Scott Campbell is the art director at Double Fine Productions, a video game development studio founded by Tim Schafer of Lucasarts adventure game fame. Campbell’s cartoony and light-hearted art style form the canvas of Double Fine’s critically acclaimed games Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. I spoke with Campbell at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, after he spoke on a panel that discussed the convergence of video games and comic books. He has a webcomic of his own on Double Fine’s website, called Double Fine Action Comics.
Jonathan: Tell me about the games you worked on at Double Fine.
Scott Campbell: Psychonauts was the first game we did and I was art director on that, which meant that I helped establish the visual style of the game. I did a lot of designs for it, including the characters, and sort of kept the vision intact. Same thing with Brutal Legend, except by that time we had a bigger production team, so we had a pre-production phase as well.
Jonathan: You mentioned that with a project like Brutal Legend, you went through several stages of concepts, refining and editing. How long was the process?
Scott: Tim Schafer, the head guy at Double Fine, is a total perfectionist. I am a perfectionist too, so we always just want to iterate, iterate, iterate until it’s perfect. With that project it took about five years to make, and it’s pretty ongoing, as far as redesigning things to get them to work.
