DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY

About a decade ago, Jory Prum found an old piece of computer hardware that he had no use for. On a hunch, he took it for himself and kept it in storage, just in case.

Prum is a LucasArts veteran who began his work as a sound designer just after Grim Fandango shipped, and he's sure he knows what got him the job.

"I used to have two resumes: a sound resume and a geek resume," Prum tells Polygon. "Michael [Land, LucasArts composer] had just gotten my geek resume when I came for my third interview … he looked at it and says, 'So, how come you know Macintosh assembly language?' and I'm like, 'Um, because it's useful?'

"But I know that because I actually did know that and had a lot of tech abilities, they looked at me as somebody who would help out in the department."

His tenure lasted from 1999 through 2000, when he worked on games like Escape from Monkey Island and a host of titles based on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, which was released in mid-1999. His job was a culmination of a lifelong desire to work in the industry and at the company that created some of his favorite games and movies.

These days, he owns a recording studio just north of San Francisco, where he's worked with companies like Telltale Games — itself a studio founded by LucasArts veterans — recording sound and dialogue for series like The Walking Dead.

Last year, after Double Fine's Matt Hansen retrieved Grim Fandango's source files from LucasArts, that presented a new problem. Double Fine could get at what they had on floppy discs, but much of what remained was locked away on Digital Linear Tape, an outdated backup medium long used at LucasArts.

Composer and longtime Schafer collaborator Peter McConnell, whose credits include Double Fine's Costume Quest, Grim Fandango and the Sly Cooper series, needed to extract the information on those DLTs, so he emailed Prum for help.

Prum became familiar with the medium during his LucasArt stint, where the tapes were in heavy usage, and backing up was company policy. According to his research, DLT tape warranties boasted that their data would be viable for 30 years. The problem wasn't with the tapes, though. You can have all the tapes in the world, but that won't do you any good without hardware to read them.

That's when Prum's off-hand decision a decade earlier paid off. First thing in the morning on the day after he received McConnell's email, he headed to his storage unit and discovered that the hardware he held onto was, as he suspected, a DLT drive.

"The funniest part about this was, of course, I'd never even used this drive," he says. "I never plugged it in. I found it. Ten years ago, 11 years ago when I was starting to build my recording studio, I was taking all these trips of stuff out to the dumpster in the parking lot. And on one of the trips, there was a DLT drive sitting on top of the dumpster. And I'm like, 'Huh. A DLT drive. That could be useful.'"

It went straight from the dumpster to his storage where it sat, untouched and unused.

The DLT drive isn't the only old hardware that Prum keeps around. Just in case, he's got a PowerMac G4 with a SCSI interface, the kind with which the DLT hardware connects. So he fished out the right cable and plugged it in. The drive whirred to life, and the computer read the magnetic media inside.

Around that time, he also got an email from Matt Hansen, who had a tub of old LucasArts media. He brought 13 tapes to the studio. Some of them were labeled. Others weren't. The first four loaded without incident. The rest did not.

Inspired by his love of LucasArts and Sierra adventure games, Prum was determined to figure out what was wrong.

"To me, restoring those tapes was like an adventure game puzzle," he says. "That's the way I look at those things. It's a challenge. It's a puzzle. 'OK. How am I going to get this to work? What tools do I need? What computer do I need? What software? What's going to happen if I can't read the tapes? Oh, look! Half the tapes don't read.'

"The problem is, it's a puzzle that nobody else has the answer to."

Undeterred, the guy with the geek resume called the DLT drive's manufacturer, but found no help. So he scoured the internet, bought two more DLT drives and set out to uncover the content on the tapes. He worked the drives so hard that they overheated, and he had to let them cool down and start again the next day.

Using a program called Retrospect, he rebuilt the catalog files for each and, bit by bit, recovered Grim Fandango to the tune of nine hours per tape, including restoration. (The unlabeled DLTs, he discovered, were not related to Grim Fandango.)

When he was finished, he handed his work off to Peter McConnell, who took them to Double Fine. With the original files restored, the developer could assess its options.

REMASTERING GRIM FANDANGO

The question before Double Fine was easy to pose: How do you remaster a modern classic? Its answer relied, in part, on what people like Jory Prum were able to recover. Ultimately, though, it became a question of what a proper remaster is. And to Tim Schafer and Double Fine, that was always about the source material and authorial intent.

Since its release 16 years ago, Grim Fandango has attained a legendary status as the arguable apex of a genre. It fit squarely within LucasArts' tradition of creating ever more advanced, best-of-breed adventure games, but it also fit into an established pattern of declining genre sales. Schafer says that the game was profitable. But for all of its advances and critical praise, Grim Fandango became an argument against further adventure game development.

At its release, Grim Fandango was the logical evolution of a genre that grew up inside the PC gaming technological revolution of the 80s and 90s, and it represented some firsts for LucasArts. It shifted from the 2D sprites of Day of the Tentacle, the Monkey Island series and Full Throttle to a new engine with 3D characters. It evolved past the point-and-click trope and let users control Manny manually — with a keyboard, gamepad or, as the manual points out, one of several flight sticks. It was, in short, everything that came before, but cranked up: more characters, more story, more technology underpinning it.

