I got to sit down and talk to Tim Schafer, one of the creators of Brutal Legend. He reveals why there's no nudity in the game (it's not the reason you think), the songs you should have heard but didn't, what Lemmy from Motorhead refused to say during his voiceover session, and how I've got it all backwards when I wonder how they managed to stealth a real time strategy game - that isn't even a real time strategy game! - into their open world.

All that and more in the interview after the jump.

Tom Chick: You must have been on tenterhooks wondering how the game was going to be received. You do a lot of things in Brutal Legend that don't necessarily have broad appeal. Now that the game is out in the wild, how do you feel about how it's being received?

Tim Schafer: I've never made a multiplayer game before so I was really nervous not just to read the reviews, but to actually interact with people online. I've always been timid online and it's freaked me out. But the experience has been great since it came out, because I've been online every night, alternating on Xbox Live or the Playstation Network, playing with strangers and talking to them, asking them how they like the game. Seeing the strategies they're coming up with. It's been really rewarding. It's been really fun.

Chick: You posted on your blog your gamertag. I imagine your friends list immediately filled up.

Schafer: It did fill up. And I have all these messages I haven't read yet. For a long time I was like, 'Maybe I'll make a fake account to protect my regular account because I don't want people to go online and see whether I've gotten 100% completion'. But I was too lazy to do that, so I decided to let everyone see my gamertag. Most of my stuff is totally open. My Facebook page, my Twitter, it's all Timoflegend. People can see all my stuff but who cares?

Chick: Well what are some of the surprising things people have said about Brutal Legend that you didn't expect?

Schafer: The surprising things people have said about Brutal Legend that I didn't expect. I'm trying to think.

Chick: Let me be more specific them. One of the things you did in Brutal Legend, which was a surprising and risky decision, is that there's a full-featured real time strategy game in there. You've sort of said, 'Look, it's not a real time strategy game' and I can understand what you mean by that, because it's not what people think of when they think of a real time strategy game. But there are certainly elements in there. Brutal Legend is an open world game, but there is this RTS gameplay in it. How have you felt about how that's been received?

Schafer: It's interesting coming it at from my perspective where it started originally as an RTS game and essentially that's all it was. All the other parts evolved out of iterating on the game and expanding on it. So it's funny to hear someone ask 'Why did you add a real time strategy game?' That's like the soup stock the game was cooked in the whole time we were making it, so it's kind of funny to think about adding it. Some people seemed immediately averse to it, as if it was such a surprise when it came into the game. We had a big multiplayer event with the press, where we played stage battles with them and did a bunch of interviews about it. But I guess a lot of people just didn't see that and thought it was completely stealthed. So they were kind of taken aback when it appeared and felt they had been tricked.

Chick: You've said on your blog that it's not a real time strategy game. Do you have a way you refer to it other than an RTS. What do you call it?

Schafer: We haven't come up with a cool name for it yet. I mean, I totally understand why someone might call me on that. It's obviously an off-shoot of one. But when I say it's not a real time strategy game, that's because it's changed so much from a real time strategy game. The gameplay is totally different and much more of an action game, and you kind of have to get in that mindset if you want to play it well. But historically, I really love Herzog Zwei, which is a Sega Genesis console game, the first RTS game. And people say you can't do RTS on a console, but the first RTS was on a console and it was great. The thing I liked about it that no RTS has done since is that you weren't just overseeing the map from a god-like perspective. You could morph into a giant warrior robot that could march around the battlefield and take care of business himself. I liked having that option.

So when we started with the idea of an RTS game on a console, we looked at why those hadn't worked before. A lot of it, I think, is because they all use cursor, you know, like a PC game? And no one really enjoys driving a cursor around with their thumb. It feels weird and bad. You can't shift select with that system. But in Herzog Zwei, there's no cursor. There's an avatar. There's a jet that flies around, that can turn into the mech, the robot. The avatar is the cursor. That's your point of intersection into the game. So that's why we focus on the avatar. He can fly and land and get mixed up in the battle, and fly overhead to get a look at things from a distance. And then as we made it, as we watched this character on the screen with his axe, we realized you just got drawn more and more to that. You want to be able to do things with him. You want him to be able to cast spells, which is what the guitar playing is. You want to mix it up with the axe. And also to interact with the troops. You want to ride these cars around. You want to get those razor girls up on your shoulders. It's just a natural impulse when I'm down there that I want to do crazy Jet Li combo kung fu moves with my troops. And so as we started adding those features, it got to where that was the fun of the game. You still thought about the strategy stuff, about flying up in the air to peek where you troops go, but it became more and more moments of interjected strategy amidst this really solid action experience.

