Grim Fandango

In one of E3’s more left field announcements, the classic Lucas Arts adventure game, Grim Fandango, is coming to PlayStation 4, Vita, and PC. During PAX director Tim Schafer, artist Peter Chan, and composer Peter McConnell were joined by executive producer Matt Hanson and director of third-party production for Sony Gio Corsi to take part in a panel to reminiscence about the game, and talk about its remaster.

It’s important to note that the upcoming Grim Fandango for PlayStation 4, Vita, and PC is not a remake. Schafer says that to remake the game today would result in an entirely different game. Double Fine is calling it a remaster, and for good reason. The team is digging through the game’s original assets (which they were thankfully able to recover basically in full) and upscaling them. When the game released originally, every asset had to be compressed to fit and run on PCs. What Double Fine is doing is finding all the assets created before the compression and using those instead.

Double Fine relates this re-release to a Criterion Collection version of a DVD, and to further the comparison, Schafer says there will be lots of extras included with the game. When asked if that meant the game would receive commentary, Schafer couldn’t confirm, but said he did like to talk.

Undoubtedly, one of the extras that will be included with the game is the short eight-minute, 2 Player Productions produced video documentary shown before the panel began. In the video, we saw members of the team digging through the game’s original, uncompressed assets and talking about some of the changes the game will include. The team is working with a talented modder who added point and click controls to the game so it can be implemented for the re-release. The video also showed the game is already running, in an early state, on the PlayStation 4.

One perhaps odd aspect of the remaster is the game will not be modified to display in widescreen. Though there are technical limitations for this, Schafer said the game’s cinematography was originally designed to be viewed in a full-screen format, so to change it would compromise the original vision.

Schafer also was insistent that the game’s awkward-by-modern-standards tank controls return. “They were very popular at the time,” Schafer said, and followed up saying that the tank controls are for the elite players. “That’s how it is meant to be played.”

Both Schafer and McConnell expressed disbelief at the existence of a Grim Fandango panel, though Schafer did joke he was surprised they weren’t holding it at the inevitable Grim Fandango theme park that should have existed following the success of the game. They never thought they would be talking to a huge audience about Grim Fandango 15 years later. Developing the game was apparently such an exhausting process that almost the moment the game was released, Schafer took three months off and tried not to think about the game. It was a pre-internet age, so he wasn’t able to get instant feedback on the game from players. McConnell recalled a similar catharsis following the game’s release where he layed on a picnic table staring at the sky for a few hours once his work was complete.

For Peter Chan's thoughts on the game, as well as Schafer's uncertainty about why Double Fine chose to remaster it, head to page two.

Chan, on the other hand, said he had been patiently waiting for this moment since completing work on the game. He loves the universe and was thrilled to revisit the work he did on the game. He said he’d always thought Grim Fandango could exist outside of its video game source material and be an animated film or a short.

For Chan, work on the game was a different process than most. He worked remotely sending in stacks and stacks of concept art every week. Schafer described receiving those packages of art as exciting presents as they were always excited to see what was inside. Chan left LucasArts just as work on Grim Fandango began, but was able to work out a long distance freelance deal to continue to be part of the team. His ultimate goal was to work on films and he actually drew all of Grim Fandago’s art with that in mind. In this way, his concept art was a little different than traditional video game concept art. The work he did on Grim Fandango eventually got him a job working with Tim Burton on his canceled Superman film project, and later the stylistic film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Looking over at Chan, Schafer said, “So this was basically a big portfolio piece for you?” Chan laughed, but basically agreed. “Happy to help. Happy to help,” Schafer joked.

McConnell was equally enthusiastic about the music as Chan was about the game’s art. McConnell said he even wrote music in the game’s style before they even started any work on it because McConnell liked that style of music and assumed it would surely be needed at some point in the future.

During the creation of the game, McConnell had some odd tools for composing the music. He had Schafer record detailed descriptions of each of the game’s areas with backing of some light bongo drums. He had one of the recordings on hand and played a clip – with bongos – of Schafer describing a seedy area with dangerous gambling going on. McConnell set up a program so he could click on a picture of a room and it would pull up Schafer’s recording.

The soundtrack for Grim Fandango will be re-recorded with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the same orchestra that did the music for Broken Age. It’s one of the only aspects of the game that will be completely overhauled.

During the Q & A portion of the panel, Schafer was stumped by a fairly straightforward question: why Grim Fandango? Why not a different classic Schafer adventure title? Ultimately he hesitantly landed on the idea that Grim Fandango is generally a very hard game to find and play. Shortly after release, it became incompatible with most computers, and hasn’t appeared on other platforms since, mostly due to technical limitations. Even after he said it out loud, though Schafer still seemed unconvinced with his own reasoning. When asked about the possibility of other remade Schafer adventure games, he said, “As long as everyone here buys 10 copies of Grim, we can remaster more of my old games. I’m definitely into it.”

There is no release date for the reamstered Grim Fandango yet, but development is well underway. The team is currently rummaging through the game’s original assets and files, but as mentioned previously, it is already up and running on PlayStation 4.