Haunt developers inspired by Tim Schafer's GDC speech

Haunt, the next game from PaRappa creator Masaya Matsuura, will feature a cameo from another studio head with a big personality: Double Fine's Tim Schafer. Matsuura and producer Dewi Tanner talked in an interview about bringing him on-board for the game.

"So already at the time [GDC], we had some other voice over track already put in the game," Matsuura told Gamasutra. Tanner hints that he wasn't satisfied with the voice, and Matsuura says something still felt missing. "And one day you [Tanner] told me that about how Tim would be a good voice over actor."

They say they loved his speech at the GDC awards and that informed the decision. "It's a really specific mood that we were looking for in this game," Tanner said. "So it's a haunted house game -- we don't want it to be like slash horror -- so we wanted to keep a little sense of humor, and a little bit impish, in that sense. And I think Tim really has that kind of passe humor, which really comes out well. You can never know if you can really trust what he's saying."

Schafer has his own time constraints heading up a busy studio, and Matsuura jokes that he didn't have time for it. But Tanner says that since there's "not too much narrative" in Haunt, he was done after "a couple of afternoons."