Grim Fandango: A Film Noir in the Land of the Dead
It was widely loved, poorly sold, and remembered as a symbol of the end of an era. It deserves to be remembered as a game.
The premise sounds like a pitch that could only survive in a golden age. You are Manny Calavera, a travel agent in the Land of the Dead, selling packages to the recently deceased for their four-year journey to the afterlife. The best packages go to the good; you have been getting the bad ones. Then you notice something wrong with the system, and the plot becomes a film noir of forged tickets, corrupt bosses and a woman named Meche.
Grim Fandango was released in 1998 by LucasArts for the PC and was directed by Tim Schafer. Its look and mythology are drawn from Mexican Day of the Dead traditions and, by design, Aztec beliefs about the journey to the underworld, filtered through the shadows and fast talk of 1940s crime pictures. The characters are skeletal figures, calaca-style, with faces that read as expressive despite the absence of flesh. That combination could have been a gimmick. It works because the writing takes it seriously.
Technically, the game was a leap for the company. It used a new 3D engine, later referred to as GrimE, in which polygonal characters move through pre-rendered backgrounds, allowing for a cinematic camera that cut between angles like a film. The company’s earlier adventures were mostly 2D. The music, by Peter McConnell, draws on jazz and Latin influences and has always been singled out for praise. Manny is voiced by Tony Plana, and the cast’s performances, like the script, treat wisecracks and sincerity as parts of the same conversation.
The design is a classic point-and-click adventure at heart: inventory puzzles, conversation trees, elaborate logic chains. The interface, however, had characters controlled directly, with keyboard movement, which some players disliked then and still dislike now. The puzzles have also been debated; a few are considered obscure. Those complaints are fair and worth acknowledging. They do not seem to have dented the game’s standing among people who care about adventure games.
Its commercial performance is the sad part. By most accounts, sales were disappointing, and Grim Fandango is often cited as an emblem of the decline of the graphic adventure as a mainstream genre in the late 1990s. That framing is popular and probably too tidy, since the genre’s fortunes were affected by many things, but the game’s failure to find a large audience is not in dispute. LucasArts moved away from adventures afterward, and Schafer left the company in 2000 to found Double Fine Productions.
What happened next is a nice story about preservation. After Disney acquired LucasArts in 2012, the rights to Grim Fandango became available, and Schafer’s studio secured them. Double Fine released a remastered version, with updated visuals, a remastered soundtrack and modern control options, in January 2015 for the PC and PlayStation 4, with other platforms following. That release put a game that had been hard to run on modern computers in front of a new audience, and it is one of the better examples of an older game being rescued by the people who made it.
The opinion part: Grim Fandango is one of the few games with a truly complete world. It has a look, a sound and a voice that are unmistakably its own, and it treats death as a place with bureaucracy and heartbreak rather than as an ending. Its sales figures do not measure any of that.