“General Lionwhyte kidnapped all the young men living in this town and took them to a mine,” explains Schafer, as the Deuce barrels toward our destination. Ophelia battles alongside Lars and Lita Halford, who have good intentions and great charisma but lack the organizational skills to mount a proper revolution against the demonic Tainted Coil and their human turncoat leader, General Lionwhyte (voiced by Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford). Eddie snaps together a hot-rod (“the Deuce”) and teams up with Ophelia, a comely member of the human resistance who becomes Eddie’s love interest. “He’s a very practical-minded guy.” It’s not long before he learns a few riffs on his guitar - by tapping button combos, Ocarina-style - to raise ancient relics.
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“He’s a roadie, so he can build anything,” reasons Schafer. “That’s our decision-making process: ‘What do you think of this creature? Would you see it on an album cover?’ ‘Yes.’ Then it’s in.”īefore the Titans of this world ascended to become the Metal Gods, they left behind the plans and parts for cars, weapons, and all kinds of cool stuff, but nobody has had the mechanical know-how to figure them out…until Eddie comes along. “We tried to make every piece of concept art look like it could be a heavy metal album cover,” Schafer tells us.
#Ophelia brutal legend concept art full
Once slightly safe, Eddie realizes he’s atop a grisly temple made of skulls and corpses, and the landscape of this strange world is full of giant swords sticking out of the ground, towers of bone, pits of fire, wheels of pain, and other stuff you’d see, well, in the pages of Heavy Metal Thunder. He can blast Druids and Battle Nuns with pyrotechnics, electrocute them with zipzagging lightning bolts, or play a massive Earthshaker power chord to shatter the environment and send enemies flying. And since, as Schafer says, “the whole world is like an amplifier,” Eddie’s guitar, Clementine, is imbued with destructive magical force. Eddie quickly grabs the weapon - The Separator, which will have its own history revealed in time - and hacks the baddies to bloody bits. But the red-robed demons surrounding an enormous double-bladed axe…that’s new. “Eddie gets injured in a stage accident, and some of his blood gets into the mouth of his belt buckle - which he doesn’t know is an ancient amulet of time travel.” When Eddie wakes up, he’s in the same place he was before, only the foam-and-Fiberglass stage set has been swapped for real stone, and the audience has been replaced by piles of human remains. You play as rock roadie Eddie Riggs - “a man out of time, who should have been born in the early Seventies,” reveals Schafer. And in my head, when I listen to the music, it’s so much cooler than that.” But the only visuals that were available outside of the album art were the videos, and they usually had a budget of, like, $10 - one guy standing in the middle of a church with a sword. The lyrics and particularly the album art - the covers and the gatefold sleeves - were so evocative of these fantasy worlds.
I was always a big metal fan, especially in high school. “How can you not make a videogame about that?”Īs passion projects go, it’s hard to top Brütal Legend, an action/adventure game that Schafer says he’s “wanted to make for years and years. “I mean, come on,” says Schafer enthusiastically. Backlit by an orange glow, a hulking armored mech suit with missiles for tusks and a chainsaw in each hand belches fire out of tubes on its back, lumbering forward on a battlefield littered with human remains. He’s randomly discovered the cover image of Massive Killing Capacity, the third album by Swedish death-metallers Dismember. Tim Schafer - the game designer known for funny cult hits like Psychonauts, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle as much as his goatee and mischievous grin - is sitting in the San Francisco offices of Double Fine, paging through Heavy Metal Thunder, a paperback collection of rock-album artwork.
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