Grim Fandango

Why We're Nerding Out About The Re-Release Of Grim Fandango For PS4

One of the announcements at this year's E3 that got one of the biggest reactions was the news that Tim Schafer's 1998 LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango is being remastered for PlayStation 4 sometime in 2015. The game centers around a jaded professional grim reaper Manuel "Manny" Calavera's vigilante journey to reward a pure soul in the afterworld.

For fans of the game, like myself, it is extremely exciting news. Grim Fandango was a cult and critical success (it often appears on "Top Games Of All Time" lists), but a commercial flop — one that caused Schafer to leave LucasArt's and start his own company, Double Fine Productions. This year, that very company fought and succeeded to win back the rights from Sony to re-master the game for release on PS4.

Full disclosure: I'm not a gamer. I participated in gaming to the extent that, when I was little, I would spend hours watching over my brother's shoulder as he played games. However, Grim Fandango was one of the few games in which I became totally immersed. I think it's because it felt less like a game and more like a beautiful movie or a dream that you could walk around in.

Grim Fandango was a feat of design in so many ways. Playstation actually just released a 12-minute retrospective with Tim Schafer talking about the journey of creating the game. It was not surprising to hear that many of the designers, artists and composers who worked on Grim look back on it as some of their greatest and most rewarding work.

These design elements are what has kept the game alive amongst fans all these years and are why it's getting remastered 16 years later. The last gaming device I owned was a Gameboy Color, but I'm almost ready to buy a PS4 just to play the re-mastered Grim when it comes out. Here's why:

The Mexican folklore element: In the retrospective, Schafer explains that the story for Grim Fandango was inspired by the Mexican tradition of hiding a bag of gold on your chest and another in your coffin so that when you entered the afterworld, the spirits couldn't steal them. "Crime in the afterlife just seemed so intriguing," Schafer explained. The game takes place in the "Land of the Dead," which is like a purgatory where souls arrive to discover how they will be making their journey to the underworld. The options are: foot, car, boat or the coveted "Number Nine" express train. The plot hinges on a woman, Merecedes "Meche" Colomar, who Manny believes was cheated out of a ticket on the Number Nine by his scheming bosses.

The characters in Grim Fandango are based on Mexican Day of the Dead figurines called "calacas" and Spanish/Spanglish phrases are sprinkled throughout the dialogue. The first chapter of the game takes place on the Day of the Dead festival, which in Grim Fandango world is the one day where the dead get to visit the world of the living.



(calaca figurine)

The Film Noir element: "I was really getting into Film Noir and read every Film Noir novel I could get my hands on; going to film festivals; reading Raymond Chandler novels," Schafer explains in the retrospective. All the characters smoke cigarettes and speak in moody, dramatic, although often comedic, dialogue. At one point, Manny runs a bar similar to Rick's Cafe in Casablanca. Schafer credits the union of Mexican folklore and Film Noir with the magic of Grim Fandango: "As soon as we brought these two crazy elements together…it just sparked idea after idea. Sometimes you're just pulling teeth to have an idea, but with Grim it was like a firehose. It was such an explosion of ideas and creativity on that project."

The "Land of the Living": Manny enters the world of the living at one point and is confronted by this uncanny, 2-dimensional, nightmarish collage. Seeing something like this in a video game? Pretty unheard of. I imagine this is also how the creators of the game felt about the "land of the living" while they were holed up in their offices creating Grim Fandango.

Dialogue: Most of the characters in Grim Fandango have a pretty sharp, dry wit that is only enhanced by the fact that they're all dead. And when it's not funny, it's downright poetic.

Puzzles: If you've ever played any of the old Sierra text-based RPG adventure games like King's Quest or Spacequest, you know that you basically had to have written the game yourself in order to figure out some of the puzzles, plus they were all super-creative. Grim Fandango has more than a few pretty absurd, item-based puzzles to solve. Example: using a fire extinguisher to put out flaming beavers in a bone forest.

The environments: From the flaming beavers of The Petrified Forest, to the opulent "Blue Casket" club in Rubacava, to the Central American/art deco styling of Nuevo Marrow, to the awe-inspiring Edge Of The World complex, Grim Fandango's environments cement themselves in your imagination as if you'd really been there.

The plot: Put briefly, the plot of Grim Fandango has heart. It's about corruption, justice, love, struggle, missed opportunities, loneliness and time all wrapped up into a deliciously mysterious plot.

Glottis: Glottis is Manny's demon sidekick and both he and his souped-up company car are based on the art of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth who is best known for drawing cartoons and illustrations for Hot Rod magazines. Glottis was summoned up from the Land of the Dead with one purpose: "TO DRIVE. Or, to change oil or adjust timing belts if no driving jobs are open." He's basically an enormous orange boulder with bulging eyes and a wild, crazy smile. In the retrospective, Schafer talks about artistic design in the game: "We'd just stop and take a look at the screen and it'd be this skeleton with an orange face and a Russian hat, wearing a guard's uniform, standing in a sewer next to a "Big Daddy Roth" hot rod and a white alligator and we'd be like what is this thing we're making? This is insane. This is a crazy thing that no one's ever seen before."

Music: Schafer enlisted Peter Mcconnell to compose a Film Noir/Jazz score for the game, which happened to be his dream project. "Whenever you're getting a chance to do somebody's dream project they always kind of throw themselves into it," said Schafer. Mcconnell studied the "Main Title" in Casablanca for inspiration. The music in the game ranges from moody, to eerie to transcendental.

At the time, Grim Fandango's commercial failure was pointed to as an example of the end of adventure games. For Schafer and his team, the re-release of Grim Fandango is both a revival for the genre and a big thank you to fans who kept it alive and playable over the years through emulators and bug fixes. "This new release will take all of that good stuff that has been done to Grim Fandango over the last 15 years and put it together," Schafer said. "We fought hard to get the rights to re-release it and now we have to live up to that." I for one, cannot wait to get lost in the world of Grim Fandango once again.

