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Tim Schafer
—Tim Schafer |
Tim Schafer, also known by his anagram Mr Shitface, was once a respectable game developer, but has now been reduced to being the lap-dog of online SJW's for their money, which he uses to fund his mismanaged excuse for a company, which releases incomplete failure after incomplete failure that all burn to the ground due to his own staggering incompetence.
After flushing 3.45 million dollars down the toilet (he literally posted pictures of himself using the money as toilet paper) and only being able to complete one quarter of a game with 9 times his estimated budget, Tim recently solidified his status as a senile, old has-been when, at the 2015 Game Developers Conference, he got up on stage and used a decorated sock-puppet to make racist jokes to a crowd of bewildered spectators white guys.
Back when Tim wasn't shit (at least 100 years ago)
Back in the long forgotten age of the 90s, when he was working at LucasArts, Tim wasn't a fat, pathetic sack of failure, but rather, a fat sack of success; creating such titles as Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle and his last arguably good game Psychonauts (which undersold and was dropped by its original publisher mid-way through because of Tim's poor managing skills). While all of these are in the (now dead) adventure genre, which is the lowest rung of computer game design and now regularly outdone by teenagers making flash games on Newgrounds, they still keep him in the good graces of today's gamers sailing on the sea of nostalgia and allow him to bait them into his recent scams.
The downward spiral
Brütal Legend
—Bobby Kotick, On Tim Schafer calling him a prick and Brütal Legend |
After a 4 year hibernation, Tim came back with his first game in a long time to the eager anticipation of his fans.
And it was shit.
Brütal Legend was an irredeemable pile of cocks that made an RTS out of a 13 year old metal fan's idea of cool, with the help of Jack Black (who's entire career revolves around just that) and half its development budget's money being thrown at the feet of aging, has-been rock stars in exchange for cameos that Tim hoped would increase sales to make up for the fact that the game is a giant turd.
His own die-hard fans struggled to find something nice to say about the game and after Tim called Activision/Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick a prick, Kotick responded by revealing that Schafer is a hack that can't stick to a schedule or a budget and that this lackluster game was hated by its own publishing company, who considered pulling the plug on it. Everyone got mad at Kotick and jumped to the defense of their hero Tim Schafer, but soon after, when Tim repeatedly failed to complete projects because he is indeed incompetent, everyone realized Kotick was right and Electronic Arts made one of the only good decisions in its history and cancelled Brütal Legend 2.
The Broken Age scam
But Tim's most legendary failure has to be Broken Age. After asking for 400k in KickStarter money and collecting a record sum of 3.35 million, with an additional 100k donated off KickStarter, Tim Schafer took that money and created.......... Nothing.
The project fell through almost completely. Despite receiving roughly 9 times the amount of money he was asking for, Schafer inflated his plans for the game and, as a result, was unable to complete even half of one half of it, announcing that the game will be split into 2 chapters but he only has the money to complete half of the first. This might have something to do with him blowing a chunk of the budget on hiring voice actors that include some of the most well known (and most expensive) in the industry, the creator of Adventure Time, the returning Jack Black and fucking Elijah Wood.
He went on to beg his fans for more money, tell them he would not be asking for money from a publisher because he doesn't like them and because that would be "against the spirit of KickStarter" (unlike outright stealing the money you were given and then begging for more), and finally put what little of the game was already finished on early access to gather more funds, telling the people who donated money and expected a full game: "Just don't look".
Over a year and a half later Schafer finally released the second part which made everyone wonder what took him so fucking long, considering the plot (of both games) makes no sense and everything is solved with bombs and deus ex machina, while the puzzles feel like "Babies first adventure game". But what made it obvious that the entire thing was a con is that he didn't change anything. The entire game is made out of preexisting assets, no new characters or locations are added and the two heroes who live in separate worlds just change places and solve almost the exact same shit as the first half but with the locations reversed. Writing the story was literally the only thing Schafer had to do to complete part 2, and it still took him more than 18 months, cost him an extra 50k and ended up being shit that feels like it was written on the fly.
All of this is made even more hilarious by the fact that Tim responded to the success of his fundraiser by posting numerous pictures of himself eating, throwing around, burning, blowing his nose and wiping his ass with the money.
Space Base DF9 and Double Fine in general
Double Fine, Tim's company that he started after being booted out of LucasArts and is named that way either because of the dispassionate response people give when you insist they evaluate it, or because it fines its customers by making them pay for every game twice, has earned itself a dubious reputation for racking up debts and never properly completing a game.
The company is known for simultaneously creating multiple games, splitting the teams of these games in half in the middle of the production to have them go work on something else they just randomly came up with and running mufti-layered funding schemes for each of these games before releasing a broken, incomplete, inferior product to the market in the form of early access, with promises to use the money this will make to later fix the rest of the game but then using it for something else (for example Massive Chalice is still in early accesses and, at the time of writing, shows no signs of changing).
