Tim Schafer Quotes

Author Image

Tim Schafer

Profession : Businessman

Birth : July 26, 1967

People talk about games and loneliness - it's a lonely activity. I didn't understand that. 'Gears of War' was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn't sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house.

Tim Schafer

Adventure games are all about details - if you happen to take this one object and use it with this other object, in a really weird place, at a weird time. If you happen to write a really funny dialogue line for that, even if it didn't solve the puzzle, people will appreciate that.

Tim Schafer

I'm a dad now, so now I just don't care what I look like. Once you've created life, you just don't care what anyone thinks.

Tim Schafer

If you're not loyal to your team, you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you, and it just won't be there.

Tim Schafer

I enjoy everything. I actually do listen to everything. In high school, I listened to a lot of metal and punk rock.

Tim Schafer

I've always hated superheroes. I cannot stand them. I love Norse mythology, but I hate superheroes. They ruined movies, then comics, and now games.

Tim Schafer

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

Tim Schafer

I always think the recipe for success for a game or any sort of a fantasy experience is to think of a character that hasn't really been explored before, who is unique and has special abilities that not everybody has, and plop them into whatever is the most interesting situation to plop them into.

Tim Schafer

Publishers are very risk-averse, so they lean towards licenses and sequels. But the fact is that even those are not guaranteed hits. So, if 'playing it safe' does not guarantee hits, they might as well leave it up to the really creative, risk-taking people, because they couldn't do any worse.

Tim Schafer

What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.

Tim Schafer

The Internet has allowed a lot of access - people feel entitled to change the ending of games, for example. So there are a lot more voices coming at you all the time, which I think has its effect on creative decision making and possibly makes people more afraid to take risks.

Tim Schafer

When I'm playing 'Rock Band,' I'm like, 'Man, someday, later on in life when I'm a famous rock star...' Which gets a little harder to convince myself of as I reach middle age, but it still happens a lot.

Tim Schafer

The last time I really got into new music that wasn't heavy metal was probably like... TV on the Radio? I think that was it. That's the last time.

Tim Schafer

I've now met, I would say, almost every single one of my rock idols. I feel like I should just drive off a cliff now.

Tim Schafer

Kinect is such a great new entry into the field because it takes away one of the big barriers to little kids to playing a game, which is the controller. You can't hand a basic video game controller to a child and expect them to understand what a left bumper is and to click in the right stick.

Tim Schafer

I think when you play 'Psychonauts,' you are kind of playing inside of my head.

Tim Schafer

If I had done a sequel to 'Day of the Tentacle,' there probably wouldn't have been a 'Full Throttle.' If I did a 'Full Throttle' sequel, there wouldn't have been a 'Grim Fandango.' It's important to make new stuff up.

Tim Schafer

I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you.

Tim Schafer

There was a 'magic rock' my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as 'Pikmin' - I wanted to go into that world.

Tim Schafer

I've always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn't matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is 'Tetris,' one of the greatest games ever made.

Tim Schafer