Amid a major restructure set to eliminate 3,200 jobs at Xbox, Psychonauts and Brutal Legend developer Double Fine was one of the lucky studios able to secure its independence. Now that it’s once again independent, the studio is returning to Kickstarter for a project that’ll seem very familiar to longtime fans: a two-week game jam that’ll determine what Double Fine’s next game will be.
Officially christened “Amnesia Fortnight 2026 – Indie Reboot: A Double Fine Productions Game Jam, Documentary and Kickstarter Campaign,” this project will hit the crowdfunding platform on August 31, as the studio explains in its announcement.
“We’re going to do a Game Jam, live on the internet, in which our backers will get to choose which of our myriad of ideas get made into four new prototypes– and which of those final four will become a real (small) game,” the studio explains.
Double Fine is no stranger to Kickstarter, as it funded development of the throwback adventure game that would become known as Broken Age through the platform back in 2012. Development stretched out much longer than originally planned, but the game was ultimately released in two parts across 2014 and 2015.
Amnesia Fortnight is another longstanding Double Fine tradition. At first, it was a purely internal effort to escape the stress of Brutal Legend’s development. The studio would simply forget its current project, split into groups, and spend two weeks designing and building small game prototypes. Double Fine would return to this concept multiple times over the years, and Amnesia Fortnite prototypes would eventually turn into retail projects like Costume Quest, Stacking, and the recently released Kiln.
But the best part of the news might just be this: “All alongside the process, 2 Player Productions will be filming all the fun to produce one of their award-winning documentary spectaculars.” The 22-hour documentary series that chronicled Psychonauts 2’s development was fantastic, and broadly praised by devs as the best insight the public’s ever gotten into how hard making games really is.
On top of all that, Double Fine CEO Tim Schafer has also confirmed that the studio once again owns its IP. “Everything, we got back, the transfer of the IP came back to us,” Schafer says on the Kinda Funny podcast (via Kotaku). “We have the publishing rights back to our games. It still says ‘Microsoft’ on some of them, but it just takes a while for it all to process. When people buy our games, it supports the studio.”
Not all of the news out of Double Fine has been good – after all, the studio just laid off 23 people in the wake of its new independence. But here’s hoping that the developers who remain can find their footing as they take control of their own destiny once again.