Chick: How then did the open world grow around this RTS? How did it balloon into what it is right now?

Schafer: We kind of put off thinking about the single player game, because we wanted to do what we knew the least about, which was the multiplayer game. So we did all the multiplayer stuff for at least a year before we started thinking about the single player campaign. We felt like we had the most experience with narrative content. We felt the most confident about that, so we left it off at first. And then we started getting into it and we were like, 'You know, I think we underestimated how big this has to be. This is going to have to be much bigger, this single player campaign. We can't just reuse stage battles over and over again. We have to have custom stuff, and scripted stuff, and special cinematic moments.' So that's when the single player campaign ballooned and we took an extra year to make the game. It was supposed to come out in 2008. We ended up making a much bigger single player campaign.

Chick: I want to talk a little about that delay. There was an uncertain period when some of the Sierra assets carried over in the Activision merger and some of them didn't. You guys were a casualty of that. Did it ever look like the game wasn't going to get published? Or were you always assured that someone was going to pick it up?

Schafer: Once the game had become demo'able, and it had a trailer, and interactive parts you could play, and Jack and his guitar and stuff, you could really sense there was a lot of interest in the game. People wanted to look at it, talk about it. It seemed to get a lot of attention. But when we were pitching Psychonauts, we had to beg people to look at it. So Brutal Legend was different. But the question was if it was going to be right for a particular publisher at a particular time. We already knew there were multiple possibilities and offers. It wasn't like it wasn't going to happen.

Chick: So how is Brutal Legend different now that it got that extra year and EA as a publisher? What would it have been like coming out a year earlier and published by Activision or Sierra?

Schafer: The single player campaign would have felt anemic. It would have felt more empty.

Chick: Would it have been an open world, like this?

Schafer: We started with that. The real motivation for the open world is that we wanted to create a real land that felt like it existed. In between missions, it was there. It was persistent. You could wander around freely in it. It wasn't like we wanted to imitate Grand Theft Auto, but we didn't want it to feel like you were moving from one closed environment to another, as if you're traveling through a series of cages. We wanted you to feel like you're out in a real place, finding points of action.

Chick: Did EA make much of a difference in terms of licensing music?

Schafer: Oh yeah. We were already going down that path before, but they brought a lot more muscle to it. They've got a great team of people who've already worked with those busy high-profile people. It was great to have a whole licensing department at EA to deal with that.

Chick: Now I want to talk about the writing and how this game comes from your imagination, and how people playing this game think, 'Oh yeah, this is a Tim Schafer game'. Now this might be like being asked to pick your favorite child, but how does Brutal Legend fit in among all the games you've done in terms of which one you feel closest to? And does that even make sense? Can you evaluate them that way?

Schafer: Well, yes and no. They're all different, but I've never made a game I felt distant from. They're all very personal. This one is a little more personal. Like in Grim Fandango, there was art deco and art nouveau, which I loved. And film noir. But heavy metal and the fantasies associated with that are something that I identified with all my life. It felt like this place where I was sticking in secret private memories of my teenage years, so it felt unique in that way. And I like to hope my writing gets better every time. I practice writing. I try to get more ambitious every time.

Chick: If you go back and look at your earlier games, does it seem to you like your writing has gotten better?

Schafer: I've been playing Monkey Island on the iPhone on my way to work these days. And it's hard to judge, because you're very forgiving of your early stuff. 'Oh, I was 22 when I wrote that!'

Chick: Now I know when you were on Jimmy Kimmel...

Schafer: You mean Jimmy Fallon?

Chick: Yeah, yeah, I'm mixing up my Jimmys.

Schafer: Jack was on Jimmy Kimmel. It's hard to tell me and Jack apart. Is that what you're saying?

