Psychonauts is a 2005 platform game developed by Double Fine Productions and published by Majesco Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. The game follows Razputin (Raz), a young boy gifted with psychic abilities, who runs away from a circus to try to sneak into a summer camp for those with similar powers to become a "Psychonaut", a spy with psychic abilities. He finds that there is a sinister plot occurring at the camp that only he can stop. The game is centered on exploring the strange and imaginative minds of various characters that Raz encounters as a Psychonaut-in-training/"Psycadet" to help them overcome their fears or memories of their past, so as to gain their help and progress in the game. Raz gains use of several psychic abilities during the game that are used for both attacking foes and solving puzzles.
Psychonauts was based on an abandoned concept that Double Fine founder Tim Schafer had during his previous development of Full Throttle. The game was initially backed by Microsoft's Ed Fries as a premiere title for the original Xbox console, but several internal and external issues led to difficulties for Double Fine in meeting various milestones and responding to testing feedback. Following Fries' departure in 2004, Microsoft dropped the publishing rights, making the game's future unclear. Double Fine was able to secure Majesco as a publisher a few months later allowing them to complete the game after four and a half years of development.
The game was well received, but publisher Majesco encountered a severe financial loss after the game's release and departed from the video game market. Psychonauts has earned a number of industry awards and gained a cult following. It has since been cited as one of the greatest video games ever made. In 2011, Double Fine acquired the rights for the title, allowing the company to republish the title through digital distribution with updates for modern gaming systems and ports for Mac OS X and Linux. Double Fine reported that their own sales of the game have far exceeded what was initially sold on its original release, with cumulative sales of nearly 1.7 million . A sequel, Psychonauts 2, was announced at The Game Awards in December 2015 and was released on August 25, 2021.
Gameplay
Psychonauts is a platform game that incorporates various adventure elements. The player controls the main character Raz in a third-person, three-dimensional view, helping Raz to uncover a mystery at the Psychonauts training camp. Raz begins with basic movement abilities such as running and jumping, but as the game progresses, Razputin gains additional psychic powers such as telekinesis, levitation, invisibility, and pyrokinesis. These abilities allow the player to explore more of the camp as well as fight off enemies. These powers can be awarded either by completing certain story missions, gaining PSI ranks during the game, or purchasing them with hidden arrowheads scattered around the camp. Powers can be improved — such as more damaging pyrokinesis or longer periods of invisibility — through gaining additional PSI ranks.
The game includes both the "real world" of the camp and its surroundings, as well as a number of "mental worlds" which exist in the consciousness of the game's various characters. The mental worlds have wildly differing art and level design aesthetics, but generally have a specific goal that Raz must complete to help resolve a psychological issue a character may have, allowing the game's plot to progress. Within the mental worlds are censors that react negatively to Raz's presence, and attack him. There are also various collectibles within the mental worlds, including "figments" of the character's imagination which help increase Razputin's PSI ranking, "emotional baggage" which can be sorted by finding tags and bringing them to the baggage, and "memory vaults" which can unlock a short series of slides providing extra information on that character's backstory. However, they do allow him to take part in Morceau's "Basic Braining" course, which he easily passes. Impressed, Sasha invites Raz to take part in an experiment to determine the extent of his abilities.
During the experiment, Raz comes across a vision of Dr. Loboto, an insane ex-dentist, extracting Dogen's brain, but is unable to intervene. Raz eventually realizes that the vision is true after finding Dogen without his brain, but the Psychonauts refuse to believe him.
After receiving additional training from Milla, Raz learns that Dr. Loboto is working on behalf of Morceau, who intends to harvest the campers' brains to power an army of psychic death tanks. Lili is soon abducted as well, and with both Sasha and Milla missing, Raz takes it upon himself to infiltrate the abandoned Thorny Towers Home of the Disturbed insane asylum where she was taken. Ford gives him a piece of bacon which he can use to contact him at any time, and tasks him with retrieving the stolen brains so that he can return them to the campers.
