Schafer: "I've pitched Psychonauts 2 several times, but nobody wanted it"

You want Tim Schafer to make Psychonauts 2. I want Tim Schafer to make Psychonauts 2. Tim Schafer wants Tim Schafer to make Psychonauts 2. So what's stopping us? Publishers. Stupid dirty rotten publishers with their stupid dirty rotten money-making priorities.

"I mean I get a lot of, on Twitter or whatever, daily questions about Psychonauts 2," Schafer told Digital Spy in a recent interview. "And I would love to do Psychonauts 2, I've actually pitched that to publishers several times and no-one has taken the bait so far.

Schafer's had a tough time appeasing the faithful. "So it is hard because fans often don't know how the business works, with the difference between a developer and a publisher, it's hard to explain that. I'd love to do that game, but I'd have to convince someone to just give me a few million dollars, that's all."

There's also the innovation vs iteration question to consider. "If I did a sequel to any of the games I had before, it would have prevented one of the [new games]... if I did a sequel to Full Throttle there wouldn't have been Grim Fandango, and so on and so on down the line.

"It's hard. But now we have multiple projects, we have multiple teams, one of us could be working on a sequel and one of us could be working on a new game. It opens up a lot of possibilities."

Let's hope one of those possibilities is Psychonauts-shaped. The original game was one of Xbox's best platformers thanks to its endlessly inventive level design and trippy, smart-mouthed plot.

UPDATE: Hold the phone. Mojang AB founder and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson has reached out to Schafer on Twitter, saying he'd love to publish a Psychonauts sequel. "I'm serious."

Might want to bear in mind that this is the same Notch who once challenged Bethesda to a Quake duel to resolve a legal dispute. Still, fingers crossed.