At the Onyx Bar in San Diego I got a chance to meet with Tim Schafer, the creator of the new heavy metal themed game “Brutal Legend”. Having an impressive career spanning from the early days writing for Monkey Island, to heading up the creation of Grim Fandango and to currently running Double Fine, his own game company, Tim has found great critical success but his titles often fail to find the financial success they deserve. His latest title, Brutal Legend, stars Jack Black and looks like it is ready to take over the world with a slick combination of heavy metal, heavy action and heavy satire.

Brutal Legend captures that unmistakable feeling of metal and brings the idea of dragons, leather, magic and music together better then Man-o-War ever could. While we are totally “stoked” about the game, we wanted to crack into a few questions about the man himself.

Dio

Brutal Legend has been in the works for a long time, the game was originally planned to be a full out multiplayer title and has seen some major improvements and changes as it has grown. Originally it was reported that Ronnie James Dio was going to play a role in it.

Flash Flood Media: What happened to Dio?

Tim Schafer: Dio is awesome and he was definitely someone we definitely, really wanted to have in the game and it would have been great. All I can say is music licensing is more complicated then I ever could have imagined and there are so many other things involved. It’s not just a matter of… it’s just very, very complicated.

FFM: So it’s clear to say it wasn’t by choice?

Tim: Given the option I would have had Dio, he’s awesome.

FFM: But Tim Curry is taking his place, right?

Tim Curry as Darkness

Tim: Yeah, for that character, some of it was my mistake, I casted him. I wanted him to play a bad guy, Doviculus, the emperor of the demons. Dio has such a powerful voice, that I always thought of him as being booming and powerful, but he’s not. As soon as he got there, I was talking about how low this guy’s voice had to be and he was like, “You know I’m not a bass. I don’t do that.” Anyway, Tim Curry did this part in the movie Legend, the old Ridley Scott movie, Lord of Darkness, and that character is so perfect for what we are looking for. That way he also has this really deep voice and he’s also evil, but also a little, umm… kinky. He’s this kind of S&M demon, like when you hit him with your axe, like half of the time he is kind of like “oh oww oww!” (in pain) or half the time he is like “ohhh…” he likes it. So it’s kind of a perfect role for Tim Curry and he was so much fun to work with.

FFM: Speaking of Voice actors, do you often plan a character around the voice actor first?

Tim: Never usually, except for the very beginning you never know who you are going to get for these parts. I never thought we where going to get Jack Black, we thought of Jack a lot, having this character who is so heart felt, like really into rock, just loved music, nothing ironic about it, he’s just there to fucking rock. He loved it, just like in School of Rock, that guy is just, he’s not ironically into Iron Maiden. He ended up looking a lot like Jack Black. Then we found out he played Psychonauts, our previous game and he really liked it and we figured maybe we would have a shot. We had this meeting with him at the Four Seasons, just me, I went to the Four Seasons, sat around the pool and showed him concept art, he liked it and signed up for it. Then I had to write more dialog, there are like 30,000 lines of dialog in the game by the end of it and more then 3,000 of those are attacks. So then I started writing for him, having him in mind while I was writing so some of it was not written for him and some of it was written just for him. And when he does the readings he makes it his own, he improvises and customized it with his own voice.

FFM: Old school question, of all the characters you have created, do you have a favorite?

Tim: Well, you know, I’ve always loved Glottis (from Grim Fandango) have you played that game?

FFM: That’s one of my favorites. I consider it one of the best stories ever written, even outside of games.

Grim Fandango

Tim: Thanks for playing, but I mean he was just more then having been what I wrote, he was something more. Something about that last scene where they are hugging each other, I always get kind of sad watching that scene, just the way he read those lines, Alan Blumenfeld, the actor, he was really great. Manny Calavera, you know, Tony Plana who later showed up on Ugly Betty, like on a hit TV show, as Ugly Betty’s dad. If you watch it, it’s really funny to all of the sudden hear Manny Calavera’s voice come out of the TV set. Manny is a favorite character, and Hoagie, the original roadie, the character, I always wanted to do something with Roadies and Hoagie was a touch on that, but I think Eddie Riggs (star of Brutal Legend) really take it down, I think Eddie might be my favorite of all time, because I’ve been with him for so long and when he did Raz too, okay, Raz and Void too, who is done by the same actor who did Glottis. There you go, I think if you keep talking to me I’ll just name each one.

