One of the stranger moments of my career was reviewing a game, giving it a four-page review and a well-deserved score of 89 percent in the then-massively-selling UK PC Gamer magazine, and then the game not coming out for another eight months. That was just one example of the nightmares Psychonauts—Double Fine’s magnum opus—went through on its path to becoming one of the most beloved games of all time. It’s now 20 years since its official U.S. release, and that deserves celebration.
You can immediately see why Psychonauts might have struggled to convince a publisher. This was Double Fine, a company that was only famous for being the place where Tim Schafer—the guy who wrote the adventure game classics Full Throttle and Grim Fandango—worked after leaving LucasArts. Obviously everyone was expecting DF to be an adventure game studio, and somehow their first project was…a third-person platformer? But one where you had to solve puzzles, and it was story-led, and it was also a collectathon, but there were psychic abilities, and missions about dealing with complex trauma, and half the game wasn’t platforming but chatting with other characters…Microsoft, originally intended to be the publisher for an Xbox exclusive, never got it.
Microsoft’s feedback after focus group testing described the game’s storyline as “unoriginal, childish and overly complicated,” which are quite the most extraordinary descriptions of a game that was defiantly unique and surprisingly mature. The document went on to say, “Humor should be simplified and made immediately apparent.” And then it suggested the game set in a summer camp where hero Raz helps the staff and inhabitants of the summer camp, in a summer-camp-themed story, not be set in a summer camp.
Later entirely dropped by Microsoft, it was eventually picked up by publisher Majesco, with some stealth funding from SimCity legend Will Wright, and did manage to be completed. (It’s worth adding here that there’s a lot of romanticizing of this period and its triumphant tale of the plucky indie developer making good, but the reality is a swathe of people were fired, and the remaining employees were crunched for months.)
International publishing was another matter, and entirely lost in these various post-mortems is how THQ screwed things up even further. At the time in the UK, a full-blown advertising campaign was launched, review code sent out to magazines and websites, and then the game pulled at the eleventh hour. As I mentioned at the start, back in 2005 PC Gamer had run a large, very positive review, and had it not been the same issue that reviewed GTA San Andreas, it could have been on the cover. And then…it didn’t come out.
In fact, it wouldn’t come out for over half a year, then with no advertising or promotion at all, and stores I visited spoke of not being able to get stock. It just couldn’t catch a break. Majesco went on to take a loss in its year of release, and the game didn’t manage to sell 100,000 copies by the end of 2005. It was a flop.
Except, it wasn’t. Not after a bit. In 2015, Double Fine pulled out all the stops to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Psychonauts, releasing yet another documentary, this time just about its development (you can see the first episode above), at which time Schafer revealed that the game had sold 1.7 million copies. More extraordinarily, 1.2 million of those copies were sold after Double Fine had managed to secure back the rights to the game in 2011. It was a game that would see a new burst of sales with each milestone in PC gaming, from the opening up of Steam to external publishers to the phenomenon of Humble Bundles.
And, importantly, it’s a game that absolutely merits all this attention and love. Psychonauts absolutely captured the wit and personality that had made LucasArts adventure games so great, and applied them to a very different setting. I stood by (and stand by) holding back from giving Psychonauts a 90+ percent score (even when the review was re-printed eight months later when it finally came out in the UK, by which time I received a lot of flak), because its platforming fell short of tipping over into that esteemed territory, but it’s a game that I wish everyone would play.
Ask anyone who has, and they’ll immediately want to describe to you their favorite level (which is to say, their favorite brain into which they ventured). Many will say the Milkman Conspiracy level, which explored a character’s psychosis with the most incredible combination of wit and tenderness. Others will bring up the bull running sequence, with its amazing use of paintings and its equally amazing, unique art style. I will tell you it’s the guy with the Napoleon complex, because oh my goodness, there is so much that’s so smart in there.
But honestly, my favorite parts are between the levels, roaming the camp and talking to the other characters, finding the little secrets, or overhearing the gossip. So much of it is so loving, so respectful of its bonkers little people, and I managed to appreciate all this despite living in a country where summer camps aren’t a thing. Take that, 2003 Microsoft. (It’s certainly of some irony that Microsoft now entirely owns Double Fine.) It’s one of those games where you want to seek out every tiny detail so you can discover every single line written by Schafer and Erik Wolpaw.
For the rest of this week, you can pick up a copy of Psychonauts on Steam for a wildly tiny 89c, and if you never have, or haven’t since you played it on Xbox 20 years ago, I really recommend that you do. Few games have this much heart, and deliver so much fun. (It’s also good to see the massively expensive, four-year-old sequel Psychonauts 2 is available this week at a price games that old should be: $15.)
Double Fine seems to have dug its arms far down the backs of its couches to find even more nuggets and unrevealed details about Psychonauts for the rest of the week, which will be appearing here. I’m just going to sit back and reminisce, trying not to sniffle when I remember that moment of absolute gut-punching horror and sadness hidden within Agent Milla’s memories.
.
