Psychonauts turned 20 earlier this month. So, to celebrate, Double Fine Productions has been marking the occasion with a bunch of blogs and videos taking a look back on the legacy of the 3D platformer.
The latest of these (and to our minds at least, the most interesting) is a 12-minute conversation with the Psychonauts writer/director Tim Schafer uploaded to YouTube yesterday, wherein the Double Fine founder digs deep into his own subconscious to tease out some of the major inspirations on the game from back when he was first working on the title.
If you're familiar at all with the Psychonauts story or have read any interviews with Schafer in the past, you may have already heard of a few of these influences in the past.
In the video, for instance, Schafer once again goes over how a rejected idea for a Full Throttle sequence featuring Peyote-induced hallucination resulted in the initial germ of an idea and how games like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Final Fantasy VII inspired him to move away from point-and-click adventures. However, there are also a ton of other lesser-known influences that the video covers too — some of which took us slightly by surprise but make complete sense in context.
For example, in the video, Schafer speaks in a little bit of detail about the impact that Sega's sky-pirate RPG Skies Of Arcadia had on the project, referencing how the team ended up lifting some mechanics from the title for its own game, like the idea of digging for underground collectibles:
"Skies of Arcadia was the one I played most recently before making Psychonauts. And there’s some actual mechanics that showed up in Psychonauts, like the Cham. There’s these little buried Chams that give off this vibration and sense. So they are under the ground and you have to dig them up. I think that’s obviously where the Psitanium came from in Psychonauts too. So thank you Skies of Arcadia..."
In addition to this, he also went over the effect the 1984 Dennis Quaid movie Dreamscape had on the relationship between Raz and his father, the impact of the Fly II on early versions of the setting, and how a child actor from the 1994 Jet Li classic The New Legend Of Shaolin inspired his approach to writing Raz.
If you consider yourself a Psychonauts fan, it's well worth a watch, and will no doubt have you coming away knowing a little bit more about the Xbox (and PS2) classic.