Psychonauts 2 is in development, and anyone can profit from its success

It's up to fans to push funding over the top, or the idea will go back on the shelf.

Double Fine Productions is making a follow-up to its very first game, Psychonauts, the action platformer first released for the original Xbox. The sequel's complex blend of funding will include an open call for equity investors, a groundbreaking new opportunity made possible by a startup called Fig.

"We are making Psychonauts 2," Tim Schafer told Polygon last week from Double Fine's offices in San Francisco. The independent studio's founder was also the writer of the original game, which debuted more than 10 years ago. "For us, it's pretty monumental, considering it's the game that formed us as a company." More monumental still is the fact that Double Fine's next game will be the first crowdfunded game to welcome investment from every fan — not just cash for T-shirts and downloadable game codes, but a share of the game's potential profits. Virtually anyone will be able to get a piece of the action. And that campaign is scheduled to go live tonight.

In the beginning At the center of the Psychonauts universe is Raz, a young acrobat raised in a circus who just happens to have latent psychic powers. The original game introduced the world to the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, a training facility maintained by the U.S. government thinly disguised as a children's retreat. Over the course of nearly a dozen levels, Raz used his burgeoning PSI powers — clairvoyance, pyrokinesis, telekinesis and others — to unlock the secrets of Whispering Rock, and unburden its troubled minds by exploring them from the inside out. The cult classic has sold nearly 1.7 million copies over its lifetime The game grew to be a cult classic, selling nearly 1.7 million copies — two-thirds of which were bought in the last five years. But Psychonauts wasn't just Double Fine's first game. It was also an entirely new genre to many on the team. "None of us had made anything like it before," Schafer told Polygon. Prior to founding Double Fine, Schafer had worked at LucasArts, where he helped to create titles like The Secret of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. (You can read more on the founding of Double Fine in Polygon's massive double-feature story from 2012.) "I had only made PC graphic adventures at that point, and we had never made a console game. Since then, we've been making a lot of console games ... so I feel like the 10 years since we shipped that one have definitely taught us a lot." Sitting above Schafer's desk is a slim volume — the Psychonauts idea book — where he's been squirreling away the plans for Psychonauts 2 over the course of the last decade. "It is weird that often the first things that you sketch out are the first scene and the last scene," Schafer said, noting that the arc is already mostly defined. "But, those are pretty clear in my head after all this time. "I've had this story for a long time. I've had the places that I want to go, the locations and the minds — the key minds — that I want to go into. I know how I want that to work for sure."

The journey ahead Psychonauts 2 is currently in pre-production, Schafer said. But Double Fine isn't the kind of studio that returns, again and again, to old franchises. That alone makes Psychonauts 2 a departure for the company. But, to hear Schafer tell it, he and his team already have a solid handle on the scale of the game that they want to make. The plan is to design and build a singular experience that matches the scope of the original. "The first game had 11 mental worlds that you went into," Schafer said. "And there were two or three, depending on how you slice it up, physical locations. We wanted to do something similar to that, but the exact numbers are flexible. "We want to do something that feels like an epic of a tale. We're not trying to do an episodic game that's smaller. We're trying to do something that will feel like what it felt like to play the first game." Now Double Fine just needs the money to make it. Just about everything Double Fine produces is from a fresh IP, which has created some challenges in securing funding from big publishers. That's part of the reason why, Schafer said, Double Fine has gone with crowdfunding for its last two games. What has surprised the team is the outpouring of support it's had for its projects, especially for Double Fine Adventure, which went on to become Broken Age. That game's Kickstarter campaign ballooned well beyond its initial ask of $400,000 to a total of over $3.3 million. Schafer stressed how different the production of Psychonauts 2 would be from that of Broken Age. "When we started the Double Fine Adventure project, we didn't know what we were making," Schafer said. "We started and we said, 'Let's make a $400,000 Flash game.' We thought we were going to make this a point-and-click, really simple kind of thing. And then when we got $3.3 million, we said, 'Let's change it. We can do a different thing. We can do a bigger thing.' And we just figured it out as we went." That expanding budget led to an evolution of that game, and a few development and production hurdles that have all been chronicled in the studio's documentary video series. Schafer says this time, things will be different. "With Psychonauts 2, we have the first game as the model. We have this action-adventure platformer with stylized art and humor and dream logic and PSI powers and all the things that we know are going to be in it. So, we also have a model for the next game. "I have a backlog of design ideas that we are now fleshing out with artists, and taking a look at the mechanics and what things we want to bring back and what things we want to add to it. So it's in that early stage of development."