Psychonauts is a platform game developed by Double Fine Productions that first released in 2005. The game was initially published by Majesco Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, Xbox and PlayStation 2; Budcat Creations helped with the PlayStation 2 port. In 2011, Double Fine acquired the rights for the title, allowing the company to republish the title with updates for modern gaming systems and ports for OS X and Linux.
Psychonauts follows the player-character Raz (voiced by Richard Horvitz), a young boy gifted with psychic abilities who runs away from the circus to try to sneak into a summer camp for those with similar powers to become a ”Psychonaut”, a spy with psychic abilities. He finds that there is a sinister plot occurring at the camp that only he can stop. The game is centered on exploring the strange and imaginative minds of various characters that Raz enters as a Psychonaut-in-training/”Psycadet” to help them overcome their fears or memories of their past, so as to gain their help and progress in the game. Raz gains use of several psychic abilities during the game that are used for both attacking foes and solving puzzles.
Psychonauts was based on an abandoned concept that Schafer had during the development of Full Throttle, which he expanded out into a full game through his then new company Double Fine. The game was initially backed by Microsoft’s Ed Fries as a premiere title for the original Xbox console, but several internal and external issues led to difficulties for Double Fine in meeting various milestones and responding to testing feedback. Following Fries’ departure in 2004, Microsoft dropped the publishing rights, making the game’s future unclear. Double Fine was able to secure Majesco as a publisher a few months later allowing them to complete the game after four and a half years of development.
Despite being well received, Psychonauts did not sell well with only about 100,000 retail units sold at the time of release, leading to severe financial loss for Majesco and their departure from the video game market; the title was considered a commercial failure. Psychonauts since has earned a number of industry awards and gained a cult following. Following the acquisition of the game, Double Fine’s republishing capabilities and support for modern platforms has allowed them to offer the game through digital distribution, and the company has reported that their own sales of the game have far exceeded what was initially sold on its original release, with cumulative sales of nearly 1.7 million as of December 2015. A sequel, Psychonauts 2, was announced at The Game Awards in December 2015 and is planned for a 2019 release.
