Psychonauts. Brutal Legend. Iron Brigade. Monkey Island. Grim Fandango. Day of the Tentacle.

Just some of the wonderful titles and names from the mind of Tim Schafer, whether it be his time at LucasArts or his running of Double Fine. It’s not the first time I’ve gone on about Schafer; he’s someone I look up to hugely and Double Fine are easily my favourite games developer. Over the years he’s brought me much laughter, joy and pretty much awesome times playing games created from his seemingly endless creativity and over the past few weeks, things seem to have gone very exciting for the man who clearly stores all his creativity in that grizzly beard of his.

You see, two major things seems to have popped up that have got me incredibly excited both as a Double Fine fan and an admirer of how Schafer goes about his work as a name within the gaming industry. The first regards one of my all time favourite games in Psychonauts. Just the thought alone of Psychonauts and how criminally underrated and unknown it is to the wider audience of the world makes me a sad panda, and to this day I still often play the wonderful game that it is even if it’s a generation behind the times now. As a platforming title, it does the job. It probably offers nothing more than any normal platformer would. What makes Psychonauts so special though to me is the charm; the character, the personality that oozes out of it’s every orifice; the fact it offers something completely differently and blows away anything that could come close. Just like the many titles Schafer spearheaded before hand, it’s just ridiculously fun to play and with so much detail and joy coming out of the game it instantly became one of my favourite titles. Yet, it sold so little and did so badly commercially. Over the years, since 2005, it’s sold 400,000 copies worldwide. Let’s compare this to Gran Turismo 4 which sold 1.5 million in 2005 alone. OK, so the two games are a world apart in how well known they are, but it goes to show how little exposure Psychonauts got from a selling point of view. Basically, Psychonauts was made to look bad because it sold horribly bad, when in fact it was easily one of the better games of the era personally.

But that was then, and now it’s fondly looked back on by those who know of it. No matter what games Double Fine have brought out, you’ll see people asking Tim on Twitter ‘When is Psychonauts 2 coming out?!’. I’ve never really expected anything. It did too badly commercially to initiate a sequel being release no matter how good it was. Maybe it’s a good thing, left something unspoilt and special as it is instead of risking with a crappy sequel, right? But then again, what is life without risk? The umm’ing and err’ing of a Psychonauts fan like myself could go on and on but a few weeks ago, something staggering happened. Hell, something happened – that’s enough without being staggering! Markus ‘Notch’ Persson revealed on Twitter that he would help fund Psychonauts 2 to finally make it happen. And he was serious too.

Oh my.

It’s very early days though. Maybe he won’t but he certainly is interested. If you don’t know who this mysterious Notch is, he’s the mind behind the mega-uber success that is Minecraft. But just the fact alone that something COULD finally happen is really quite exciting, it’s a moment I’ve been waiting for for years now and something could actually happen! I can understand why there would be a little bit of apprehension to a sequel though. Like I’ve mentioned already, carrying on the weird and wonderful world of Psychonauts onto a sequel could be a complete disaster but you really don’t know; with the cult status it’s gained over the years it would surely do better than it did back then and, quite frankly, I have all the faith in Schafer and Double Fine to make a sequel just as good as the original. Should it happen? Hell yes it should! Will it happen? Who knows.

Then you have the tale of the Kickstarter project that came to life within the last week or two. Kickstarter is a platform that allows for public funding towards creative projects, no matter what form they may come in, whether it be films, gaming, whatever – creativity is the name of the game and it allows people to support a project they want to invest in. Random little twittering from the mind of Schafer wondering about starting up a Kickstarter project resulted, within 6 hours, in fans raising $400,000 towards funding a new game. Just within a few hours of it being considered for god sake! At the type of writing, the fund stands at a staggering $1.4 million, again just from donations from fans around the world. It’s an incredible turn of events and the money is being put towards creating Double Fine Adventures, which will be a return to classic point and click adventure gaming such as the Monkey Island games or Broken Sword. I think this, and get plenty excited over this idea alone, then I think back to how quickly the money’s been raised and it’s genuinely blows my mind how quickly this has all happened.

And who’da thunk it? A new point and click adventure game from a big games developer in 2012. Sometimes I really love how life turns out even when it seems like a genre is dead and buried!

So, two very exciting things coming out of the pipeline for this company that I do so love. It’s impossible not to be excited, even if the Psychonauts 2 thing leads to nothing. It goes to show some of the reasons why Double Fine hold such a high status of regard in my eyes – they not only make wonderful games and have a fab sense of humour I connect with immediately but this level of interaction with fans, this ability to gain a following and not have hugely massive games with a mainstream audience like Call of Duty of Battlefield, and to create games that are just downright excellent to play from a gameplay point of view and through how much love and effort are put into them.

Let’s just see what happens next!

(oh, and go and buy yourself Psychonauts. Do it do it do it! It’s even on Xbox Live, Steam and Gog.com for cheap if you can’t find it in the shops. You won’t regret it!)