Chick: Well, you mentioned that a lot of the game was inspired by being a kid and admiring those old album covers. And I get the sense that Brutal Legend is a game for 40-year-olds reminiscing about what it was like to be 14-years-old. And I don't mean that to belittle it. It reminds me in a way of Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are movie. It's this nostalgia about childhood from an adult perspective. Is that intentional or am I just projecting?

Schafer: Maybe that's unintentional. I mean, yeah. People who are close to my age and who lived through the 80s with, like, Judas Priest, are definitely going to have a deep connection with some of the same memories. And I think that's in every second of the gameplay. But people who don't have that, we're aiming for them, too. We're also trying to bring that experience and those fantasies to people who are unfamiliar with them. So we use that backdrop to create a fantasy world. It's supposed to be for people who like metal and people who don't like metal.

Chick: Well, there are a lot of universal things in there. For instance, what it's like being a kid when you're impressed by cars and girls and music, but being a kid is such a big part of it. I think of when Eddie gets to kiss Ophelia, and then there's that painful moment when she says, 'Can we walk back separately so people don't see us?' That's so obviously the sort of memory many of us have about summer camp. That's part of why I ask. It seems like there's a lot of that child-like innocence. Let me try it this way. It's profane, but not in a negative way. There are no drug references, there's a lot of cheesecake instead of out-and-out sex. It's very innocent and playful. And also the sense of humor. A lot of contemporary humor is mean-spirited and crass. To many people, humor is a matter of being dismissive or sarcastic. You don't seem to have any of that. Even though there are a lot of ridiculous things in Brutal Legend, you don't ridicule them. It seems like there's a lot of affection. Is that something you have to intentionally do or is that just a natural part of your sense of humor?

Schafer: Huh. I never thought about that.

Chick: Do you sort of agree that a lot of humor is crass and mean spirited? We grew up with, like, Letterman who's very biting and sarcastic. Or in the gaming space, I think of Yahtzee, who does those short videogame review cartoons. You stand out against that as a kinder, gentler, more affectionate type of humor.

Schafer: That's interesting. Let me think about that. The way you describe it almost sounds like something I wouldn't want to do. I know there's a lot of humor out there that is, like, really safe. It's like, "We're not out to offend anybody". I would hate to think I was doing that. I like to think I'm making jokes that are pushing it, in some way. But I guess I don't have that kind of hostility.

Chick: I bet you want to be dark and edgy.

Schafer: I have at different times in my life. I definitely grew up with David Letterman and I've always felt bad for Dave when someone like Oprah gets offended at his sarcasm. You know what I'm talking about? I kind of identify with that, because a lot of humor comes from a teasing place. Growing up in a large family, a lot of our humor was about teasing each other. I grew up to be kind of a teaser and sometimes, in my adult life, I'll meet someone who thinks I am really mean because I'm teasing all the time. At some point we have to have this epiphany where we realize that I'm teasing them because they're friends of mine and I like them. You know what I mean? It's the way I'm used to affection being shown. Through teasing, through making jokes. I think of that kind of sarcastic humor as an affectionate thing and not a cruel thing. I don't have a taste for cruelty or meanness. Even like the violence in the game. It's not something that upsets me. It's not some kind of weird crazy torture porn. It's supposed to be good clean dismemberment, all in good fun.

Chick: The game lets you bleep out profanity and cut out the gore, presumably to make it safe for a younger audience. How important was that for you? Was that trivial to do?

Schafer: Tech-wise, we had that in from the beginning because we added dismemberment, and our lead programmer Nathan said that's just a flag and we can turn that off. I said, 'I'll keep that in mind.' We're able to just turn that on and off. But it did create some challenges for the programmers in the art team and the effects team, because sometimes you use blood to cover up a seam. What are you going to do when a character gets their head cut off and gore is turned off. We had to use that parental advisory sticker to cover up things. Like when Eddie flips off the camera, if you have profanity turned off, we had to cover up his middle finger. And there's the nudity thing. No one ever pushed me on that, but we never went full topless. I always remember my experience with National Lampoon, the actual magazine. You ever read that when you were younger?

Chick: Sure, absolutely.

