Psychonauts developer Double Fine, recently parted from Xbox ownership amid a massive shakeup at the former parent company, has announced it will bring back its beloved game jam, Amnesia Fortnight, as a Kickstarter, with supporters able to vote on its next project.
This was announced today on the Kinda Funny podcast by CEO Tim Schafer alongside a newly posted Kickstarter page. The event will take place on August 31, and will be a live Game Jam in which backers of the Kickstarter will get to choose which of the studio’s ideas get made into four new prototypes, and which of those four will be turned into a game. The game jam will also be turned into a documentary by 2 Player Productions.
“Being independent again, we can go back to do a lot of things we were doing before,” Schafer said. “Like crazy game jams, like our Amnesia Fortnight Game Jam where we split into small groups and we make a game in two weeks…Game jams and, you know, we got a little bit of runway on the departure to sign some games. We want to sign some game deals, get going, it’s kind of a scary time to be out there. It’s a runway, not a freeway, it doesn’t go forever. It’s just a little patch where we can take off on our own power, and we want to extend it a little bit.
“So we’re doing a game jam, which we used to do a lot. We used to do these game jams, and we used to do them publicly. So if you join the Kickstarter, you get to vote, you get to hear all the teams pitch. Everyone at Double Fine gets to pitch a game. And if you join that, you get to help vote for which one we actually make, and we’ll make like four of them, and then you get to vote on which one we [work on] for a little bit longer to polish up and actually release.”
Schafer goes on to say that the company is in a similar place to where it was when it finished development on Brutal Legend, when a sequel was canceled by EA and the team had to work on a number of smaller projects born out of Amnesia Fortnights to keep the studio afloat. He says Double Fine is currently working on multiple games, but needs time and financial runway to finish them that could be provided by something out of a game jam like Amnesia Fortnight.
Double Fine was acquired by Microsoft in 2019, and released Psychonauts 2, Keeper, and Kiln under its banner. It was recently spun off alongside Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, and Ninja Theory during a massive Xbox restructuring that resulted in the layoffs of 1600 people company-wide in June. Separately, Double Fine underwent its own layoffs last month as it fully separated from Xbox. Schafer mentioned on the podcast that Double Fine owns all its own IP and publishing rights now, saying, “buying any of our games helps support the studio.”