Tim Schafer, the founder, president, and current CEO of California-based game developer and publisher Double Fine Productions, has announced that the studio will be focusing entirely on original games, with no sequels currently in the works.
Double Fine, the studio behind quirky cult favourites such as the Psychonauts series and Brütal Legend, and which has published third-party titles like Thoth and Gang Beasts, was acquired by Microsoft in 2019 and became a first-party developer as part of Xbox Game Studios.
Following the acquisition, the company released the highly anticipated sequel to their debut title Psychonauts in 2021 to much acclaim. Psychonauts 2 was funded, in part, through a successful crowdfunding campaign, which, along with the Microsoft acquisition, allowed for the game to take on a larger scale than initially intended, restoring previously cut content such as boss fights.
While the sequel performed well, it looks unlikely that another entry in the series will arrive any time soon. As Schafer told IGN: “The studio is doing multiple projects right now and they’re all original IPs, because we did Psychonauts 2 and that will hold us for sequels for a while.”
Double Fine’s first game since Psychonauts 2 is the recently announced Keeper, which is set to launch on October 17 of this year. Described as an “atmospheric puzzle adventure”, the game, which is an entirely original IP from the studio, will follow a living lighthouse and seabird as they explore a variety of strange, colourful and otherworldly locations. In the same IGN interview, Schafer “described Keeper as smaller-scale compared to Psychonauts 2, but with an impressive level of quality.”
Keeper, whose lead director Lee Petty previously headed Double Fine’s RAD in 2019, is set to launch later this year on PC and Xbox Series X|S consoles. The game is available to wishlist now.
Words by Ash Douglas
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