Double Fine has helped bring some of Lucasarts' most treasured adventure games to modern audiences in recent years, by remastering Grim Fandango, Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle. At last weekend's Rezzed, Samuel caught up with head honcho Tim Schafer, who said he'd love to revisit more of his older games under the right circumstances.
"We'd love to," says Schafer of returning to his back catalogue. "And in some ways it's up to Disney, if they want to do that, obviously, and if the original creators want to be involved. That's what makes those remasters special, that the original creators came back and were able to say what to improve on, what to leave alone."
Schafer tells Samuel that despite Double Fine's string of recent remasters, his primary instinct is to make games, leave them behind, and move onto the next. He stresses the importance of cultivating new ideas, but appreciates that certain games are worth revisiting after a period of time.
"You should always be trying to pull out new ideas. But then, 20 years go by for some of these games," says Schafer. "It's been enough time that there's some value in going back and looking at [classic games]. Also, they were falling apart. They weren't available anymore, they didn't run so you'd have to pirate them if you wanted to buy some of them. We thought it was time.
"Also, the source material was ageing. A lot of it was on tape drives that are crumbling. Some of the team had passed away. While everyone's still around, let's make a definitive version of this game. We can get the team back together to comment on it, and gather that art, go to the archives and find what we can find."
The remasters that have since come out the other end are "really phenomenal", reckons Schafer. He admits that he wasn't always convinced revisiting older games was in his best interests, but that he's ultimately glad he did.
"[I was like], 'We don't own them, what's the point?' and I'm really glad we did decide to do them, even though we don't own them," says Schafer. "First of all we made money off of them, which is something I couldn't do in the past. We made money off Full Throttle, but we sold more copies of Grim Fandango this time around than the first time around, and so that was exciting to be a part of.
"And also, I got to make sure they were done right, and still be associated with the new versions of the game and not let someone else do that. That was really important to me. So I'm glad we did that. I would like to own them some day, mostly just to make sure I can preserve them.
"We lucked out, we made those remasters [with people] that were fans of the old games at Disney and at Lucasarts, and people still wanted to see those kept alive."
Look out for Samuel's chat with Tim Schafer at Rezzed in full tomorrow.
