Canon or not?
Boyd Cooper's an interesting character.
In Psychonauts, compared to its sequel, we tend to get slightly less information on the characters whose minds we invade. It makes sense, especially for the inmates. Lili's in trouble, we're in a rush, we'll grab a few vaults and learn some basic information about our characters and learn what put them into their state of distress to begin with. Psychonauts is far more about quick-fixing the inmates' immediate mental distress compared to the sequel which is far more about actually talking to those characters in their mind and giving them tools to help them with long term recovery of their traumas and issues.
And I think no characters exemplify this more than Boyd Cooper, the only character for whom we arguably do no real good and don't really help. Raz's entire goal in "helping" Boyd is to get him to open the asylum and in doing so we unleash The Milkman, an implanted alter ego that burns down the asylum. We open the gate but we don't really help Boyd at all.
So, we never really learn much about him. We learn that he was once a guard at Hernando's, that he snapped when he was fired and burned the place down. We learn that Oleander implanted the Milkman but that's it. And besides the Milkman there's no explanation for any of the imagery in Boyd's mind. No explanation for the scouts. The den mother. No explanation for what it was that drove him to this paranoia, what it was that was eating away at him so badly that he snapped and became an arsonist just from being fired.
Yet there is reason behind all of these things. All of it pieces together but the vital pieces to do so are pretty much absent. But Boyd happens to technically be one of the most developed side-characters in the whole game.
For this, we're going to have to dive into the forbidden text - the character backstory document. Which... is ironically the most publicised and widely known document of its kind. But still, I tend to treat it with more hesistance than I do all the other leaked development documents because this is the only document where DF folks have explicitly expressed having a problem with it being leaked to the public years ago. Given the way some people treat it, there's some okay reasoning behind that.
If you somehow don't know, this is a Word document leaked with the Steam release of the game several years ago. I've talked about this leak many times but this particular file was the only one that survived from that leak for years until the specific manifest containing these files was eventually rediscovered.
This document contains brief (mostly) writeups detailing concepts for the backstories of many characters in the game. None of this information was ever intended to appear in full and much of it is contradicted by either the contents of the final game or the contents of its sequel. These storied intended to server as reference - they exist to help Tim Schafer's planning as well as to serve as inspiration for things like dialogue writers and voice direction. None of these stories were ever meant to be told in full, just fragments here and there, presumably to give them wriggle room in the future if they decided to fill in the blanks with something new.
The document explicitly states as much right at the top - "Most of these stories will never show up directly in the game. They’re just here as reference and inspiration for dialog writing, voice recording, etc. They might be boring to read, not that carefully written, or just pointless." Hell, for Edgar's backstory it even includes a note explaining that the backstory in this document has been supersceded by the cheerleader one that ended up in the final game. This is why I say the devs have some good reason to be upset about this leaking though - many fans prior to the sequel (but some even now) tend to regard the information in this document with more seriousness than they probably should, either ignoring, failing to realise, or choosing to disregard the fact that this is not meant to be some kind of secret withheld word of mouth canon.
So keep all this in mind as I discuss this.
However! Of all the backstories presented in this document, I think that Boyd's holds up best when scrutinised and compared with what is presented of him ingame. His entire mind is rife with pieces from this theoretical backstory and pretty much none of it is really directly contradicted. The backstory presented in the document fills in many of the blanks when it comes to explaining various elements of Boyd and it's clear that the writers and designers were drawing from this backstory heavily.
The paraphrased version goes like this:
Boyd lived much of his life as an only child with loving parents, his mother volunteering as a local scout troop's den mother and his father being a milkman. At some point though, Boyd's mother started an affair with a widowed single father of 14 children which became a huge scandal in Boyd's small suburban neighbourhood.
So Boyd's mother left his dad and took Boyd with her, leaving him surrounded by new faces and no longer receiving the same full time attention and care that he once enjoyed as an only child, leaving him to feel isolated. This isolation and resentment for his mother spiralled into a deep-rooted paranoia where he saw himself at the centre of an elaborate web of conspiracy against him.
We learn that Boyd dropped out of high school and that this was when he took on his job at Hernando's. Initially competent and doing well his paranoia led to him to harrass innoccent shoppers which eventually led to his firing, which only reinforced his beliefs and was what ultimately drove him to burn down the store.
And that's more or less where Boyd's story picks up from that of the game. Oleander implants his instructions, stations Boyd as a guard and we know what happens after that.
There are some inconsistencies - the backstory document seems to imply he never actually got a chance to burn down Hernando's though Boyd's ingame memory vault says otherwise. Whether this is a detail they decided to change for emphasis or not is up to intepretation and especially dependent on how much weight you give to the backstory document.
But from this, you can see so many pieces fall into place. The entirety of The Milkman Conspiracy is shaped around this backstory. It of course explains where Boyd's paranoia and difficulty in differentiating reality from fiction originates. It explains the eerie suburban neighbourhood, mirroring Boyd's childhood home. It explains who the den mother is, why the Rainbow Squirts serve as this eerie antagonistic force.
This is why I'm describing Boyd's backstory as purgatorial. It's in a strange spot - you can kind of piece it together if you're looking very hard but you have nothing to tie it all together. You have no way to know which pieces are part of his backstory and which pieces are jokes or part of his paranoia. Honestly, it's almost perfect for Boyd - much like how for him it's not clear what's real and what isn't, to someone unfamiliar with his backstory it's not clear what parts of his mind hint at it and what parts don't.
