Heavy Metal

Tim Schafer on making his classic biker adventure FULL THROTTLE.

- Andy Kelly

In 1995 Lucas Arts released Full Throttle, a point-and-click adventure with a difference. You weren’t playing as a lovable goofball like Bernard Bernoulli from Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood, you were a tough, gruff biker called Ben who used his fists and feet as much as his brain.

At the time a Lucas Arts adventure was expected to sell around 100,000 copies, but Full Throttle sold over a million. And now, 22 years later, the game has been re-released with remastered graphics and audio. I ask the game’s writer/director Tim Schafer what it’s like going back to something he made when he was in his early 20s.

“It’s been interesting looking at how I wrote dialogue back then based on my life experiences at the time, and how I interpret it differently now that I’m older,” he says. “And now that I’ve actually been a biker on the run for a crime I didn’t commit, that adds a lot of depth to it too. I had no idea what that was like back then.”

Full Throttle was a huge leap from Day of the Tentacle, with full screen animation, 3D models, and lavish production values. “We got a lot more ambitious,” says Schafer. “We had all these kinetic, cinematic chase scenes with 3D vehicles, and that scope really hit us hard when we realized how much time it would take to make. We tried cutting some stuff, but it was still a huge, expensive project.”

But he still has fond memories of working on the game, particularly how encouraging Lucas Arts was. “We got the support we needed to make the game great,” he says. “Quality was always the number one thing there, and that came from the top. George Lucas and ILM weren’t making B-movies, so we couldn’t make B-games. We had this idea that we had to be the best, and that was something George made clear in his directives to Lucas Arts.”