Tim Schafer — the game designer known for funny cult hits like Psychonauts, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle as much as his goatee and mischievous grin — is sitting in the San Francisco offices of Double Fine, paging through Heavy Metal Thunder, a paperback collection of rock-album artwork. He’s randomly discovered the cover image of Massive Killing Capacity, the third album by Swedish death-metallers Dismember. Backlit by an orange glow, a hulking armored mech suit with missiles for tusks and a chainsaw in each hand belches fire out of tubes on its back, lumbering forward on a battlefield littered with human remains. It’s as laughable as it is lethal.

“I mean, come on,” says Schafer enthusiastically. “How can you not make a videogame about that?”

As passion projects go, it’s hard to top Brütal Legend, an action/adventure game that Schafer says he’s “wanted to make for years and years. I was always a big metal fan, especially in high school. The lyrics and particularly the album art — the covers and the gatefold sleeves — were so evocative of these fantasy worlds. I wanted to fall into those worlds. But the only visuals that were available outside of the album art were the videos, and they usually had a budget of, like, $10 — one guy standing in the middle of a church with a sword. And in my head, when I listen to the music, it’s so much cooler than that.”

The goal of Brütal Legend, then, became to “fulfill the promise of all those lyrics and all that lore, and not have it just be another Tolkien-esque elves-in-tights fantasy, but a collection of everything cool that we like, all put together. You could go back to this fantasy world, but you bring your Camaro with you.”

Schafer’s long public silence on the game was finally broken in December, when EA Partners picked up the title after a business shuffle between Sierra and Activision Blizzard left the game without a publisher. And Schafer wasn’t necessarily quiet because he wanted to be. “Sometimes when you’re negotiating a business thing, you don’t want to mess up anything that’s going on, so you just have to keep quiet,” he admits. “You have to post dumb stories about your cat on the news blog. You’re stuck.” But no longer — the umlaut-riddled world of Brütal Legend will be open to all this fall, and appropriately, it all starts with the spilling of innocent blood.

You play as rock roadie Eddie Riggs — “a man out of time, who should have been born in the early Seventies,” reveals Schafer. “Eddie gets injured in a stage accident, and some of his blood gets into the mouth of his belt buckle — which he doesn’t know is an ancient amulet of time travel.” When Eddie wakes up, he’s in the same place he was before, only the foam-and-Fiberglass stage set has been swapped for real stone, and the audience has been replaced by piles of human remains. But the red-robed demons surrounding an enormous double-bladed axe…that’s new. Eddie quickly grabs the weapon — The Separator, which will have its own history revealed in time — and hacks the baddies to bloody bits. And since, as Schafer says, “the whole world is like an amplifier,” Eddie’s guitar, Clementine, is imbued with destructive magical force. He can blast Druids and Battle Nuns with pyrotechnics, electrocute them with zipzagging lightning bolts, or play a massive Earthshaker power chord to shatter the environment and send enemies flying.

Once slightly safe, Eddie realizes he’s atop a grisly temple made of skulls and corpses, and the landscape of this strange world is full of giant swords sticking out of the ground, towers of bone, pits of fire, wheels of pain, and other stuff you’d see, well, in the pages of Heavy Metal Thunder. “We tried to make every piece of concept art look like it could be a heavy metal album cover,” Schafer tells us. “That’s our decision-making process: ‘What do you think of this creature? Would you see it on an album cover?’ ‘Yes.’ Then it’s in.”

Before the Titans of this world ascended to become the Metal Gods, they left behind the plans and parts for cars, weapons, and all kinds of cool stuff, but nobody has had the mechanical know-how to figure them out…until Eddie comes along. “He’s a roadie, so he can build anything,” reasons Schafer. “He’s a very practical-minded guy.” It’s not long before he learns a few riffs on his guitar — by tapping button combos, Ocarina-style — to raise ancient relics. Eddie snaps together a hot-rod (“the Deuce”) and teams up with Ophelia, a comely member of the human resistance who becomes Eddie’s love interest. Ophelia battles alongside Lars and Lita Halford, who have good intentions and great charisma but lack the organizational skills to mount a proper revolution against the demonic Tainted Coil and their human turncoat leader, General Lionwhyte (voiced by Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford). “General Lionwhyte kidnapped all the young men living in this town and took them to a mine,” explains Schafer, as the Deuce barrels toward our destination. “But he didn’t even give them any tools, so they’re forced to bash their skulls against the walls.”

