Founded 2000 · San Francisco, California, USA · Founders: Tim Schafer · First game: Psychonauts (2005)
Double Fine was founded by Tim Schafer after he left LucasArts, where he had spent eleven years writing and directing Maniac Mansion 2, Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango.
Tim Schafer joined LucasArts in 1989 as a programmer and tester, working his way to lead designer and then project lead on a series of acclaimed point-and-click adventure games that established his reputation as the most distinctive voice in the genre. Grim Fandango (1998), his final LucasArts project, was critically celebrated but commercially disappointing in a market that had largely moved on from adventure games; the experience of spending four years on a project that the publisher could not adequately market or distribute contributed to Schafer's departure in 2000. He founded Double Fine Productions with a small team of former LucasArts colleagues in San Francisco, securing a publishing deal with Microsoft for Psychonauts (2005) — a 3D platformer set inside characters' psyches, with writing so characteristically inventive that it attracted a devoted following despite modest initial sales. Double Fine pioneered the game development Kickstarter model in 2012, raising $3.3 million for Broken Age (2014) and demonstrating that an audience for adventure games existed independently of publisher interest in funding them.
Tim Schafer's career at LucasArts from 1989 to 2000 is the most productive run of adventure game writing in the medium's history. Beginning as a programmer and tester on Maniac Mansion, he quickly moved into writing roles, co-writing Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991) with Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman. Day of the Tentacle (1993), which he co-directed with Grossman, is routinely cited as the funniest and most perfectly structured adventure game ever made. Full Throttle (1995) demonstrated that his humour could coexist with genuine menace and a rougher, more cinematic aesthetic than the Monkey Island games. Each project showed a writer who was developing his craft rather than repeating his successes.
Grim Fandango (1998) was Schafer's attempt to make a game that deserved comparison with the literary and film traditions it referenced — film noir, Mexican Day of the Dead iconography, Raymond Chandler dialogue. The game achieved that comparison on its own terms: its writing, characterisation, and visual design are genuinely distinctive in a way that few games of any era have matched. But LucasArts' shift away from adventure games toward Star Wars properties, and the commercial performance that made that shift seem prudent, left Schafer without the institutional support for the kind of project he wanted to make next. His departure in 2000 was a resignation rather than a dismissal, but it amounted to the same outcome for LucasArts' adventure game output: it ended.
Double Fine's founding in a San Francisco office was funded by the Microsoft publishing deal for Psychonauts, which gave Schafer the budget and the time — three years — to build a 3D platformer on his own terms. Psychonauts was, like Grim Fandango before it, a critical success and a commercial underperformer: it sold around 400,000 copies across all platforms, not enough for Microsoft to consider the relationship worth continuing but enough to establish a devoted audience that kept the game in active discussion for years. The cult status that accrued to Psychonauts between 2005 and 2012 — driven by digital distribution making it accessible to players who had missed the initial release — eventually justified a sequel: Psychonauts 2 (2021), funded by a Fig campaign and Microsoft's acquisition of Double Fine in 2019.
The 2012 Kickstarter for Broken Age was the moment that changed Double Fine's public identity from a beloved mid-size studio into a model for an alternative game funding structure. The campaign's first day — $1 million in eight hours, $3.3 million total against a $400,000 goal — demonstrated to the entire industry that audiences would fund games directly, without a publisher's intermediation, if the creator had sufficient trust and the pitch was compelling. Double Fine produced Broken Age (2014) in two parts with the campaign funding; the game was received warmly without replicating the commercial scale of the Kickstarter campaign itself. But the model Schafer's studio demonstrated in 2012 enabled dozens of subsequent campaigns — Torment: Tides of Numenera, Bloodstained, Yooka-Laylee — that would not have been funded under the traditional publishing system.