It's such a strange situation. You don't know what the hints look like until you're told the full story. And those hints are definitely there:
The den mother, of course, represents the mother Boyd resented. The Rainbow Squirts at least partially represent the children that Boyd was stuck with when his mother took him away. Have you ever counted the number of Rainbow Squirts in the cutscene when you walk into the Den Mother's home? There's about 13 of them. Include the one that you have to lure outside to sneak into the house and that means that there's 14 kids in the Den Mother's house in total. If that's not an intentional nod to this backstory, it's an impressive coincidence.
Beyond that, details from this story are referenced directly in Boyd's dialogue, which gives many hints further tying this story into the actual game. Nestled amongst his repertoire of seemingly meaningless non-sequiturs we can find lines like these:
These lines blatantly hint at his relationship with his mother and the 14 children Boyd ended up living with. But again, I do not think these pieces are enough that you could figure out anything substantial from them. In fact I don't think someone unaware of the leaked backstory trying to put together info for Boyd would even register the second line as being relevant. Maybe if you had for some reason chosen to count those Rainbow Squirts at some point and registered their count as being relevant which is unlikely considering I've known all this for quite some time and yet didn't even register their significance until this video counted them as part of a similar analysis. (I highly recommend this video and others in the same series by the way. It covers the same things I'm talking about here but is focused more on the actual psychology implications behind it all rather than just pointing out an oddity of development.)
It's such a strange situation. I suppose it's not that unusual, a large part of writing is all about choosing what to reveal to the audience and what to leave to interpretation. Just because all this backstory exists doesn't mean the audience needs to know it all - having gaps for people to speculate is fun. It's just quite bizarre in Boyd's case because of how specific the existing information is. I'd love to know if anyone has attempted their own independent interpretations of Boyd's past based on all the elements found in Milkman Conspiracy and how close they got to the "truth".
Of course I do recognise the hypocrisy and bias in me giving special treatment to Boyd's backstory in this document, a document which I've already explained I largely think shouldn't be given so much weight. But I'll admit, it's hard not to when the actual ingame connection is so strong. There's big ol' backstories for characters like Ford and Raz in here too which have of course been more or less rendered moot by Psychonauts 2 but even before P2 I think they were questionable since their actual in-game connections were practically nonexistent.
Even Gloria, the one other inmate with a fleshed out backstory that's still relevant ingame, doesn't really have anything of too much value in this document. Her leaked backstory pretty much just reiterates points the game already makes quite clear and fills in a few details with fluff that's not really relevant. We know the core points of Gloria's backstory already, hers is not cryptic and difficult to piece together in the same way Boyd's potential backstory is.
For this reason I do find their memory vault choices unusual. I suppose that with 2 vaults per level, and one of them being reserved to teaching the player of Oleander's involvement with Boyd, it becomes difficult to communicate this backstory effectively. They had to choose a single moment to focus on, and so they chose the moment that explains why Boyd ended up in the asylum. It's incomplete and leaves so many questions of why he snapped, why his mental state is so unstable and why so many elements of his level are the way they are, but it also works better with the Oleander vault than a vault that just explains his childhood would be.
Storytelling in Boyd's level is far more limited than it is in other levels. You don't have other characters to give you insight into his mind because the whole point is that he feels isolated. He doesn't have friendly characters like the dog painters or Becky and even the antagonistic forces are completely twisted by his delusion and woven so heavily into the plot he's fabricated in his own mind so they don't provide any information either. When you take that in mind it makes a lot of sense why they didn't really have the capacity to provide more details on Boyd's story in his level.
Though it is worth noting how useful this ends up being as a storytelling element. Like I mentioned at the start of the post, it becomes incredibly useful later on to demonstrate the flaws in Raz's methods in the first game. Boyd retroactively becomes a perfect example for how messing with minds is a dangerous game. We do not help Boyd even in the same way we help other P1 characters. All we do is beat the Den Mother up a bit and release the Milkman. I think one of the cinematics does show the Den Mother and Rainbow Squirts amongst the entities that leave his body as weird ghosts (for some reason??) but I largely think this is probably an oversight. I do not really buy that our defeat of the Den Mother has done much to help Boyd. The webs running throughout his mind were vast and deeply interwoven.
Of course the rushed, immediate life or death circumstances of P1 were very different but fortunately Raz eventually learns his lesson in P2. P2's first real mind plays out story-wise much like it would in P1 - Raz is in a "broken" mind with the goal to "fix" it. After the plot plays out Raz learns his lesson and there's a noticeable shift from then on where Raz begins asking permission to enter minds and begins more actively engaging and conversing with characters' inner selves to get a better grasp and understanding of their issues and help them cope and deal with them. (With a very special key exception in which Raz very literally fixes a broken mirror but that's a special circumstance)
I don't know to what extent Boyd's backstory existing in this state was intentional or not but it does work out at least. Of course it's a shame that we don't learn more about him, that we don't get to help him properly, but in a way that's kind of become the point.
And who knows, maybe despite all of this, they'll just release Psychonauts 3 where Boyd is a major character and they retroactively rework his backstory around the few points of evidence that exist in-game and throw out all the extra stuff in the leaked document. Looking forward to that.