Schafer: So National Lampoon, I would read it, and I would be into these really funny parodies of politics or movies or something, but then every once in a while you'd get to a page that had a topless girl. Especially in the later days when they were trying to get more viewers. There were more naked girls in it. Do you remember that?

Chick: Oh yeah.

Schafer: I hope I was reading the right copies. So I just remember as soon as you hit the naked girls in the magazine, you would stop thinking about the great satire and the comedy and you'd be flipping through it looking for more naked girls. Your brain would jump the rails and go onto another track, which was 'I want to see more naked girls now and that's all I want'. I was worried about that distraction derailing people in the game, so we left it out.

Chick: I want to talk to you about some spoiler stuff in the story, so the next few things we'll talk about are for people who've finished the game.

IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED BRUTAL LEGEND, JUMP DOWN TO THE LARGER TEXT TO RESUME READING...

Chick: So now we're in a spoiler zone. I'm curious about redeeming Ophelia at the end of the game. Was that a tough decision to make, whether or not to actually let her die? And do you feel that you pulled any punches with the way you did it?

Schafer: We went back and forth on that for a long time. The story used to be longer, and she used to be dead for half of it. At first I thought it would be great, it would be such an emotional moment. But I started to regret it later because, for me, the story became a story of a bunch of dudes. Dudes, bros, hanging out. For me, whenever I see a movie like that, I start to lose interest if that happens. Because even if it's an action movie, at some point, it's also a love story in some weird way for me. So to think of a random movie, you ever see that movie Alive?

Chick: The soccer team crashed in the Andes? Yeah.

Schafer: Yeah, the soccer players from Argentina or Chile. They crash in the Andes and it's a survival story about them starving to death in the snow and whether they're going to resort to cannibalism. I remember watching it and really being caught up in the story. And then at a certain point there's an avalanche and the last girl in the party gets killed. And I just remember tuning out of the movie. It's not like I was fascinated with that character or anything, but I was like, 'Oh, now it's a bunch of dudes and an airplane' and I started to tune out. So I felt that if Eddie lost his love story, he would lose his motivation in the story.

Chick: And I also have to wonder, too, on the level of analyzing Tim Schafer's subconscious, how much of that must have come from your affection for Eddie. Not wanting to leave your character with an ending like that.

Schafer: I've done different things with different endings. In Full Throttle, it ends up they could be together, but it doesn't fit with Ben's characters. He's like, 'I gotta be free on the road'. So he takes off. It's not like I always want super-sweet happy endings. It's whatever's right for the characters. Eddie had made a mistake and we gave him a chance to make up for that.

...MOSTLY SPOILER-FREE ZONE RESUMES AFTER THIS TEXT

Chick: Tell me how Eddie evolved as a character. I ask partly because doing an animated story means there are so many different points of input. There is your writing. There's what the animators and artists are doing. There's Jack Black's voicework. How is Eddie different now from how you first imagined Brutal Legend?

Schafer: Before we did the visual design, he was this grizzled old roadie. Like in Wayne's World 2, the crazy old roadie who knows everything. That's the first time I've brought up Wayne's World 2 in an interview. It's something like that, and he was going to look little bit like Lemmy, because we didn't really know how to use Lemmy yet. We weren't going to use Lemmy for the main character or anything, but we didn't think we were going to have any celebrities back then. We were just designing cool looking characters. So we had him kind of like Lemmy. Old and grizzled and badass. And then we just decided we wanted him to go a little younger, and he start to look like Jack Black and Glenn Danzig. That was a big turning point. And then getting Jack Black was a big turning point. I didn't write any dialogue before we got Jack, but as soon as we got Jack, I started writing the dialogue for him. Eddie never really sounded any other way. Another big turning point was that he didn't have a name for a long time. He was just "The Roadie". And I couldn't get any writing done for some reason. I had writers block. And then I hit on the name Eddie Riggs for the character, and all of a sudden I could write the whole thing. He was like a person now.

Chick: I could see in the story a temptation to play it like a Western. In the voiceover in the beginning and at the end, you seem to be going for a Sergio Leone "Man with No Name" coming into town. But you do end up personalizing him. Eddie is so informal and, again, affectionate, it seems. How much thought do you give to the names? Even Eddie's last name is a verb for what he can do.