FFM: Well, they are all pretty good, I like them too. With the new trend in adventure games coming back, sometimes they go away, sometimes they come back, but it seems like Tale Tales is really looking for…

(Scott Hamilton calls Tim on his iPhone)

Scott Hamilton

Tim: Oh, it’s just Scott Hamilton (Tim puts the phone down), well Telltale never stopped really, that team was working on Sam and Max 2 at LucasArts and then that got canned and they left and formed Telltale Games. So they never really stopped making adventure games since the old day, so they are really believers you know. I think once at LucasArts I was asking management, “Do you guys even want us to make adventure games, you don’t seem to want us to make them, you are always trying to get us to not make them anymore”. The manager at the time was “As long as there is someone here who wants to make adventure games, we will keep making adventure games.” I think that is the way it is in the industry too, actually fans are making adventure games more than the companies, so it’s like as long as someone really cares enough to make them there will always be a community for adventure games. As long as people still download Telltale Games and check out Monkey Island there will always be adventure games.

FFM: The new special edition of that turned out awesome, what are your thoughts on that?

Tim: At first I was like, uggghhhh… they are going to redo it. It’s going to… some of the new… I dunno, some of the redone art, have you ever Galaxian or something like that and they have the redone and you are like, I think I’m going to play the old one… but then I pressed the back button and was like oh my god, it’s actually here, it’s like the entire thing. I know that game! Wow, this is actually our code running, you can tell it’s the actual game. So it’s pretty amazing how seamlessly they integrated it too.

FFM: Yeah, it even gives you an achievement for doing so. Are you happy with them bringing those back like that? Do you look forward to them doing it to other titles?

Tim: I would love to make all the old titles accessible to the people so they can play, cause people always talk about oh I’ve wanted to play Grim Fandango, but I can’t make it run on my machine anymore. So I always try to point them to SCUMMVM and all that. It’s nice to be able to have people access them. I would hate for someone to make a sequel to one of my games that I didn’t work on, but other then that, I think its cool.

FFM: You didn’t create Monkey Island, but you made a major impact on the game from being more serious to being more of a comedy?

Tim: Ron always knew he was going to make it a comedy. He always was going to make it a comedy. It’s just that Dave and I were writing dialog, I personally thought it was temporary dialog. I thought we were just goofing around and joking. They wouldn’t put ridiculous dialog like this into a game, some intelligent professional person is going to come along and write professional dialog and pretty soon it became apparent that no, this was it, we are going to ship this dialog and we were like wow, that rubber chicken joke is going to go in for real? That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever… okay. I drew the art for Hook Island, the sign, there is this screen in the island where you can slide on the rubber chicken out to Hook Island and I wanted to make sure people knew it was there. So I drew this big arrow with flashing lights on it and it stayed in the game. I was like no, no, you are going to do a really nice version of this sign right and he was like no, I like it, let’s do it.

FFM: You started off at LucasArts as a programmer right?

Tim: System Designer, Programmer, otherwise known as the SCUMM of the earth.

FFM: Was that a good time to get into the industry for you? When programmers could do art and write for a game, where now entire teams are dedicated to each section of a game and don’t interact as much.

Tim: We were programmers but it was integrated, to really implement a puzzle you really had to think there are all these possibilities of what if the player does this or that, how do I catch all these cases? So you had to be able to design and program at the same time. And now we have people who do that, like I‘m a little more removed from that, so I have other people on Brutal Legends, we have a team of people who are really skilled at those kind of judgment calls, implementing stuff based on the script that I write or their own ideas.

Brian Jones and Tim Schafer

Thanks for your time Tim! We are all looking forward to Brutal Legend, but in the meantime check out the rereleased Monkey Island Special Edition, written by Tim and revamped for modern day graphics for Xbox Live and PC. If you are feeling brave, hit up www.scummvm.org and track down some classic adventure games by Tim like The Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and more! You can also head over to www.doublefine.com and check out modern day classics like Psychonauts and learn more about Brutal Legend, coming this rOctober from EA.

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