Grim Fandango also marked the end of an era — or at least the beginning of the end. As interest in adventure games waned — or was overshadowed by up and coming genres like shooters and strategy games — Grim Fandango also became a swan song for the kind of games that developers like LucasArts and Sierra spent the last decade-plus perfecting. In the following years, LucasArts moved on to other genres, and Grim Fandango's creator moved on to his own company. His first project there, 2005's Psychonauts, was a platformer.

Just because Schafer wasn't making adventure games didn't mean he'd left them behind, as evidenced by his determination to remake his old games. Now, thanks to Disney, LucasArts and Sony, he had an opportunity to revisit one of his best. And the first order of business was to figure out what Double Fine had.

File by file, the developers cataloged the information pulled from floppy discs and DLTs to recreate the original game as faithfully as possible. Now, what would they do with it? The answer is straightforward: Not much, because nothing much needed to be done. To Schafer, remastering should be about delivering the original game with the original intent, but tweaked to take advantage of modern technologies.

In the tradition of recent remastered products like those in the Halo series and LucasArts' own Monkey Island franchise, Grim Fandango Remastered will ship as a single product with two distinct but related parts. The first half is a canonical version of the original game, tuned to work on modern hardware. For the second half — the remaster — Double Fine took the original assets and updated them for a world full of modern technology and high definition displays. And nowhere was that more important to the developer than Grim Fandango's cast of 3D characters.

"We could always just keep going and going," Schafer says, "but in the time that we had, we wanted to focus on stuff I thought would matter most to the players, which are the characters.

"We wanted to focus on stuff I thought would matter most to the players, which are the characters."

"The backgrounds still hold up. Typically, it took a day to render them, at the time. They were rendered in Softimage, and they were rendered as high res as we could, and they don't look as dated as the characters. The characters were rendered on the fly in 1998, so they all look like the original Tomb Raider. That's where you're looking most of the time, anyway, so we focused on that. We focused on making Manny look good, making his sections look right, making his lighting look right."

To make Grim Fandango feel more modern, Double Fine developers started with the original images that formed the texture of the world. By today's standards, those tiny images look blown up, blurry and pixelated. By recreating them at significantly higher resolutions, Double Fine was able to retain the original look and feel of Grim Fandango without much noticeable alteration. They didn't stop there, though.

Grim Fandango's influences are as plain as the skull on Manny Calavera's shoulders. The adventure game is built upon a foundation of classic film noir sensibilities and pulpy detective fiction. Strong shadows and art deco inform the design, while punny, Raymond Chandler-inspired dialogue and characters fill its mysterious world. In the late 90s, LucasFilm pushed the technological envelope, but technology also limited what it could do. In a chiaroscuro world, for example, it wasn't always possible for characters to cast shadows on the ground, let alone on themselves.

With a light touch and modern capabilities, Double Fine added a bit of color to the world.

"One of the programmers made the mistake of saying, 'Now we have dynamic lights,' so he could do stuff like, when [Manny] lights a cigarette, it could light up his face. And I was like, 'Oh! We've got to do that!' and he was like, 'Oh — I don't know if we can. Like, we could do it, but I don't know if we have time.'"

Schafer kept on the programmer, and that lighting appears in Grim Fandango Remastered. Light touches like that are the guiding force of Double Fine's remaster. Characters will cast shadows now. When they walk up to a window, venetian blinds will cast shadows on them, too.

Improvements don't stop at the visual, though. The game's composer, Peter McConnell, wasn't happy with some of the digital samples he used to create the score, according to Schafer. While they were able to recover the original Pro Tools sessions for the audio, Double Fine also rerecorded the score with full orchestration, thanks to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, with whom the developer also worked on Broken Age. Grim Fandango Remastered players will hear the score in a new way during the game's credit sequence.

Double Fine did update the game with one significant nod to modernity, though: Grim Fandango Remastered players will have new control options, beyond the tank controls that shipped with the original game. In a nod to modern control schemes, and as a tacit acknowledgment that some have trouble role-playing as tanks, players can now make Manny move wherever they point their analog sticks. Double Fine even enlisted the help of a Grim Fandango modder, Tobias Pfaff, to bring point-and-click controls. The PS Vita version will let players tap to move.

Though rethinking the controls required extra effort, it fit within the overriding goal to modernize the game unobtrusively.

"It was a lot of work, right?" Schafer says. "A lot of new icons had to be made and all this stuff, but when people are playing it, a lot of people are just not going to notice. The game's just going to work, and they're just going to be playing it. They won't notice that we completely rejiggered the controls to be intuitive."

As a bit of meta icing on the undead cake, Schafer also reassembled the original Grim Fandango development team, sat them down, heated up some microphones and recorded hours worth of developer commentary — further fulfilling his goal of giving Grim Fandango the Criterion Collection treatment.