Grim Fandango

The original version appeared for computers with the Microsoft Windows operating system . 2015, the studio released Double Fine Productions with Grim Fandango Remastered a modernized version for various platforms.

action

The player takes on the role of Manuel "Manny" Calavera, a deceased who works as a travel consultant for the Department Of Death ( DOD ) in the realm of the dead in the city of El Marrow . Since as a living person he has not done enough good deeds to be allowed to travel immediately to the “realm of eternal rest”, he is forced to do this work in order to be able to finance the trip. The DOD has the task of organizing this journey for other souls. Depending on your lifestyle, it can be started on foot, in the car, on a ship or on the number nine train . The journey in number nine is particularly popular because the train only takes four minutes for the journey, which otherwise takes four years. The DOD travel advisors acquire customers on trips to the realm of the living. There they use the scythe to open the cocoon-like covers in which the souls of the newly deceased are and accompany them into the realm of the dead. Since Manny's actual chauffeur is not available at short notice, Glottis takes over his job - a massive demon who has amazing skills as a mechanic.

Shortly after his new colleague Domino Hurley took up his duties at DOD, Manny notices that there are no longer any candidates for number nine among his customers. Not even Mercedes “Meche” Colomar, which has an exemplary curriculum vitae, is entitled to a ticket, according to the computer. Manny's attempt to clarify this case costs him his job and brings him into contact with guerrillas around the revolutionary Salvador Limones, who have set themselves the goal of fighting corruption in the DOD.

Manny and Glottis join this underground movement - mainly to find Meche again, who set out on foot out of shame. Accompanied and supported by glottis, Manny embarks on an arduous, multi-year journey that takes her from the dead metropolis El Marrow (German: "bone marrow") via the port city of Rubacava ( modeled after Casablanca ) and the sea of tears to a border station where the gateway to the realm of eternal rest is. On the way he repeatedly comes across traces of Meche, which was obviously kidnapped by Domino.

As the adventure progresses, Manny realizes that both Domino and his boss are working with gangster Hector LeMans . They embezzle tickets for number nine in order to sell them to wealthy residents of the realm of the dead, who actually didn't deserve the comfortable journey. Manny eventually finds Meche in a coral farm run by Domino on the edge of the ocean, where Domino has locked her and other dupes as slave labor. Manny and Glottis eventually free Meche and the prisoners, while Domino is killed in a duel with Manny.

Manny manages to get Meche to the gate to find out that the number nine tickets found at Domino are all fake. Manny and Glottis travel back to El Marrow to get Meches ticket back from Hector LeMans so that she can get into the realm of eternal rest. In the city that is now under LeMan's control and has changed a lot, Manny, Meche and Glottis manage, with the help of Salvador Limones, to corner Hector LeMans despite a traitor in their own ranks and to track down the tickets. It turns out that LeMans was hoarding the stolen tickets himself, because the wicked crook of his life needs all the tickets to get into the realm of eternal peace himself. Finally, at LeMans' mausoleum, there is a final fight with Manny, with Calavera being able to take out the gangster.

Meche receives her ticket and Manny also receives one as “company compensation”. While Glottis stays behind (as a demon he is intended for a life in the realm of the dead), Manny and Meche climb number nine and drive away together.

Game principle and technology

For the first time since 1986, LucasArts no longer uses the SCUMM system for programming this game , but the new development GrimE with the Lua script language . This change results in a radical innovation in the controls and graphics style known from games. While the actions of the game character were previously controlled with the mouse in a 2D environment, at Grim Fandango only the keyboard is used for control in a 3D game world - three-dimensional figures composed of polygons act in front of pre-rendered , likewise three-dimensional backdrops. The game uses a modified version of the Sith Engine that was originally developed for Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II .

The introduction of GrimE and Lua for game control was cited at the time as one of the reasons for the commercial failure of Grim Fandango. The same argument was made in 2000 about the fourth part of the Monkey Island series - Escape from Monkey Island - which was also programmed with GrimE and Lua and also turned out to be a flop.

If the game is running on a fast computer, one task each in the second and third year (getting out of the elevator and jumping off the assembly line) can no longer be solved. On the latest generation computers, the game tends to crash at certain stations. Installing a new patch (available on the manufacturer's website) usually fixes this problem. At the same time, it solves the problem of missing subtitles in the cutscenes. An alternative third-party program launcher is available for compatibility with 64-bit Windows versions.

ResidualVM

In 2003, some developers from the ScummVM spectrum started the ResidualVM side project . Just like ScummVM, the aim was to make older adventures (re) executable on numerous platforms, but the focus was on games with 3D graphics. The focus of development was initially almost exclusively on Grim Fandango, so that current versions already fully support the game. In places, ResidualVM also corrects programming errors in the original versions, which the official patches of their time did not fix.

Production notes

The idea for Grim Fandango came from Tim Schafer , who developed a total of five games for LucasArts. The title can be translated as "grim / merciless fandango"; it refers to the classic dance of death and comes from one of the fandangos that the owner of the Blue Casket bar recites in her second year. In the original it reads:

“With bony hands I hold my partner,
On soulless feet we cross the floor.
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door.

