By the end of 1998 the British games press had been writing the adventure game’s obituary for months. PC Zone opened its review of Grim Fandango that Christmas by asking “Is the adventure game really dead?”, and answered that if anyone could bring it back, it was LucasArts. The company’s answer was a strange one: a comedy about death, set in a Mexican afterlife, told in the style of 1940s crime films, and played without the mouse pointer that LucasArts’ own adventures had made standard. Critics called it one of the best adventures ever made. Not enough people bought it, and it became the last adventure Tim Schafer made for LucasArts.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: LucasArts.
- Project leader, designer and writer: Tim Schafer. Kevin Bruner was lead programmer.
- Released: late 1998, for Windows PCs; £39.99 in Britain.
- Engine: a new 3D engine, later known as GrimE, with game logic written in the Lua scripting language. It replaced SCUMM.
- Remastered: by Double Fine Productions, released on 27 January 2015.
Manny Calavera, travel agent
The hero is Manuel “Manny” Calavera, a skeleton who works for the Department of Death in the Land of the Dead. Newly arrived souls face a four-year walk to their final rest. As Computer Gaming World explained, “the more virtuous your client’s life was, the faster they get there — and the bigger your commission”: a saint gets a first-class ticket on a ship or a train, a sinner walks. Manny is paying off a debt from his own life and is stuck with the worst clients. When a saintly woman, Mercedes, is denied the ticket she has earned, he sets out after her and into a conspiracy that is cheating the good dead of their journeys.
The story runs over four years of Manny’s afterlife, one year to each part of the game. “It’s like a four-year road trip,” Schafer told Edge in February 1998. “At each transition between years, he changes jobs, changes costumes, his personal relationships change.” Beside him throughout is Glottis, an oversized demon who lives for cars and becomes Manny’s driver. By the second year Manny owns a club in the port town of Rubacava, the part of the game its lead programmer later called the least compromised by the production schedule.
Film noir and the Day of the Dead
Schafer mixed two sources that had never met in a game. One was Mexican folklore, the Day of the Dead holiday on 2 November, which gave the game its grinning skeletons: the dead cannot have tattoos, so they wear scrimshaw carvings on their bones instead. The other was Hollywood crime films. Schafer named Chinatown, Casablanca and The Big Sleep to Edge. Computer Gaming World spotted more borrowings: Manny’s workplace owed something to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, his rival Domino Hurley to Al Pacino’s salesman in it, and the gambler Chowchilla Charlie to Peter Lorre in Casablanca.
The look came from the same mix. Computer and Video Games found the decor “strictly 1920s, with bits of Mayan and Aztec mythology thrown in”. Edge reported in August 1998 that no motion capture was used on Manny: the artists animated him by hand throughout, for “a kind of filmic stop/go animation look”, inspired by the characters of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. The dead could die a second time, by being “sprouted” into a bed of flowers. Schafer wanted Latino actors for the whole cast: “it would just look silly otherwise,” he told Edge.
The score, by Peter McConnell, was, in Computer Gaming World’s words, “a good mix of swing, bebop, jazz, and spiritual South American folk music”. McConnell later called it his favourite LucasArts work. It was recorded during a swing revival in San Francisco’s Mission District, and “the whole Grim score was made up of musicians from the Mission District scene in the late Nineties, all playing within walking distance of each other”.
Leaving SCUMM behind
Grim Fandango was the first LucasArts adventure that did not run on SCUMM, the scripting system the company had used since Maniac Mansion. Schafer explained why in 2013: “Ron and Aric had left and we really needed someone keeping up the engine side of SCUMM,” while the company’s best programmers were busy with 3D games such as Jedi Knight. Edge reported in 1998 that technology from LucasArts’ recent Outlaws had been reused, and the team wrote the game’s logic in Lua. When Edge first saw the game, Manny was a 250-polygon model, and the team had built about 90 sets, one for each room or outdoor scene.
Those sets were pre-rendered: computer-generated pictures used as flat backdrops, with Manny and the other characters drawn in real-time 3D in front of them. Kevin Bruner, the lead programmer, explained the catch to Edge in 2012. “The prerendered 3D backdrop was 2D in practice,” so an invisible 3D collision model had to be laid over each scene to tell Manny where he could walk. When it went wrong, Edge noted, a lift would not co-operate or Manny would get “snagged on thin air”.
No cursor
Schafer wanted rid of the interface. “I think that tricky interfaces are what keep mainstream audiences away from some games,” he told Edge early in development, and he wanted nothing on screen between the player and the world. In an early demo Manny walked about under the arrow keys, and the finished game was played from the keyboard, a joystick or a joypad. To show what could be used, Manny turned his head towards anything important as he walked into a room. Schafer said it “indicates objects of interest within the room without using intrusive cursors or icons, and it also gives Manny this appearance of constant alertness”.
Players found the controls the game’s weakest point. Computer and Video Games said it played “more like Resident Evil” than a point-and-click adventure: the player pushed Manny forwards and turned him, in the manner later called tank controls. Computer Gaming World found the interface “better than most third-person-on-a-background interfaces” but still called the game “a bear to control at times”: Manny sometimes turned round and walked off down a path the reviewer had not chosen, and it was easy to “use” an object when the puzzle needed it picked up. Bruner told Edge that losing the cursor also changed the puzzle design. A table could no longer hold five or six small things to click on, because Manny’s gaze had to pick each one out separately, so everything that could be used had to count.