Every game DF makes starts with crowdfunding, exceeding their goal and then begging investors to subsidized their game anyway (usually IndieFund, the same people who helped Phil Fish rig IndieCade and the IGF) with the most noteworthy example being SpaceBase DF-9, which was released in early access and a year later was announced to be dead, put out as a 1.0 release build despite previously being in the 0.6 alpha stage, and the money made from the passing year of it being sold as early access was used to pay back the investors, possibly with a profit.
This cycle of baiting their consumers into a scam where they pay for an incomplete game while their money pours into the pockets of DF's staff and investors is only one of various styles of mismanagement practiced at the company that also includes paying its employees obscene salaries and then wondering why the company doesn't have any money, "remastering" 15 year old games like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle (even though there is nothing to remaster and they end up looking exactly the same) in a pathetic attempt to scrounge up some funds and, in what has to be the best example of why Double Fine is a shit games developer staffed by monkeys and run by a downie, is the time they fired 12 of their 60 person crew and then had a party with Phil Fish as a DJ (perhaps in part due to his and Tim's shared love of abruptly canceling projects) before going back to begging for donations the very next morning.
Psychonauts 2 and the painfully obvious scam
Desperate for funds, Tim recently turned to the last bit of goodwill keeping him within some gamers' good graces in the form of a Pychonauts sequel. Goodwill that was immediately squandered when, after exceeding funding goals yet again, the entire thing quickly began to look like a scam.
If you're too lazy to watch the in-depth analysis in this video, then here is what it boils down to-
Via a crowdfunding company partially owned by him, having become an unwanted guest at other such venues to the point of having to create his own, Tim quickly found a way to maximize profits and is offering a profit sharing programmer that gives unskilled and unaccredited people like yourself the option to buy his game's garbage stock at a laughable premium and without any of the share holders rights or ability to sell for a six month period, one which the company's accountants do not believe it will survive. Your contract further stipulates that in the event of bankruptcy, through a string of convoluted legal loopholes, funneled through a number of suspiciously identically named companies, you will be entitled to none of your money back, which will be used to pay off the games external investors (IndieFund again, with whom Tim had run similar cons in the past) and the remainder of which will be kept by Tim. All this for the opportunity to get an average return (literally just put your money in the S&P500 and sit on it you retard), provided that the final product (which, again, undersold and ended up in bargain bins) moves more than twice the units in full price hard-copies than its first installment did overall.
And if that's too long for you as well, here's the idiots version-
Tim created a fake company that sells stupid backers overpriced, unresellable stock with a 0% chance of turning a profit, giving them a share of a fake company he intends to bankrupt and then keep all their money.
Final nail in the coffin: A literal sockpuppet
If Tim's reputation was quickly worsening before, right around the start of GamerGate was when he decided to take it behind the shed and shoot it. Starting with going on rampages on Twitter, taking photos with Anita Sarkeesian, appearing in one of her videos and (as previously mentioned) hiring Phil Fish as a DJ, Tim was quickly dumping his respectability down the drain even before he chose to ramp it up with a final act of lunacy. But what did he have to gain from all of this? Well, as this article already stated, he is being funded by IndieFund, a company that pretends to invest in indie developers (in what world is Schafer an indie?) but really just uses that as a cover for massive racketeering schemes. Schafer needs IndieFund's money and he won't be able to get it anymore if people continue digging into their criminal activities.
Tim's final act that turned him from the darling of the gaming world to a walking, talking joke was when he was invited to speak at 2015's GDC ceremony and promptly delivered his speech with a talking sock-puppet, the internationally accepted symbol of going crazy. He used the sock to tell a racist joke implying that only white people play video games while failing to solve a basic math problem to the sounds of nervous, awkward laughs coming from the audience.
The internet exploded with shoops and jokes about how him not being able to count to fifty might explain what happens to all that money he keeps being given, how SJWs live in an Orwellian version of 1984 where 2+2=5 and 1+1+40=50, and the irony of a fat, white neckbeard making racist jokes about niggers and stereotypical gamers to the cheers and roars of a crowd of "progressives" who are all just as fat and white as him. Tim became such a laughing stock that he was added as a character to Postal 2, faithfully depicted as a fat, neckless faggot in a plaid shirt, concocting half-backed schemes in a dark room, surrounded by more honest interpretations of his previous games, doughnuts and dildos (pictures in the gallery below). And so, a 30 year career had overnight been reduced to a legacy of nothing but crudely drawn pictures of a fat guy in blackface with a colorful fap-sock on his sweaty hand.
Death of a Career in Meme Form
Sock edits About missing Pics
[Expand Gallery]
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See also
External links
- Go troll him on Twitter
- Reddit thread about his racist joke
- Article about how shit he is, to which the retards (and personal cronies of Tim) responded to with a counter article.
- Article about Postal 2's depiction of Schafer
Tim Schafer is part of a series on Visit the Gaming Portal for complete coverage. |
Featured article March 9 & 10, 2015 | ||
Preceded by Questionable Content |
Tim Schafer | Succeeded by Hatred (Video Game) |