Schafer: I care about names a lot. I really work on the names. I don't like to let anyone else name the characters. I fuss over it. I write pages and pages of fake names trying to brainstorm the right name. Sometimes it's easy. Like in Grim Fandango, I can just pick a Spanish word. It probably sounds ridiculous if you actually speak Spanish and you play Grim Fandango, because the characters are all named things like "coal" and "ore", but they sound great. But for this game, I pulled a lot from the world of heavy metal, which is why the characters are named Lars and Lita Halford. But later on, we actually cast Lita Ford and Rob Halford, and it was just embarrassing and confusing. For Eddie, there are a lot of reasons for his name. Eddie is the mascot for Iron Maiden. There's a character Meat Loaf plays in Rocky Horror Picture Show who looks a lot like Eddie. There's Eddie Van Halen. And Riggs is what a roadie does. He rigs things. At first, his name was going to be Rig. But that just sounds like a Kurt Russell movie from the 80s. 'Hey, Rig, we thought you were dead.'

OOPS, ANOTHER BRIEF SPOILER ZONE. JUMP AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE GAME...

Chick: When I first started playing and met Ophelia, I was like, "Oh, please. Really? You named her Ophelia?" But then considering where the story goes, I was like, "I can't believe I didn't trust Tim Schafer would know what he was doing".

Schafer: That one was a suggestion from our gameplay programmer Anna. I was like, 'I don't know what to call this girl' and Anna suggest Ophelia, which was a spoiler, too. Because in Hamlet, Ophelia drowns. So that one I stole from the team.

Chick: And she drowns in Hamlet because she was rejected as well. Did you intend a fakeout where the player thinks Doviculous is Eddie's father?

Schafer: That was among the things I was hoping to confuse the player with as they went to the ultimate revelation. I didn't purposely push it towards that. I don't know if there's a particularly piece of evidence, but I definitely wanted a fog over the last few missions about 'Wait, what's going on? Who's my dad? What's up?' Not specifically that one, because that would have been way too Star Wars.

...SORRY ABOUT THAT. SPOILER-FREE ZONE RESUMES HERE

Chick: You laid out the backstory with these legends illustrated with beautiful artwork. There are mosaics with voiceovers about the mythology of Brutal Legend. But then you hid them. I imagine there are lots of folks like me who finished the game, but missed the last few legends. Was that a tough decision, to take this rich mythology and artwork and to hide it?

Schafer: I wasn't actually going to do that at all. I had written that backstory to help me with the main story and Erik Robson, our designer, was coming up with things to do in the open world and he was, "How about we use that backstory and we actually show some of it". But I'm glad that came up, because it actually fills some holes in the plot. There are some things you don't understand if you don't see all the lore. We eventually made them easier to find, because they used to be really hidden. But we found that if people didn't see at least most of them, they might not get what we were talking about in the story.

Chick: You arrange different songs to play during different types of gameplay. You very clearly have it set up in the song list so that this song will play while the player is doing this sort of activity. And you also use specific songs to great effect for very specific moments. I'm thinking of the escape with the Dragonforce song or the "Mr. Crowley" reveal. Do you imagine those early on that way, or does the soundtrack fall into place after you've gotten the songs?

Schafer: Certain songs, like "Back in the Funny Farm" by Motorhead in the beginning, I always wanted to have in the game. And I definitely wanted "Mr. Crowley" in there, and I definitely had that scene imagined. And I always wanted to have the credits being videos of the team while "Never Say Die" played by Black Sabbath. You've gotten to that last part, haven't you? And it's not like it's one of Black Sabbath's most famous songs. Some people don't even like that album, but I like it a lot and I've always thought that song was great. It was a great, like, motto for the team.

That's only like a handful of scenes and song combinations. A lot of the other ones were found by Emily and her research on metal. Emily Ridgway, our music director. She uncovered a lot of those. Like Brocas Helm, which is so spooky in the spider mines. Some of them we couldn't get. That was probably the most heartbreaking thing for me. I really wanted this song by Randy Rhodes, a little solo song called "Dee" that's on Blizzard of Oz. It's this classical piece of music that's really pretty and short. I always thought that would be so great to use for the dream sequence where Eddie and Ophelia are kissing, right before the last battle. And I really wanted that in there. It's such a soft tender song, but anybody who knows anything about metal would know that was a super legit song. And anyone who has Blizzard of Oz knows that song. That's how great Randy Rhodes is. But we couldn't get clearance on it. At the very last minute, we had to pull it out. But luckily we had "Holiday" by Scorpions, which is another great tender metal song. And we didn't have enough Scorpions in the game.

