Super Mario 64, a forgotten Dreamcast JRPG, classic Jet Li films, and more all inspired Tim Schafer while working on Psychonauts
Psychonauts, the iconic platformer about entering peoples’ psyches to sort out whatever emotional baggage they’ve got strewn about, is 20 years old. And to celebrate the milestone, Double Fine founder and Psychonauts director Tim Schafer shared some of his inspirations for the classic.
Before opening Double Fine Productions, Schafer was widely known for a bunch of LucasArts point-and-click adventure games, such as Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, but he decided to instead make a third-person, fully-3D platformer after playing Super Mario 64, naturally.
“I remember that [Mario 64] was the first one where I just, like, pushed the joystick in the direction I wanted to go and the character ran that way, and I was like: ‘Wait a second,'” the director recalled in a new vlog.
“And then, at the time, I played a lot of games like Final Fantasy 7,” he added. “Maybe later [The Legend of Zelda] Ocarina of Time. These games where you just drove the character directly and ran around. And you could still do things and have a story and solves puzzles and stuff, but I think that was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t think I want to make a point-and-click adventure anymore. I think I want to make a console game. I want to make a character-driven console game that is just really immediate and has more action, but, you know, still has a lot of narrative.'”
Those early 3D console games were “a big turning point” for Tim Schafer to “leave behind what I’d been doing for the last 10 years and try something new.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find games that aren’t in some way influenced by Mario or Zelda or Final Fantasy, but the Psychonauts team looked in more niche corners too. Schafer said Psychonauts also had “some actual mechanics” from criminally overlooked Dreamcast JRPG Skies of Arcadia, specifically with the resource that you dig up from under the ground.
Everything else from horror romp The Suffering and Disney’s Nightmare Before Christmas to art work from Joe Sorren and a Haruki Murakami novel also influenced Schafer to some degree. Raz’s daddy issues specifically may have sprouted from a small scene in 1984’s Dreamscape, while his dedication to being the best mind-fixer possible came from Jet Li’s “really serious” on-screen son in The New Legend of Shaolin, played by Mo Tse. You can check out the full list above for the specifics, though, it’s all interesting stuff.
What’s next for Double Fine? No one knows yet, but the team said it’s working on stuff that “could never get accepted by a publisher.” And, no, that doesn’t include a Banjo-Kazooie revival.
Check out the new games of 2025 and beyond to see what’s in the pipeline.
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