Double Fine Productions, Inc. is an American video game developer based in San Francisco, California. Founded in July 2000 by Tim Schafer shortly after his departure from LucasArts, Double Fine's first two games – Psychonauts and Brütal Legend – underperformed publishers' expectations despite critical praise. The future of the company was assured when Schafer turned to several in-house prototypes built during a two-week period known as "Amnesia Fortnight" to expand as smaller titles, all of which were licensed through publishers and met with commercial success. Schafer has since repeated these Amnesia Fortnights, using fan-voting mechanics, to help select and build smaller titles. Double Fine is also credited with driving interest in crowdfunding in video games, having been able to raise more than for the development of Broken Age, at the time one of the largest projects funded by Kickstarter, and more than US$3 million for the development of Psychonauts 2.
The company continued to build on its independent developer status and has promoted efforts to help other, smaller independent developers through its clout, including becoming a video game publisher for these titles. Double Fine has also been able to acquire rights to remaster some of the earlier LucasArts adventure games, including Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle. Microsoft purchased the studio in June 2019 after previously taking over Psychonauts 2's publishing, bringing it into Xbox Game Studios. As part of a major reset of the Xbox division in July 2026, Double Fine was released from Xbox Game Studios, becoming an independent studio again.
History Double Fine was founded by former LucasArts developer Tim Schafer, together with some colleagues from LucasArts, in July 2000. In the years prior, LucasArts had started to shift development away from adventure games into more action-oriented ones as part of the general trend in the gaming industry. Schafer, who had just finished producing the adventure game Grim Fandango, a title which met with critical praise but was a commercial disappointment, saw others leaving LucasArts and was unsure of his own position there. He was approached by colleagues suggesting they launch their own studio to develop their own titles. Schafer departed LucasArts in January 2000, co-founding Double Fine later that year.
Schafer started Double Fine with programmers David Dixon and Jonathan Menzies in what was once a clog shop in San Francisco. After several months of working on the demo for what would become Psychonauts, a mixture of personnel from the Grim Fandango development team and other new employees were slowly added to begin production.
After the implementation of Amnesia Fortnights in 2011 as a means to find new titles to publish, the company is split into a number of teams with about 15 people each. Each team has the capabilities of fully developing a small game on its own, but for its larger titles, like Psychonauts 2, the company temporarily merges two or more of these teams, and with the option of unmerging the teams once the project is finished.
The company remains situated in San Francisco. The name "Double Fine" is a play on a sign on the Golden Gate Bridge that used to display "double fine zone" to warn motorists that fines on that stretch of road were double normal rates. Double Fine's logo and mascot is called the Two-Headed Baby, frequently abbreviated 2HB, an abbreviation also used for Moai, an integrated development environment. The Double Fine website is also host to seven webcomics, which are created by members of Double Fine's art team and are collectively referred to as the Double Fine Comics.
On June 9, 2019, during Microsoft's press conference at E3 2019, it was announced that Double Fine had been acquired by the company and was becoming part of Xbox Game Studios. According to Schafer, through the acquisition, Double Fine would be able to retain its independent nature but would not have to struggle with finding publishers for its games, a problem it has had in its past. Schafer spoke to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, a games subscription service for Microsoft Windows and Xbox users, as one favorable aspect of the acquisition. Schafer felt many of Double Fine's games, particularly Psychonauts and its sequel, do not have an aesthetic that people would necessarily pay the full price for, but the subscription approach of Game Pass lowers that barrier and would potentially get more people to try the game. Thus, Schafer felt that being acquired by Microsoft would allow the studio to continue to develop experimental games and allow these projects greater exposure. A month ahead of the release of Psychonauts 2, in July 2021, Schafer stated he was happy with Microsoft's handling of Double Fine; he called the acquisition a "limited integration" with Double Fine retaining all control on the creative elements while leaving the financial issues up to Microsoft to manage, and left the studio able to focus their creative skills on finishing the game without feeling any budgetary crunch. Double Fine and 2 Player Productions released PsychOdyssey, a 22-hour documentary on the making of Psychonauts 2 in February 2023.
Schafer said in August 2025 that the studio is presently working on original intellectual properties, such as Keeper, which has Lee Petty as its lead developer, and had no current plans for releasing sequels such as Psychonauts 3 or Brutal Legend 2 despite requests from players for these.
