I have fond memories of Psychonauts, and would love to see a sequel. Unfortunately that looks very unlikely to happen, even though the game’s creator Tim Schafer is up for the challenge.
Psychonauts is a highly-original platform adventure game released on PC, Xbox, and PS2 in 2006. Psychonauts 2 is a game a lot of people would like to see made, but, as Schafer recently explained to Digital Spy, that doesn’t look likely.
“I mean I get a lot of, on Twitter or whatever, daily questions about Psychonauts 2. And I would love to do Psychonauts 2, I’ve actually pitched that to publishers several times and no-one has taken the bait so far. So it is hard because fans often don’t know how the business works, with the difference between a developer and a publisher, it’s hard to explain that. I’d love to do that game, but I’d have to convince someone to just give me a few million dollars, that’s all.”
Like film studios, record labels, and book publishers, those who sell games to the public want guaranteed hits these days, often at the expense of originality. However, working on a sequel would be bad for originality in another way.
“… If I did a sequel to any of the games I had before, it would have prevented one of the [new games]… if I did a sequel to Full Throttle there wouldn’t have been Grim Fandango, and so on and so on down the line. It’s hard. But now we have multiple projects, we have multiple teams, one of us could be working on a sequel and one of us could be working on a new game. It opens up a lot of possibilities.”
Surely someone would be willing to take a gamble on a Psychonauts sequel. There is an in-built audience there, and this is a game that would benefit from next-gen visuals while retaining the strong storyline.
