A Tweeted offer to back a sequel to Tim Schafer's cult favorite Psychonauts was "a semi-joke," said Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft and a guy who's not hard up for cash in light of that game's success. Notch rattled off a host of reasons why we shouldn't get our hopes up, especially the cost of the project.

"The budget for doing a Psychonauts 2 is three times higher than my initial impression, Notch wrote on his personal blog today in a post titled "Hype!" He also assumes (rightly, one thinks) that Schafer's Double Fine studio will be tied up with the Kickstarter project, which has raised $1.8 million in about a week.

"Tim and I haven't spoken much at all other than a couple of emails," Notch wrote. Also "a couple of other parties have mentioned also being interested in investing in it."

In one of those conversations, Schafer told Kotaku that he informed Notch the original Psychonauts budget was $13 million. It released in 2005. "I was like, 'I don't think you can make [it] for a million dollars,'" Schafer says he told Notch. Yet, "as soon as I mentioned the amount of money he said, 'Yeah, I can do that.'"

Evidently that figure moved up to about $40 million. That's not to say Notch hasn't seriously thought about it—he has, to the extent that he would be very specific about his reasons for doing so. "I would not be investing in this as a charity. It would be because I think the game would be profitable," he said. "And naturally, I wouldn't want to have any creative input in the game. It would be purely a high-risk investment in a project I believe in.

"All I know is that IF the numbers work out and IF they still want to do it and IF they don't decide to self fund a sequel by doing more crowd funding (which is honestly what I would've done if I were them), I would be most interested in doing this type of investment," he said.

Hype! [The Word of Notch]

Until about, oh, early last week, Psychonauts 2 seemed like an idea—or maybe a wish—that would never become a video game.

But then the man who made millions making Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, offered, over Twitter, to "make Psychonauts 2 happen."

Tim Schafer, whose Double Fine Productions made the first beloved Psychonauts game told Notch he'd be into it, but it was going to be expensive.

"I was like, 'I don't think you can make [it] for a million dollars.' The original game was, I think, $13 million, I think you have to match the original game."

"As soon as I mentioned the amount of money he said, 'Yeah, I can do that.'"

Imagine if other rich people—say, any game publisher in the business in the last half-decade—had been as ready to make this game happen.

Tim Schafer has pitched Psychonauts 2 to big video game companies. He has pitched the sequel to a game that was canceled, revived and then earned raves when it finally came out in 2005. But no publisher ever bit. They thought it was too creative or too obscure.

The failures frustrated Schafer, because Psychonauts, an adventure about a boy who can enter the minds of other colorful people and explore their thought-landscapes, wasn't supposed to be one-and-done.

"We had a lot of plot elements that were backstory in that [first] game that we planned on revisiting in the future and tying it back in," Schafer told me last week. "We had a longer story arc planned for those characters."

This is how he'd pitch the sequel to big game publishers: He'd show a 2010 fan trailer called Inceptionauts that mashed up the movie Inception and the first Psychonauts. "It's better than any trailer we ever had for the game," Schafer said. He says it even helped him remember how much he'd liked Psychonauts, which he had taken a break from thinking about after it came out. "It reminded me how much I like it," he said, adding that "I'd like to thank that fan for making the video. I used it to try to fund Psychonauts 2."

Schafer may have talked plot and setting to his potential Psychonauts 2 backers, but he demured from telling me how the new game would relate to the first, other than to tease that "I have ideas to take them to a more international setting."

He did, however, definitely talk to publisher suits about sales. "My pitch also involved how the game sold something like 400,000 copies initially. It wasn't enough for us to make money. But since then, through Steam and Good Old Games and all the places it's been, it's gotten in the hands of a lot of people." He recalls one day when a $2 Steam sale pushed Psychonauts even ahead of Call of Duty for revenue for that day. That, he remembers, was a good day.

None of this turned Psychonauts 2 into a real project scheduled to become a game you or I could play.

Then, on February 7, Notch Tweeted.

Schafer woke up to text messages from friends telling him to check Twitter. He thought he was being sued. No, the opposite. Someone wanted to give him money.

Soon, Notch and Schafer were talking.

"He said he had no idea it would get picked up like this. He said, 'Sorry for putting you on the spot, I didn't realize it would go so big.'

"I feel like I was being proposed to on the jumbotron at the baseball game."

Schafer sounds like he wants to say yes, but negotiations between him and Notch remain private. (Notch and his team at Mojang didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The man who oversaw the making of Psychonauts simply wants to work with the man who made Minecraft. "He's been pretty successful. And, when you look into it, it's a really inspiring story. He's just a regular guy. He didn't do anything sleazy to get it. He just made it himself, distributed it himself, it's a great story. I think we have a lot to learn from him, so I'd like to do something with him.

"And I'd like to make Psychonauts 2."

You want to know how Tim Schafer and Double Fine managed to generate more than a million dollars in Kickstarter cash? Look no further than this hilarious exchange from twisted platforming classic Psychonauts. Sometimes you just gotta make out.

Expect to see plenty of Schafer and friends in our weekly Great Moments in Gaming Humor segment. He and colleagues Dave Grossman and Ron Gilbert are responsible for a some of the most hilarious gaming experiences ever gifted to mortal man from on high, from the point-and-click adventure The Secret of Monkey Island to the point-and-click adventure Day of the Tentacle.

Apparently pointing and clicking leaves a lot of room for funny bits.

But 2006's Psychonauts is no point-and-click adventure. It's a platform odyssey through the fractured minds of the campers and counselors of a summer camp for psychic children. Children like Razputin, the game's hero, voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz of Invader Zim fame. Or Raz's girlfriend Lili, who get excited by the strangest things.

The entire game is filled with side-splitting humor, courtesy of both Schafer and Eric Wolpaw, half of the beloved gaming commentary site Old Man Murray, who later went on to write the dialog for Portal and Portal 2.

But those are games for another week. Now pucker up!

Got a favorite funny gaming moment? Send them to Fahey @ Kotaku Dot Com and they could be featured in the next edition of Great Moments in Video Game Humor.