'Grim Fandango': The Game About the Dead That Refused to Die

In 1998, gaming was in the midst of a renaissance moment: Nintendo 64 hit a high water mark with Ocarina of Time, PlayStation got an evergreen franchise with Metal Gear Solid, and Half-Life started an ongoing chain reaction on PCs. Titles such as these would forever redefine the relationship people had to video games. And meanwhile, the PC adventure game genre was about to see a champion in Grim Fandango.

Despite all the layers of hell that stood against it, Grim Fandango has risen from the dead, remastered and polished for modern consoles, as documented here by Kill Screen's Jon Irwin. It's a game full of crime, skeletons and travel brochures; a game I vividly remember bringing the instruction manual in for show and tell. Figuring I'm not alone in loving Fandango, I asked modern game makers how they felt about the seminal skeletal adventure.

"The unfurling scope of it was so unexpected," said Scott Benson, animator and co-creator of the upcoming Night in the Woods. "The writing felt so much more sophisticated than a lot of in-your-face Hey Kids Check Out This Ka-razy Game that you see more often. It felt, and still does feel, mature in a way most 'Mature' games certainly are not. It's plenty goofy but not goofball. It's plenty dark but not gritty. Full of likeable characters you actually wanted to spend time with. And it was often extremely funny. That doesn't hurt."

By the time Fandango came out, point-and-click adventure games had become about as developed as you could expect. Sierra made them clever, LucasArts made them witty, and Cyan made them weird. These basic attributes became intensified in the second half of the 90s through a carnival of vivid new worlds and ideas. There were games designed by Douglas Adams, inspired by Kafka, and twisted by The Residents. Robert De Niro gave it a go. But if these were heading towards something—a zenith of the best traits, smarts, quirks, and atmosphere that a point-and-click game could offer—iit felt like it all worked towards Grim Fandango, and that work was worth it.

Legendary game designer Tim Schafer worked on the popular Monkey Island series before taking the lead with the biker-themed adventure Full Throttle. But Grim Fandango, a smoky noir about being a travel agent for the Mexican land of the dead, surveying several years of well-dressed protagonist Manny Calavera's afterlife, is considered to be his greatest work. (Or at least a photo finish with Psychonauts, depending on who you ask.) After LucasArts closed shop in 2013, it was thought that the door had permanently shut on Fandango, despite Shafer being a bigger figure in the game scene than ever.

As much as that humour and whimsy is critical to LucasArts' work, such as Sam & Max, Maniac Mansion, or Monkey Island, Grim Fandango was uncanny for finely cutting that silliness with a certain darkness, a well-balanced atmosphere that enabled you to take this setting seriously while simultaneously chuckling.

Between Fandango's speed demon compadre Glottis' overstimulation or Robert Frost balloon animals, there was conspiracy, corruption and danger. A good illustration of this is Manny's visit to the land of the living, where he spouts witticism standing in the middle of an unsettling, Dave McKean-ian Norman Rockwell.

"Honestly I was thrown by the change to 3D, and to the apparent lack of comedy (compared to other LucasArts games)," said Jake Rodkin, who worked on Telltale's Sam & Max and Monkey Island games, as well as one of the co-creators of the immensely acclaimed Walking Dead series. His next project is Firewatch. "I was in high school at the time, and had been playing LucasArts adventure games since some time in elementary school and had a lot of expectations… It seems ridiculous now to think that I was put off of Grim for being different because, even as a kid, the reason I loved LucasArts adventures was because they were different from the other games."

"The game's setting, the cinematic feel, the incorporation of Mexican folk lore mixed with film noir style and tropes, still feel as fresh to me today as they did in 1998, because in the 17 years since Grim came out, nobody else has come close to executing that style the way Grim did," Rodkin added. "I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but even in today's landscape Grim still stands out. I'm not sure if there's a salient takeaway from that, 'be really original and do an amazing job at it,' isn't that useful?"

Who better to do a Let's Play vid than Schafer himself?

Rodkin says it's not even the most obvious elements that stuck with him. Fandango did away with the user interface, the blocky command lists that took up half the screen in many LucasArts titles.

"Every step he takes on his four year journey of the soul, you're in control over," said Rodkin. "In a point-and-click game, you're almost the character's conscience, the voice over their shoulder, saying Maybe you should go over here (*click*), okay how about here? (*click*)." Rodkin said this factored greatly into Telltale's work.

When I played Klaus Lyngeled's 2013 game Stick it to the Man, a platforming puzzle adventure about brain parasites, I actually thought Schafer was directly involved. The slapstick and illustrative style seemed so reminiscent of Schafer's oeuvre, and Lyngeled said he gets this comparison all the time. The first time Lyngeled played Grim Fandango it had a particularly memorable impact, not only for its own engrossing world, but, being Swedish, it was his introduction to Mexican culture.

"Grim Fandango's universe fits much better together than most games," said Lyngeled. "It's just so strong and different. No one's really done that much, not even with movies. It's built on this really strong culture. And that noir feeling, I think it's present in Stick it to the Man, even if it's not directly noir style. Everything with LucasArts was about that quirky humour, it spoke true to me at least. It's smart, thoughtful."

"Grim's world felt FULL, for lack of a better word," said Benson. "The world felt realized, full of its own identities and spaces and sounds. That's all kind of conceptual but it's a real feeling you can get from some of the best games. I feel like current games like Kentucky Route Zero have this. They don't feel like they came out of any game setting or character playbook, they don't feel as though they are checking boxes at all. Year two in Grim is an excellent example of this. You get so much of the culture and politics and just what life IS in this world."

Benson thinks that, despite Grim Fandango becoming a PC blockbuster when it came out, he struggles to imagine a modern publisher green lighting such a project. It's so niche, it's such a risk, a game starring Humphrey Bogart in a sugar skull. But maybe Fandango would find its roots in the indie world; Benson's own game was a Kickstarter success, and that's not to mention Tim Schafer's own Broken Age, which was one of the platform's earliest successes, receiving over $3 million in funding. Benson seems to think Fandango broke ground for a lot of the ambitious worlds being programmed today.

"I think that's why it reminds me of the explosion of indie and smaller company games we're seeing right now," said Benson. "It has so much of the DNA of its creators all over it. You can see their love for all of these cultural touchstones and they feel included out of love, not out of cynicism. Also it's not like Mexican folklore or Casablanca references were the hottest things in games in 1998."

Like all great games, Grim Fandango illustrated what could be done with the medium, and set a certain standard for others to aim for. It's thanks to a world so developed that it doesn't have to choose between quirky or heavy, and certainly we can see some of that in Telltale's work, as well as Night in the Woods, and many other releases. Grim Fandango, the game of the dead, lives on in others.