How Tim Schafer Broke Into the Game Industry: A Legendary Cover Letter | Hacker News Reader

How Tim Schafer Broke Into the Game Industry: A Legendary Cover Letter

doublefine.com

207 pointszach14 comments

Tim Schafer is awesome. I'd hire him in a second. Except we'd be paying a lot less than $27k, it's not the 1980s and he doesn't speak Chinese. No dental benefits either.

It's pretty cool that he kept the letters. I hope I can build my own company into the sort of place that will have people keeping random HR stuff like this and reposting them to the net years on to reminisce about the days we weren't a soul crushing corporation. In the meantime, anyone who hasn't yet should buy Psychonauts and help keep these guys in business. Best game I've ever played.

Or buy Brutal Legend, his company's new game. Or better yet, both (Psychonauts is available on the XBox360's back catalog of original XBox games, and I would hope Double Fine still gets a good cut of any sales of it).

Psychonauts is also $10 on Steam. I originally played it on the Xbox, but today, I would definitely plug a 360 controller into my PC and download from Steam instead. High res and native widescreen, baby.

Steam also cuts out the retail portion of the picture, which gets more money directly to the publisher/developer.

I've actually been on the fence about buying Psychonauts for a while, after reading his post and seeing how he's just a normal guy with ups and downs who's trying to put out great stuff I'm going to! What a great run-on sentence that was.

I got it for PS2. Not exactly the best looking game of its time. But some unforgettably great concepts.

You play the game inside someone's psyche. Early on you come across a suitcase that is crying and it needs your help to find a missing tag. I really laughed out loud when I realized it was emotional baggage. :)

Later in the game you have to solve some puzzles by looking through other people's eyes and realize that they see things differently than you.

Wonderful stuff!

The thing I noticed first was that no one sends rejection letters anymore - you just go into the resume black hole (unless you actually manage to get an interview).

I've received a few via email. Pretty much the same wording too.

I had this experience too, the last time I was job hunting, and it seems pretty rude, especially after being told "we'll call you within a week." I would have been happy with a boilerplate email. It would have saved me some anxiety and unnecessary follow-up calls.

I always liked Tim Schafer and his fantastic and unique sense of humor. I don't think there is anyone else who writes stuff on the internet (obviously a large group) who can make me laugh as reliably as he can. Oh yeah, and his games are great. If you see this, thanks for the laughs Tim. And thanks for this inspiring post.

Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know Tim Schafer, but if not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer

I liked his closing line the best. "Mature industries" get so full of themselves.

Doesn't Yoyodyne crop up in Gravity's Rainbow also?

Oh, this is great. I just took a screen shot and emailed it to Tim!

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