Chick: Let's talk about the recording sessions. Do you have a separate voiceover director, or is that something you do?

Schafer: Both. Khris Brown did a lot of voice casting and directing. I showed up a lot of times for the main characters, because we kind of developed who their character is in the studio. So for all of Jack's sessions, I was there. And for all the celebrities from the world of metal I went because a) I wanted to meet Ozzy Osbourne, for crying out loud. And also we did a lot of work with them to create their characters, so I had to be there for that. But there were tons of other characters I wasn't there for that Khris directed all by herself. And she usually works alone like that. But we've been working together since Day of the Tentacle, so we know how to team up in that way.

Chick: I'm specifically interested in your relationship with Jack Black. I ask because there's a certain sincerity to what he's doing. It feels like it's something he's very close to. I'm curious about the process of recording with him. Was there any back and forth? Did you have to talk much about the character, or because you were specifically writing for him, did he just get it?

Schafer: From the beginning, we showed him the game, and the game seemed to click with him, which was great. Because that was the validation I totally wanted. I wanted Jack Black to like the game. It was speaking to some of the things he represents about metal, and the seriousness and ridiculousness of metal. So when he first came to the studio, we went over things like how deep should Eddie talk, and should he be super gravelly or whether he should be just normal. He's a really committed guy. He worked every line like twenty times just trying to get it to sound right, and improvising a little bit on top of it. And then he would hang out and talk about the game. He was such a friendly, down-to-earth guy. It was really fun to work with him. There was back and forth about who Eddie was, but he mostly seemed to just pick it up from the script.

Chick: Did any of the actors ever work together in the studio?

Schafer: They were all separately. Even when Kyle Gass came to the studio. With stars of this magnitude, you can't get them in the same room at the same time unless some major major seismic shifts happen. It's really hard and expensive to get them in the studio at the same time.

Chick: You used a lot of icons of heavy metal who aren't necessarily voice actors. Who took to it the easiest? Who seemed to really get what it was all about the be a voice in a videogame?

Schafer: They were all so different. Lemmy was the first one and we were all super intimidated because we were meeting our first celebrity. He came in and he was really quiet and we were, like, 'Oh, jeeze'. And Lemmy looks like Lemmy all the time. He looks like a rock star. He could walk out on stage in exactly what he's wearing all the time. He doesn't show up in sweat pants with a baseball cap on or anything like that. He's wearing his cowboy hat, and his cowboy shirt, and his cowboy boots, and he looks like he's about to go rock. So we were all really intimidated and then he just started smoking in the studio. Which is amaizing because no one gets to smoke indoors in LA. He was smoking and he had a drink. And he made me a drink and I started to calm down. He started talking about Medieval swords and battles. He turned out to be a huge Moorcock fan. You know that guy? He's really into ancient battles mixed in with fantasy. It turns out he's a history buff and he has a collection of antique swords back at his house. Then he said, 'Well, do you want to do this?' And he started reading the lines. He would do one take of every line and that was it. And if we asked him to do a new take he would kind of say it again, pretty similarly to how he did it the first time. We wrote the character to be Lemmy anyway. That's what we wanted. We wanted Lemmy's voice as is. We didn't want him to craft some other character, so that was perfect. He read it all super fast.

He was funny because he was the only person who out-and-out rejected lines that I had written. I wrote a line for him to say 'Top notch!' because at the beginning of this one album, he says, 'Top notch!' And I wanted him to say that. And he was like, 'Top notch? What is that?' And I was like, 'You don't like that line for some reason?' And he was, 'Well, I just don't think it's something my character would say'. 'Well, all right, what do you want to say?' 'How about "High score!" "High score!"' So I said, 'Okay'. I didn't really understand, but it didn't bother me at all to have a line rejected. I loved the fact that someone working on the game was into the character enough to feel like they thought the character would say this and not say this other thing. It was great that Lemmy got that involved.

