong Kong to shoot footage for fun, but ultimately resulting in the films Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, which Schafer noted were some of the director's more famous films.

These Amnesia Fortnight periods proved fortuitous, as Schafer considers these to have kept the company viable. Upon completion of Brütal Legend, Double Fine had started work towards its sequel, but was told to stop development shortly after as Electronic Arts decided against publishing the sequel. With no other publishing deals lined up at the time, Schafer turned back to the eight game ideas developed from Amnesia Fortnight, believing they could be developed further into short complete games. Schafer also looked at the success of smaller focused games like Geometry Wars on the various download services, realizing the potential market for similar titles. Schafer and his team selected the best four, and began shopping the games to various publishers, and successfully worked publishing details with these. Two of these games, Costume Quest and Stacking, were picked up by THQ and released digitally on the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network storefronts; both games were considered successful and THQ has expressed interested in helping Double Fine produce similar titles in the future. Iron Brigade (originally titled Trenched but changed due to trademark issues) was developed as an Xbox Live Arcade with association with Microsoft Game Studios, and similarly received positive praise from journalists. A fourth game, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, is to be published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in association with the Sesame Workshop for the Xbox 360 using the Kinect controller; though initially not a licensed title, Schafer and his team found it to be an ideal fit for their first licensed-property game. The four unused ideas may be used for a game in the future, according to Schafer, but believes some of them may be unsellable to a publisher.

The development groups for these games were headed by the former leads from Brütal Legend: lead animator Tasha Harris for Costume Quest, lead art director Lee Petty for Stacking, lead designer Brad Muir for Iron Brigade, and lead programmer Nathan Martz for Once Upon a Monster. This was to not only put these teams under people who had been in the industry for a long time, but as a means to help promote these leads. The remaining staff were split among the four teams, with some later swapping to make sure each team has appropriate resources when needed, such as artists and programmers. Double Fine did not have to lay off any of the staff during this time, and instead were able to hire Ron Gilbert, Schafer's former collaborator at LucasArts, to work on the new titles, as well as a future title that Gilbert has envisioned. Schafer stated that though they could likely make another large game akin to Psychonauts or Brütal Legend, they would likely keep the smaller teams to continue to work on these smaller titles, due to the gained experience shared by the company.

Other projects

Main article: Double Fine Adventure

In February 2012, Double Fine along with 2 Player Productions announced a Kickstarter project (codenamed Double Fine Adventure) aimed to create a new adventure game, a genre that has been perceived as niche and commercially risky. The project, aimed to collect $300,000 for the game's development and $100,000 for the filming of the game's development by 2 Player to be released alongside the game, is anticipated to be released in October 2012. The project reached its $400,000 funding goal in under nine hours of the month-long drive. Within 24 hours, Double Fine Adventure had raised more than a million dollars, becoming the most funded and most backed project ever on Kickstarter.

Despite the success of the Kickstarter, the compound continues to seek publisher for other future titles.

On February 22, 2012, Double Fine filed a trademark for the name "The Cave", later confirming that this was not related to the Double Fine Adventure project.

Double Fine's website features several free minigames. The most recent of these, Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, is a pastiche of Schafer's LucasArts games, and features Schafer himself as the protagonist.

Games

• 2005 Psychonauts – Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox
• 2009 Brütal Legend – PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
• 2010 Costume Quest - PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft Windows (THQ, Dracogen)
• 2011 Stacking - PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft Windows (THQ, Dracogen)
• 2011 Iron Brigade (formerly titled Trenched) - Xbox Live Arcade (Microsoft Studios)
• 2011 Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster - Xbox 360 with Kinect (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment)
• 2012 Double Fine Happy Action Theater - Xbox Live Arcade with Kinect (Microsoft Studios)
• 2012 Double Fine Adventure (working title) - Microsoft Windows (through Steam), Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, Android

Double Fine has also produced a few flash games, developed by Klint Honeychurch and showcased on its website.

• 2007 Epic Saga: Extreme Fighter - A low-res 2D fighting game, complete with moral victory quotes.
• 2008 My Game About Me - Three minigames focused around Olympic 'events': Eating, Sleeping and Surfing.
• 2008 Tasha's Game - A platform game in which players use a cat to collect platforms to help Tasha progress through the level.
• 2009 Host Master and the Conquest of Humor - A point-and-click game in the style of Monkey Island in which Tim Schafer must find jokes for his speech at Game Developer's Conference 2009, which Schafer hosted in real life.

Awards

• 2006 Game Developers Conference: Best New Studio
• 2011 Official Xbox Magazine: Developer of the Year

Psychonauts Awards

• British Academy Video Games Awards 2006: Best Screenplay
• GameSpot Best and Worst of 2005: Best Voice Acting, Best Graphics Artistic, Funniest Game, Best Game No One Played, Best Platformer
• IGN 2005 Awards: Best Platformer, Best Game No One Played
• EuroGamer: Overall Game of the Year 2005
• PSM: Buy or Die award in issue #100, #5 on Top 10 Games of 2005 list, Best Characters
• Electronic Gaming Monthly 2005 Awards: Best Game No One Played
• 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards: Best Writing
• PC Gamer magazine 2005 Awards: Best Game You Didn't Play, Editor's Choice Award
• E3 2002 Game Critics Awards: Best Original Game
• GameShadow Innovation in Games Awards nominee (Best Game, Innovative Visual Effects, Best Narrative)

External links

• Official website
• Trip to Double Fine from The International House of Mojo
• Return to Double Fine from The International House of Mojo