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DevelopmentEdit

Background and project inceptionEdit

Tim Schafer was the project lead for Grim Fandango.

Grim Fandango‘s development was led by project leader Tim Schafer, co-designer ofDay of the Tentacle and creator of Full Throttleand the more recent Psychonauts and Brütal Legend.[19][20] Schafer had begun work on the game soon after completing Full Throttle in June 1995, though he conceived the idea of aDay of the Dead-themed adventure before production on the latter began.[21] Grim Fandango was an attempt by LucasArts to rejuvenate the graphic adventure genre, in decline by 1998.[22][23] According to Schafer, the game was developed on a $3 million budget.[24] It was the first LucasArts adventure since Labyrinth not to use theSCUMM engine, instead using the Sith engine, pioneered by Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, as the basis of the new GrimE engine.[25][26] The GrimE engine was built using the scripting language Lua. This design decision was due to LucasArts programmer Bret Mogilefsky’s interest in the language, and is considered one of the first uses of Lua in gaming applications. The game’s success led to the language’s use in many other games and applications, including Escape from Monkey Island and Baldur’s Gate.[27]

Manny’s office, from Peter Chan’s original concept art (top) to wireframe mesh (middle) to in-game representation (bottom)

3D designEdit

Grim Fandango mixed static pre-renderedbackground images with 3D characters and objects. Part of this decision was based on how the calaca figures would appear in three dimensions.[8] There were more than 90 sets and 50 characters in the game to be created and rendered; Manny’s character alone comprised 250 polygons.[8] The development team found that by utilizing three-dimensional models to pre-render the backgrounds, they could alter the camera shot to achieve more effective or dramatic angles for certain scenes simply by re-rendering the background, instead of having to have an artist redraw the background for a traditional 2D adventure game.[8] The team adapted the engine to allow Manny’s head to move separately from his body to make the player aware of important objects nearby.[8] The 3D engine also aided in the choreography between the spoken dialog and body and arm movements of the characters.[8] Additionally,full-motion video cutscenes were incorporated to advance the plot, using the same in-game style for the characters and backgrounds to make them nearly indistinguishable from the actual game.[28]

Themes and influencesEdit

The game combines several Aztec beliefs of the afterlife and underworld with 1930s Art Deco design motifs and a dark plot reminiscent of the film noir genre.[29] The Aztec motifs of the game were influenced by Schafer’s decade-long fascination withfolklore, stemming from an anthropology class he took at University of California Berkeley, and talks with folklorist Alan Dundes, with Schafer recognizing that the four-year journey of the soul in the afterlife would set the stage for an adventure game.[2][30] Schafer stated that once he had set on the Afterlife setting: “Then I thought, what role would a person want to play in a Day of the Dead scenario? You’d want to be the grim reaper himself. That’s how Manny got his job. Then I imagined him picking up people in the land of the living and bringing them to the land of the dead, like he’s really just a glorified limo or taxi driver. So the idea came of Manny having this really mundane job that looks glamorous because he has the robe and the scythe, but really, he’s just punching the clock.”[2] Schafer recounted a Mexican folklore about how the dead were buried with two bags of gold to be used in the afterlife, one on their chest and one hidden in their coffin, such that if the spirits in the afterlife stole the one on the chest, they would still have the hidden bag of gold; this idea of a criminal element in the afterlife led to the idea of a crime-ridden, film noir style to the world, triggered too many ideas that they had to then trim down.[31] The division of the game into four years was a way of breaking the game’s overall puzzle into four discrete sections.[2][8] Each year was divided into several non-linear branches of puzzles that all had to be solved before the player could progress to the next year.[32]

The team created a puzzle design document in the planning of the game, laying out branching non-linear puzzle paths for the player to solve within the context of each year of the game.[33][34][35]

Schafer opted to give the conversation-heavy game the flavor of film noir set in the 1930s and 1940s, stating that “there’s something that I feel is really honest about the way people talked that’s different than modern movies”.[36] He was partially inspired by novels written by Raymond Chandler andDashiell Hammett.[36] Several film noir movies were also inspiration for much of the game’s plot and characters. Tim Schafer stated that the true inspiration was drawn from films likeDouble Indemnity, in which a weak and undistinguished insurance salesman finds himself entangled in a murder plot.[29] The design and early plot are fashioned after films such as Chinatown and Glengarry Glen Ross.[2][7] Several scenes in Grim Fandangoare directly inspired by the genre’s films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, Key Largo, and most notably Casablanca: two characters in the game’s second act are directly modeled after the roles played byPeter Lorre and Claude Rains in the film.[1][29]The main villain, Hector LeMans, was designed to resemble Sydney Greenstreet‘s character of Signor Ferrari from Casablanca.[2]His voice was also modeled after Greenstreet, complete with his trademark chuckle.

Visually, the game drew inspiration from various sources: the skeletal character designs were based largely on the calacafigures used in Mexican Day of the Dead festivities, while the architecture ranged from Art Deco skyscrapers to an Aztec temple.[29]The team turned to LucasArts artist Peter Chan to create the calaca figures. The art ofEd “Big Daddy” Roth was used as inspiration for the designs of the hot rods and the demon characters like Glottis.[2]

Originally, Schafer had come up with the name “Deeds of the Dead” for the game’s title, as he had originally planned Manny to be a real estate agent in the Land of the Dead. Other potential titles included “The Long Siesta” and “Dirt Nap”, before he came up with the title Grim Fandango.[36]