SPEED DEMONS

The Big Daddy behind TIM SCHAFER’s love of fast cars and ‘freeks’

- Jeremy Peel

To the trained eye—or rather the trained ear—there is a heavy metal logic to the world of Brütal Legend. From Black Sabbath come the Ironheades, blue-collar headbangers with bulging neck muscles. Their class war is with the Hair Metal Militia, the glam sellouts who got into bed with The Man. And the threat to everyone are the goths, who threaten to pull us all down into their gloomy mire.

Then there’s Fletus. A pond-green greaser who races you in side missions, he doesn’t have anything to do with the other demons of this fantasy metal world. “I’m too ugly,” he explains. Squint a bit and you can make out the gruff Geordie demeanor and signature flat cap of AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson. In a land where everybody else has picked a side, Fletus simply leans against his hot rod and scowls through the underbite of exhaust pipe teeth.

What is he, then? The short answer is that he’s a figment of Tim Schafer’s imagination. But that figment comes from a very specific place in the Double Fine designer’s head.

At the time of