Raz frees the mutated lungfish Linda from Morceau's control, and she takes him safely across the lake. At the asylum, Raz helps the inmates overcome their illnesses, and they help him access the upper levels of the asylum, where Loboto has set up his lab. He frees Lili and restores Sasha and Milla's minds, allowing them to confront Morceau. The inmates subsequently burn down the asylum, allowing Morceau to transfer his brain to a giant tank. Raz defeats him, but when he approaches the tank, it releases a cloud of sneezing powder, causing him to sneeze his brain out.
Raz uses his telekinesis to place his brain inside the tank, merging it with Morceau's. Inside, Raz discovers that Morceau's evil springs from his childhood fear of his father, who ran a butcher shop. At the same time, Raz's own father appears and the two dads join forces. However, he turns out to be an imposter, with Raz's real father, Augustus, appearing and using his own psychic abilities to fix his son's tangled mind and beat the personal demons. At the camp's closing ceremony, Ford presents him with a uniform and welcomes him into the Psychonauts. Raz prepares to leave camp with his father, but word arrives that the Grand Head of the Psychonauts—Lili's father, Truman Zanotto—has been captured. Thus Raz and the Psychonauts fly off on their new mission.
Development
Psychonauts was the debut title for Double Fine Productions, a development studio that Tim Schafer founded after leaving LucasArts, following their decision to exit the point-and-click adventure game market. Schafer's initial studio hires included several others that worked alongside him on Grim Fandango (1998). Super Mario 64 (1996) had introduced him to direct player character movement in a 3D space, along with Final Fantasy VII (1997) and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998), which also prominently featured storytelling and puzzle-solving, like Schafer's previous works. He said, "I think that was the moment where I was like, 'I don't think I want to make a point-and-click adventure anymore. I think I want to make a console game. I want to make a character-driven console game that is just really immediate and has more action, but, you know, still has a lot of narrative.'"
The conception of Psychonauts can be traced as far back as during the development of Full Throttle, where Schafer envisioned a sequence in which the protagonist Ben goes under a peyote-induced psychedelic experience. This was eventually ejected from the game for not being family-friendly enough, though Schafer still held a fascination with products of the subconscious, feeling that one could "understand your mind better" through dreams rather than thinking consciously. In his later years at LucasArts, Schafer pitched a "spy game" featuring martial arts and meditation, in which the player character would solve puzzles by embarking on vision quests through their mind. One of Schafer's co-workers misinterpreted his pitch, believing that the player would go into other peoples' minds, and Schafer realized that he preferred this idea.
Other influences include the film Dreamscape (1984), in which the main character can enter into other peoples' dreams, and in a child's dream, his father is portrayed in an exaggeratedly negative manner, as is Razputin's father in Psychonauts; the Haruki Murakami novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), which inspired the concept of visiting dream-like constructs inside a character's head; the Jet Li films The New Legend of Shaolin (1994) and My Father Is a Hero (1995), in which the main character is accompanied by a child who is abnormally determined and mature for his age, much like Raz; The Fly II (1989), where a group of children with psychic abilities are held in a research facility and experimented on (this evolved into the idea of Psychonauts taking place at a summer camp); The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), as the team was inspired by the visuals of the scene where Jack Skellington confronts Oogie Boogie when creating the level "Black Velvetopia", as well at the film's overall craftsmanship, and initially desired to recreate the stop-motion style, though they were limited by a lack of technical expertise; the work of artist Joe Sorren, who was drawn from heavily when designing the characters, with their unconventional proportions and color schemes; the video game Skies of Arcadia (2000), which features collectibles that are hidden underground and make the player's controller vibrate when they stand over them, much like the arrowheads in Psychonauts; both The Suffering (2004) and the work of artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Klee inspired the idea for figments according to different members of the team.
Most of the game's dialog and script was written by Schafer and Erik Wolpaw, who at the time was a columnist for the website Old Man Murray. After establishing the game's main characters, Schafer undertook his own exercise to write out how the characters would see themselves and the other characters' on a social media site similar to Friendster, which Schafer was a fan of at the time and from where he met his wife-to-be. Schafer used the camp and woods setting as a natural place that children would want to wander and explore.
