Longevity is a rare commodity in the gaming business. A title comes out, it takes up a two-month residency on a store's chart rack or splash page - if it's lucky - and is then put out to pasture in the used section. To the casual consumer, it's often easy to forget a game ever existed within six months of its launch.
While times are changing thanks to the galloping onset of the digital revolution, this was never more true than it was back in 2005 when Double Fine's eccentric debut Psychonauts arrived on shelves. Despite a rapturous welcome from critics and Schafer fans alike, it famously flopped at retail, nearly dragging both developer and publisher Majesco down with it.
However, since then its cult has slowly grown and grown, fed by word of mouth and the careful custodianship of its creators. Today, the game is arguably more visible than it has ever been, with its followers devouring the merest hint that a sequel might one day get a green-light. That clamour reached fever pitch last month when deep-pocketed indie talisman Markus 'Notch' Persson popped up on Twitter with an offer to bankroll a follow-up.
As we found out when we met up with creator Tim Schafer at Double Fine's San Francisco HQ earlier this month, the story of the game's troubled development and subsequent trek into cult classic territory is almost as engaging and unexpected as the off-the-wall brain-surfing adventures of psychic sprog Raz that the game itself depicts.
Tim Schafer.
The germ of the idea that would one day blossom into Psychonauts was first sown while Schafer was still working at LucasArts, where he was partly responsible for the studio's purple patch of classic adventure games - from Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, to Full Throttle and Grim Fandango.
Schafer recalls speculatively pitching a concept for a spy game to LucasArt's top brass. "You were going to meditate on objects and that meditation was going to be this vision quest that you went on in your head to figure out clues, and that's how you're going to solve puzzles," he recalls.
Its subsequent transformation into the game we know today was actually a result of a water-cooler misunderstanding with a colleague.
"I remember talking to someone in the hallway - they were like, 'I heard about that game where you go into other people's heads. Tell me more about that'. I was like, 'No, you don't go into other people's heads, you go into... wait a second'.
"It was him misunderstanding my pitch, but it actually sounded like a much better idea."
The concept was then put on ice for a few years while Schafer wound up his stint at Lucas. Frustrated that he had no ownership of the games that he felt creatively entwined with and tiring of the company's conservative corporate culture, Schafer upped sticks and set up Double Fine back in 2000.
Schafer's Psychonauts highlights
"All the levels have really distinct feelings. I really like the ambience in Black Velvetopia - I really like the way the music and the Black Velvet look of that and the blackness of it is just kind of a cool place to hang out in.
"I also really like the camp. We put a lot of our childhood memories of camp in there. The graveyard, the woods, the abandoned campfires, the old truck, the tree. Just making a place the felt cool and interesting as it turned to night time; a place the feels real, and is fun to hang out in, and makes you forget you're playing a game for a while."
When it came to deciding on the embryonic studio's first project, Schafer immediately returned to that light-bulb moment back at LucasArts.
"I'd taken this class at UC Santa Cruz about the psychology of dreams," says Schafer.
"I love hearing regular people talking about their dreams. They'll describe an experience like fighting a bear and the bear has the face of their father, or something like that. It was like these people are creating literary metaphors in their sleep.
"They are not writers and they are not trained to create these metaphors but they're taking all their emotions while they are asleep and turning them into these crazy dramas with surreal visuals. That seemed really neat to me.
"That idea of taking psychological dramas and making them literal sounded like something you could use in a game - you could go and actually fight the demons in someone's mind, literally, or sweep all the bats out of their belfry in a really literal way. It was a great way to expose character in a more interactive way. Instead of 'let's see a long cut-scene where someone tells you how they feel', it was cooler to just go inside their heads and see what's going on in there."
Development soon got underway, with Microsoft signing on to publish the game as an exclusive for its new Xbox system, buoyed by then-platform chief Ed Fries' desire to populate the young console with creative, artful experiences that pushed the medium forward. Psychonauts seemed to fit the bill perfectly
But then disaster struck. Fries left Microsoft to pursue consultancy work and his replacement took a pair or pruning sheers to his work-in-progress portfolio.
"There was a new regime, and we were late and expensive," remembers Schafer.
"As so often happens when regimes change, someone shows up and the first thing they do, if there's any project that's late or is expensive, they cut it. Seven games got cut and we were one of them."