Double Fine submitted its petition to unionize within the CWA (Communications Workers of America) on May 7, 2026.
In June 2026, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News reported that multiple studios at Xbox Game Studios, including Double Fine, were in negotiations for independent buyouts and separation from the division to avoid being shuttered. The studio laid off 23 out of around 90 employees in July 2026 following this transition, with Schafer saying "Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action. Our transition to becoming an independent company also means becoming a size that we can sustain."
As part of a major restructuring of the Xbox division on July 6, 2026, Double Fine was released from Xbox Game Studios and returned to being an independent studio. Double Fine retained all rights to games and intellectual property during this move.
Projects Double Fine's first completed project was Psychonauts, a multi-platform platform game following Raz (named after Double Fine's animator Razmig Mavlian), a psychically gifted boy who breaks into a summer camp for psychic children to try to become part of an elite group of psychic heroes called Psychonauts. Critically praised, it was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Despite its acclaim, however, it did not sell well initially.
Double Fine's second project was Brütal Legend, a hybrid real time strategy, action-adventure game following a heavy metal roadie named Eddie Riggs, whose name is derived from both Eddie the Head, the Iron Maiden mascot, and Derek Riggs, the artist who created the mascot. The story follows Eddie as he is transported to a fantasy world in which demons have enslaved humanity. Tim Schafer has credited the inspiration for the game to the lore, fantasy themes, and epic Norse mythology of heavy metal music found in both its lyrical content and its album art. Brütal Legend was published by Electronic Arts and was released in North America on October 13, 2009, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and later for Microsoft Windows.
Amnesia Fortnight During the development of Brütal Legend, a publishing issue arose. Activision, having acquired the rights to the title through its merger with Vivendi Games, decided to drop it and forced Schafer to locate another publisher. During this period, in approximately 2007, Schafer attempted to boost the company's morale by engaging the team in an "Amnesia Fortnight". For a two-week period, the employees were split into four groups, told to forget their current work on Brütal Legend (hence the "Amnesia"), and tasked to develop a game prototype for review by the other groups. The four ideas were successfully made into playable prototypes. The four prototypes produced were Custodians of the Clock, Happy Song, Love Puzzle, and Tiny Personal Ninja.
The process was repeated later, as Amnesia Fortnight 2009, near the end of Brütal Legend, providing an additional two prototypes. The prototypes produced were Costume Quest and Stacking. The prototype for Costume Quest was made available in 2012.
Schafer credits the concept of the Amnesia Fortnights to film director Wong Kar-Wai. During the long, three-year filming of Ashes of Time, Wong had taken some of his actors and film crew to Hong Kong to shoot footage for fun, ultimately resulting in the films Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Schafer noted these were some of the director's more famous films. Schafer eventually signed a publishing deal with Electronic Arts for Brütal Legend.
These Amnesia Fortnight periods proved fortuitous, as Schafer considers these to have kept the company viable. Upon completion of Brütal Legend, Double Fine started work on its sequel but was told to stop development shortly after as Electronic Arts decided against publishing it. With no other publishing deals lined up at the time, Schafer turned back to the eight game ideas developed from Amnesia Fortnight, believing they could be developed further into short, complete games. Schafer also looked at the success of smaller focused games like Geometry Wars on the various download services, realizing the potential market for similar titles. Schafer and his team selected the best four, and began shopping the games to various publishers, and successfully worked publishing details with these. Two of these games, Costume Quest and Stacking, were picked up by THQ and released digitally on the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network storefronts. Both games were considered successful and THQ expressed interest in helping Double Fine produce similar titles. Iron Brigade was prototyped between 2008 and 2009 as Custodians of the Clock, and was originally released as Trenched before the title was changed due to trademark issues. It was developed as an Xbox Live Arcade game in association with Microsoft Game Studios, and similarly received positive praise from journalists. A fourth game, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, expanded from the Happy Song prototype, was published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in association with the Sesame Workshop for the Xbox 360 using the Kinect controller. Though it initially was not a licensed title, Schafer and his team found it to be an ideal fit for its first licensed-property game. The four unused ideas may be used for a game in the future, according to Schafer, but believes some of them may be unsellable to a publisher.