Well, tie us down and call us Tim Schafer boys, but there seems to be a lot of news about the man himself these days. The latest nugget is a four page story about his D.I.C.E. address, which apparently had a lot of interesting information about LucasArts, Psychonauts and Full Throttle:
So, the team decided to table the issue and just draw the biker gang instead. That should be easy. They could look as cool or as weird as they wanted. They went nuts! Fat guys, skinny guys, crazy-looking guys, on and on. One of those characters somebody drew up really stuck out. He just looked interesting. 'That's the main character!' Schafer remembers realizing. The lead character came about because the art team had tricked itself into taking risks.The Full Throttle 2 team might have taken this a bit far with all the midgets they seemed to be including. Anyway! Read it all over at GameSpy.
Speaking of GameSpy, they also named Psychonauts one of the 25 most anticipated games of 2005.
>>"He noted that, when publishers looked at a game, "Creative" almost became a stigma. "Wow, that's really ... creative," people would say. He joked that when his team heard those fateful words they started packing up their bags.
Create an original game? Are you nuts? Yes.
What disturbed him the most was this actual quote from an executive at a large publisher: "This is really great. This is creative. It's too bad people aren't going for creative stuff right now.""<<
You just know that when Psychonauts is a huge success, these publishing heads aren't going to go;
"Hey, creativity's back in style, let's publish some highly original games"
they'll instead go;
"Hey, Psychonauts sold well, let's do a bright, colourful platformer with some kid who has zany powers"