The art design crew included background artist Peter Chan and cartoonist Scott Campbell. Raz was originally conceived as an ostrich suffering from mental imbalance and multiple personalities. Tim Schafer killed the idea because he strongly believes in games being "wish fulfillments," guessing that not many people fantasize about being an insane ostrich.
Double Fine created a number of internal tools and processes to help with the development of the game, as outlined by executive producer Caroline Esmurdoc. Schafer believes that Fries was a proponent of "pushing games as art", which helped to solidify Double Fine's concept of Psychonauts as an appropriate title for the console after the team's collected experience of developing for personal computers.
Double Fine was also resistant to make changes that Microsoft had suggested from play-testing, such as making the humor secondary to the story, removing the summer camp theme, and drastically altering the story. Fries departed Microsoft in January 2004; shortly thereafter, the company soon pulled the publishing deal for Psychonauts.
By August 2004, Double Fine had negotiated a new publishing deal with Majesco Entertainment to release the game on Windows as well as the Xbox. Tim Schafer was quoted as saying "Together we are going to make what could conservatively be called the greatest game of all time ever, and I think that's awesome."
Though the publishing deal ensured they would be able to continue the development, Esmurdoc stated they had to forgo plans for hiring new developers to meet the scope of the game as agreed to with Majesco. Subsequently, the studio entered, as described by Esmurdoc, "the most insane crunch I have ever witnessed" in order to complete the game. This may have been partially due to the game's extensive use of FMVs and voice recordings, resulting in a large file size (about 4.7 GB), which would have presented difficulties with the GameCube's MiniDVD format (about 1.5 GB).
Esmurdoc stated that Psychonauts took about 4.5 years to complete — though that without all the complications the real development time was closer to 2 years — with a team of 42 full-time developers and additional contractors, with a final budget of $11.5 million.
Music
The soundtrack to Psychonauts was composed by Peter McConnell, known for his work on LucasArts titles such as Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. Schafer's familiarity with McConnell, having worked with him on numerous projects in the past, led Schafer to select him for the soundtrack composition. The following year, in late 2006, Double Fine released a second soundtrack, Psychonauts Original Cinematic Score, containing music from the game's cutscenes as well as a remix of the main theme and credits.
Release
The final U.S. release date for the game on Xbox and Windows was April 19, 2005, with the PlayStation 2 port following on June 21, 2005. Psychonauts was re-released via Valve's Steam digital distribution platform on October 11, 2006. Although initially unplayable on the Xbox 360, Tim Schafer spearheaded a successful e-mail campaign by fans which led to Psychonauts being added to the Xbox 360 backwards compatible list on December 12, 2006,
and on December 4, 2007, Microsoft made Psychonauts one of the initial launch titles made available for direct download on the Xbox 360 through their Xbox Originals program.
Acquisition of rights and republishing
In June 2011, the original publishing deal with Majesco expired, and full publication rights for the game reverted to Double Fine. When Majesco's rights expired, the game was temporarily removed from the service in August 2011, as Microsoft does not allow unpublished content on its Xbox Live Marketplace. Schafer worked with Microsoft to gain their help in publishing the title under the Microsoft Studios name, and the game returned to the Marketplace in February 2012.
In September 2011, Double Fine released an updated version for Microsoft Windows and a port to Mac OS X and Linux through Steam. The new version provided support for Steam features including achievements and cloud saving. The Mac OS X port was developed in partnership with Steven Dengler's Dracogen. In conjunction with this release, an iOS application, Psychonauts Vault Viewer!, was released at the same time, featuring the memory vaults from the game with commentary by Tim Schafer and Scott Campbell. The game was added to the PlayStation Network store as a "PS2 Classic" for the PlayStation 3 in August 2012. As part of a deal with Nordic Games, who gained the rights to Costume Quest and Stacking after THQ's bankruptcy, Double Fine took over publishing rights for both games, while Nordic published and distribute retail copies of all three games for Windows and Mac OS X systems. Double Fine offered Psychonauts as part of a Humble Bundle in June 2012. In 2016, Double Fine also released Psychonauts as a classic title for use with the PlayStation 4's emulation software.