Author: Sam Machkovech

Thursday evening's broadcast of The Game Awards included celebrities, trophies (real ones—not virtual ones on PlayStation), and music performances, but like in previous years, its most interesting content came in the form of world-premiere trailers for games expected to launch the following year. Perhaps the biggest brand-new announcement came from Double Fine, whose founder Tim Schafer took the stage to announce a crowdfunding campaign for Psychonauts 2.

The reveal teaser showed an admiral speaking vaguely about assaulting an island, then was warned that it was protected by "a comatose young girl who believes she’s herding a flock of sheep," at which point the admiral asked for the Psychonauts to do the job. After the trailer was shown, Schafer took the stage and told the crowd that it would immediately launch a crowdfunding campaign at fig.co, and that campaign is asking fans for $3.3 million to get a sequel off the ground for an adventure series that has enjoyed much more critical acclaim than it ever did commercial success.

"I wanna say, 'fuck yeah, we can do this!'" Schafer said in a follow-up crowdfunding request video, which confirmed that the $3.3 million ask will only make up a third of the game's total budget; the other parts will be paid for by outside investors and by Double Fine itself. (Schafer has yet to confirm if Markus "Notch" Persson will be one of those investors.) Fans of the company's last making-of documentary series will be happy to know that filming crew 2 Player Productions are on board to chronicle Psychonauts 2's creation, as well.

If you've seen actor, rapper, America's Got Talent host, and TeenNick chairman Nick Cannon in the news lately, you might have assumed it was due to his performance in an upcoming Spike Lee joint about violence in Chicago's south side. But on Wednesday, the entertainer had news from an entirely different dimension when he announced that he'd added another feather to his not-quite-Pharrell-sized hat: chief creative officer at Radio Shack.

Does this "hire" mean anything more than seeing Cannon's face on advertisements, as has been the case with many other major tech company celebrity hires? Radio Shack certainly wants us to think otherwise, as the company's announcement gave a vague list of Cannon's CCO duties, the biggest of which appears to be the "development of Radio Shack-exclusive products." Cannon will also be tasked with in-store music curation, event promotion, and helping the company "continue to grow" its educational and STEM-specific initiatives. Radio Shack didn't specify what existing educational initiatives it was running, and its home page currently offers no official information about such initiatives.

The announcement did recall a story from Cannon's youth, in which he broke a stereo that he'd taken apart then went to a Radio Shack in his home of San Diego to get help fixing it—where he eventually figured out how to assemble and modify his own sound systems. (In other interviews, Cannon has boasted that as a kid, he'd figured out how to connect telephones to turntables and "make hold music.")

Radiohead has been among the most prominent rock bands to embrace the Internet as a music distribution platform—particularly with its pay-what-you-want launch of 2007 album In Rainbows. Since then, its members have frequently spoken out about how musicians have been denied their hard-earned cash by both major labels and music-streaming services.

On Monday, pop music blog Consequence of Sound caught wind of an Italian magazine Q&A with lead singer Thom Yorke before the musician's planned performance at a concert linked to the UN's latest climate talks. According to Consequence of Sound's translation, the chat went all over the place and included Yorke's thoughts about how he discovers new music lately.

"I certainly do not use YouTube," Yorke told La Repubblica. He explicitly called the company out for not paying artists or only paying them "small sums," even though the service runs advertisements before music videos play.