Tim Schafer Reveals the 15 Inspirations He Had While Making ‘Psychonauts’
The first Psychonauts game was released in 2005 and while this platform game never became a huge mainstream hit, it is now enjoying the status of a cult classic due to its great storyline and creative setting.
As you know, a sequel was released in 2021 and the game is now enjoying a slight rise in popularity once again, as new players are rediscovering this platform classic.
In light of this, the game’s director Tim Schafer, recently revealed the 15 main inspirations behind the game and we wanted to share that fact with you here.
The inspirations were shared by Schafer in a video, and before we continue, here is the video in question:
If you are unable to watch it, we are, of course, going to bring you the most important moments here in textual form.
As you can imagine, the “father” of all platformers, Super Mario, was a major inspiration. “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,'” Schafer reveals. But there’s more.
“And then, at the time, I played a lot of games like Final Fantasy 7. 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,” he explains. “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.'”
He also mentioned the Dreamcast JRPG Skies of Arcadia, as well as some gaming-unrelated inspirations like the horror romp The Suffering, Disney’s Nightmare Before Christmas, art work from Joe Sorren, a Haruki Murakami novel, 1984’s Dreamscape, and Jet Li’s “really serious” on-screen son in The New Legend of Shaolin, played by Mo Tse.
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