Finding the thick-necked men aren’t chained up but simply demoralized into submission, Eddie liberates the slaves with — what else? — the inspirational power of heavy metal, and turns these literal headbangers into his own army. A simple D-pad tap tells your boys to follow you, stay put, or attack a target — which in this case are glamtastic leopard-print statues of Lionwhyte that shriek “Teamwoooork!” Don’t worry, it’s not a strategy game, nor does Schafer even cite the minion-powered Overlord as an influence; the simple interface gives us the impression that commanding troops won’t be a burden, or stop you from cleaving nonbelievers in twain with The Separator.

From here, you’re free to explore Brütal Legend’s open world, finding battles and joining them at will. The Deuce makes it easier to get around, but you’ll also use it in races and in combat, since the car can be outfitted with weapons. You’ll buy upgrades with lighters, the cash-like reward for successful missions, sweet Deuce jumps, and “anything that we deem to be extremely metal,” says Schafer. As you progress, you’ll amass a bigger army of Ironhead forces and find new weapons — hot-rods with ballistas mounted on top, guys that carry enormous stacks of amps (which can be used to generate foe-crushing feedback), runaway rocker chicks with crossbows who ride on your shoulders (like at a concert, get it?), and chopper-riding Fire Barons who pack Molotov cocktails, which you can pour out to “create a ring of fire to burn your enemies,” notes Schafer. “Or just write your name.”

For our first glimpse at the game in motion on 360 hardware, Brütal Legend looks alarmingly complete…but then again, it has been in development since 2005, before Psychonauts was even finished. The stylistically exaggerated characters look fantastic, the prehistoric Age of Metal realm feels fully realized, and most of the voices are already done — including that of Eddie Riggs, who, in a perfect bit of casting, is played by Jack Black. Schafer says the louder half of acoustic metalheads Tenacious D was an inspiration before JB was even involved in the project. “We said, ‘Let’s make Eddie half–Jack Black, half–Glenn Danzig,’” says Schafer. “Not like the Glenn Danzig/Jack Black lovechild, but like they had made out a little bit.”

The team didn’t want to get their hopes up about getting Black to do the voice, but “someone told us he was a fan of Psychonauts, and we thought: ‘What? That’s crazy!’ So through people’s people, we got this meeting set up — just me and him on the roof of the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. I brought this binder of concept art and laid it all out for him, and he liked it. I really would say he’s starring in the game, because he’s brought life to Eddie Riggs. He’s a huge gamer — I’ve seen his Achievements, and he plays games like Mass Effect and BioShock all the way through and then plays through them again — so when I explain dialogue choices in the game, he gets all of that stuff. He knows, and he wants to make it good.”

Jack also gets metal culture — something Brütal Legend riffs on constantly. But will the average gamer get it, too? “It’s not a game just for metalheads,” maintains Schafer. “The jokes we’re making about metal, people also get outside of metal. At the end of it, it’s still a human story about Eddie’s aspirations and the love interest and stuff, and that’s stuff that anyone can relate to.”

Plus, the gaming landscape has shifted a bit in Brütal Legend’s favor over the last few years, thanks in part to a small developer in Boston. “We started pitching this game before the first Guitar Hero came out,” says Schafer, “and we got feedback like, ‘It’s good, but have you thought about making it a hip-hop game, or making it country?’ And then Guitar Hero debuted, and that stuff changed. Harmonix had such great taste when they created the tracklist. It’s obvious that music fans picked those songs. So metal really has had a resurgence.”

That, combined with other pop-culture touchstones, put Brütal Legend on track for its 2009 release. “There’s a scene in School of Rock where Jack is singing ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin,” Schafer recalls. “He does this thing, ‘Hammer…of the gods!’ And they cut to a shot of the girl in the van, and there’s an Iron Maiden sticker on the wall. And I felt, ah…it is rising in the zeitgeist…it’s time! It’s time for this game to be made!”