double fine
I’m a fan of Tim Schafer. Quite apart from the fact that his Wikipedia page shows him lovingly holding a jar of Marmite (good man), he’s been a writer/designer/coder on some of the funniest, quirkiest games in history: Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. How can you not love this guy? It’s a terrible tragedy that Psychonauts didn’t sell better - sure its platforming was a little ropey at times and the game was padded out in places with uninspiring sections, but buried within this game were some of the most original, funny and bizarre ideas ever to grace the medium.
Psychonautswas, in my opinion, one of the most creative and best written games of the last 10 years. The sheer diversity of the environments, the fantastically quirky (and rather dark at times) sense of humour, the pure audacity of creating a game so off the wall that people tend to look at you strangely when you try to explain it: “It’s about a set of slightly maladjusted psychic kids who enter twisted worlds inside the minds of people with mental problems.