So that was Lemmy. And then Rob Halford was just like this consummate gentleman and professional. I got this call ten minutes before the first session and it was from a number I didn't recognize. I answered it and I go 'Hello' and he goes 'This is Rob Halford calling. Tim, I'm so sorry, I'm running a little late'. He was apologizing for being late. He called me personally. I was 'Wow'. Usually you don't expect that. So he showed up and he did this character of Lionwhyte that was so funny. The Lionwhyte character's lines are so funny read by Rob Halford. I loved it, but I was 'You know, I bet Rob Halford fans might be disappointed because they're just seeing this crazy hair metal guy'. So we added the character of the Baron, who's a guy who looks just like Rob Halford from 1982. Whereas Lionwhyte uses the highest parts of Rob's voice, the Baron uses the lowest parts of Rob's voice, because he's got that eight octave range, you know. We added another character just because Rob was so good.

And then there was Ozzy, who was just a crack-up. He came into the studio making jokes. He was like 'Who does this guy sounds like?' The outtakes are hilarious, because he went through a lot of different cartoony voices. He sounds like a guy who's entertained his own children and - I don't know if he has any grandchildren - but he's someone who would be a crack-up as a dad, because he made these funny cartoon voices the whole time, but we ended up with a voice that sounded just like him. He just blazed through it and he was great.

Chick: Did you always intend for every single item in the forge to have a comment? Because it sounds like Ozzy had a field day with those.

Schafer: No, we didn't think we'd get another session with him. But we started added items to the forge. Some of them had lines and some didn't, but I was like, 'I'm just going to write lines for everything and hope we get Ozzy back in the studio'. It wasn't going to happen for a long time, but then it did when we got another session where he read all those lines.

Chick: The vendor in an RPG is usually a pain in the ass. You just want the guy to shut up so you can buy your items. You've created the best RPG NPC vendor. It was always a joy to know I was going back to the forge to buy stuff. Ozzy's contribution and that writing for the items was great.

Schafer: Well, that's nice to hear. Some of them were really fun to do because I didn't know if he'd get it. I'd write in little jokes from my own memories of heavy metal. There is - now I'm blanking on the song - but in a certain Black Sabbath song - oh, it's "Killing Yourself to Live" - right before one of the guitar solos, he's goes, 'Ssmmmoke it!' He's telling you to get high! And I was like, 'Oh my god, I want to use that'. So when you buy the guitar attack that sets things on fire, I wrote the line 'smoke it' and I was like, 'I wonder if he'll know what that's from'. When we got to the line, he was just doing things in he normal voice and he got to that line and he went 'Ssmmmoke it!' exactly in the right tone, and I was like, 'Yes! He remembers! Awesome!' So that was fun for me and anyone who's a fan of, I believe it's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, will hopefully enjoy that reference.

Chick: You mention these references, and I was never a heavy metal guy, so that sort of thing goes over my head. But one of the things that most surprised me about Brutal Legend is that you don't have to be a heavy metal fan.

Schafer: No. If you don't know what 'smoke it' means, it won't take away from your enjoyment of it.

Chick: But why do you think it works so well? You obviously were inspired by this music and these album covers. How would you explain why it works so well for people who might not know these?

Schafer: The albums are just crazy and they're fun. They have an unbridled creativity to them. It's an obvious attitude of ridiculous over-the-top excess. Even that phrase "over-the-top excess" is totally unnecessary.

Chick: That's very metal.

Schafer: Yeah, you just add to it, and keep adding to it. We use it as a background, but never as a requirement. There are certain universal things about heavy metal that appeal to people who might not be willing to make the commitment to buy a record or listen to a whole metal album, but they can see those themes and that fantasy of epic battle and the struggle of good and evil and the darkness and the insanity and those things, they are universal. People who wouldn't be willing to go to a metal show can certainly experience them in a piece of fantasy entertainment.

Chick: Well, it certainly worked out that way. Tim, thanks so much for talking to me for so long. I'm really delighted with the game and I hope it does well for you guys. This is the sort of thing videogames need more of.

Schafer: Thank you. That's very nice to hear.