Reception
The reviews were strong. Edge called it “one of the most complete, expertly produced and engrossing graphic adventures ever conceived”, while noting that its puzzles were “essentially no more sophisticated than those of Monkey Island or even the ancient Maniac Mansion”. Steve Hill’s review in PC Zone, which scored it 90%, said it “represents LucasArts at their creative best” and found the humour “in a far more bitter vein than previous outings”. Computer Gaming World’s Thierry Nguyen reckoned on 20 to 30 hours of play and picked out the beat-poetry scene, where Manny takes the stage at a club, as the game’s answer to Monkey Island’s insult sword-fighting. Its warning was about hardware: the game needed at least a Pentium 133 with 32MB of memory, and Nguyen advised 48MB and a fast CD-ROM drive.
Sales were a different story. In Britain Grim Fandango reached number one in the weekly Chart-Track chart but stayed there for one week, and had fallen to ninth by the time PC Zone reported it in January 1999. Retro Gamer later judged it “a huge critical hit” whose “sales didn’t match the acclaim, the PC games market having latched on to first-person shooters”, and said it was “loved by critics, but ignored by the majority of the general public”. The same Christmas issue of PC Zone that reviewed it carried a feature on the decline of the adventure, which the graphic adventure entry describes; its caption called Grim Fandango “a shining beacon for other adventures to follow”. Few followed. LucasArts used the engine once more, for Escape from Monkey Island (2000), which Retro Gamer called “the least-loved game in the series”.
Afterlife
Schafer left LucasArts and founded Double Fine Productions in 2000. Kevin Bruner went on to co-found Telltale. When Edge revisited the game in 2012, the adventure designer Dave Gilbert said the interface was “very, very cumbersome” and that “there’s a reason, I guess, why that interface was never used again”, while Edge still counted it “among the greatest tales ever told in videogames”.
Disney closed LucasArts as a developer in April 2013. Double Fine brought the game back, releasing Grim Fandango Remastered on 27 January 2015. Double Fine lists its changes as repainted high-resolution character textures, new dynamic lighting, the score “re-recorded with a full live orchestra”, and more than two hours of developer commentary. It came out for Windows, macOS, Linux and PlayStation 4 first, and later for other systems including iOS, Android and the Nintendo Switch.
Sources
- Edge issue 55, February 1998, pp. 54–61: preview and interview with Tim Schafer (the four-year story and “four-year road trip”, Chinatown, Casablanca and The Big Sleep, the Day of the Dead, scrimshaws, Latino voice actors, the 250-polygon Manny, about 90 sets, technology from Outlaws, the early arrow-key demo, “tricky interfaces”).
- Edge issue 61, August 1998, pp. 56–65: character animation feature (Manny’s head-turning and Schafer on it; no motion capture, hand animation and The Nightmare Before Christmas).
- Edge issue 65, December 1998, pp. 87–88: review (PC, £40; the puzzles and “one of the most complete, expertly produced and engrossing graphic adventures ever conceived”; the point-and-click interface replaced by joypad or keyboard control).
- PC Zone issue 71, Christmas 1998, pp. 113–114: Steve Hill’s review (£39.99, “Is the adventure game really dead?”, “LucasArts at their creative best”, the bitter humour); and the adventure-games feature, pp. 30–33 (“a shining beacon for other adventures to follow”).
- PC Zone issue 72, January 1999, p. 22: the Chart-Track top ten (number one for one week, then ninth; review score 90%).
- Computer and Video Games issue 206, January 1999: review (£34.99; the Department of Death, Mercedes, Glottis and Domino; “strictly 1920s, with bits of Mayan and Aztec mythology”; “sprouted”; keyboard or joystick control “more like Resident Evil”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 175, February 1999, p. 206: Thierry Nguyen’s review (commissions and clients, Glengarry Glen Ross, Domino Hurley and Chowchilla Charlie, the music, the beat-poetry scene, 20 to 30 hours, the interface and walking problems, system requirements).
- Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005, pp. 40–43: Tim Schafer profile (“A huge critical hit”, sales that did not match the acclaim).
- Retro Gamer issue 27, 2006, p. 39: LucasArts games guide (Grim Fandango “loved by critics, but ignored by the majority of the general public”; Escape from Monkey Island on an upgraded GrimE engine).
- Edge issue 237, February 2012, pp. 99–102, “The Untouchables”: Kevin Bruner and Dave Gilbert on Grim Fandango (the first LucasArts adventure not based on SCUMM, the GrimE engine, collision over pre-rendered backdrops, removing the cursor, the tank and camera-relative controls, Rubacava and year two).
- Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, pp. 72–79, “SCUMM Origins”: Schafer on why the game did not use SCUMM.
- Retro Gamer issue 116, 2013: LucasArts retrospective (the studio’s closure in April 2013); pp. 35–36, Peter McConnell interview (the Grim Fandango score and the Mission District musicians).
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020: Escape from Monkey Island as the second and last game on the GrimE engine.
- Double Fine Productions, “Grim Fandango Remastered” (web, secondary; the publisher’s own page, accessed September 2026): release date, platforms and changes. https://www.doublefine.com/games/grim-fandango-remastered