It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast,
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will four years before we rest. "

The game was originally supposed to be called Deeds of the Dead , but LucasArts management did not want a reference to death in the title. Peter McConnell composed the soundtrack. The game was developed on a budget of $ 3 million. The development dragged on for almost three years. The game combines the myths of the Aztec cult of the dead with an atmosphere from the films of the 1930s, the dark plot of film noir , the drawing style of Hugh Ferriss and a Latin American-tinged soundtrack . Most of the people involved are similar to the calaveras that are sold in Mexico on the Día de los Muertos ; d. That is, like these, they are not skeletons (even if they are represented that way), but personifications of the souls of the deceased. Since they're already dead, they can't be killed either. However, with a special weapon it is possible to “sprout” them - namely to transform them into soulless plants. The rest of the people are demons (like glottis). Since they are immortal, a trip to the realm of eternal rest is out of the question for them.

Grim Fandango was released for Windows in 1998 and was only available on CD-ROM until a remake was released in 2015 . It was synchronized for the German-speaking market and provided with a complete German voice output. The character of Manny Calavera was dubbed by Thomas Piper . When it was released, it was LucasArts' last stand-alone adventure. Although the game was very well received by both the trade press and fans because of its unusual theme and black humor, it was not the great commercial success for the manufacturer like the games previously released by the game company. On the one hand, this is attributed to marketing errors by LucasArts, as the company did not manage to bring the new operating and graphics concept closer to the buyers. The control via the keyboard must be very precise so that Manny can grab objects or take a certain path (e.g. most doors in the game have only one point of view from which Manny can reach the handle); this deterred potential buyers. On the other hand, the adventure genre had generally passed its zenith in the second half of the 1990s and was increasingly being replaced by first-person shooters , action adventure games and real-time strategy games , which became more and more realistic with technical progress . Grim Fandango is therefore often mentioned as the game title that led LucasArts to turn away from the traditional adventure genre towards the exclusive marketing of Star Wars titles. It was only when the adventure genre experienced a renaissance in the mid-2000s that the LucasArts-Classics dared to reissue Grim Fandango . In 2008 a version that could be used on Windows XP computers came onto the market.

As part of the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014, the development studio Double Fine Productions announced that it would create a revised new edition for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita under the direction of company founder Tim Schafer . Porting for Windows PCs, Mac OS and Linux was also announced later. The version entitled "Grim Fandango Remastered" was released in January 2015 and includes an alternative mouse control on Windows and Linux PCs.

reception

From 15 aggregated ratings, Grim Fandango achieved a score of 94 on Metacritic . In addition to allusions to Casablanca , the German-language PC Games also discovered references to the films Dead sleep tight and Night on Earth . The magazine praised the humor, the puzzles, the jazz and big band soundtrack and the German synchronization of the game. Smaller technical inconsistencies such as path finding problems when navigating through the game world were criticized. In total, Grim Fandango drove the Monkey Island games off the throne of adventure games and took the top position.

GameStar 01/99: 88%
PC Player 01/99: 89% / Gold Player
PC Action 01/99: 90% / PC Action Gold
Power Play 01/99: 89% / Power Play direct hit

Others

The Monkey Island series contains two references to Grim Fandango . First, in the third part of the chicken restaurant, there is a skeleton, next to which is a badge that says “Ask me about Grim Fandango”. (A homage similar to the one used in The Secret of Monkey Island : There, in the SCUMM bar, sits Cobb from Loom , disguised as a pirate and wearing a badge that says “Ask me about LOOM”.) Second in the fourth part is one of Pegnose Pete's alternative identities “Manuel J. Calavera”.
Logos of the LucasArts adventures Sam & Max Hit the Road and Vollgas can be seen in Toto Santos' tattoo studio, which Manny visits in his second year. The Vollgas logo will also appear under the neon signs of the El Marrow skyline for the fourth year. Another acoustic Easter egg is the background music on arrival in Rubacava, which quotes the theme from Monkey Island II, which is played around a campfire on Scabb Island beach.
If you enter "BLAM" while playing, Manny will explode into its individual parts and immediately sit back together. He shouts “Ouch!”. There was a similar joke in Escape from Monkey Island .
If the player does not enter commands for a long time, Manny lights a cigarette and bridges the waiting time. In the manual for the game, the regular tobacco and alcohol consumption of the characters is commented on with the words: “All characters in this game smoke. All the characters in this game are drinking alcohol. All the characters in this game are dead. Think about it. "
The plot was inspired by famous films - Tim Schafer named Casablanca (design and plot in the second year), The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity as the works that would have influenced him the most in an interview . But there are also allusions to other films to be found; so there are Last year, for example, a sequence based on the finale of the British film The Third Man . Furthermore, the final fight between Domino and Manny at the end of the third year is reminiscent of a sequence of the fight between Harrison Ford and Pat Roach in Raiders of the Lost Ark (which was produced by George Lucas).
A July 2006 blog post on GameSpot spread the rumor that Tim Burton was directing a Grim Fandango movie, but it later turned out to be a duck . However, after the rumor got around to various blogs and other websites, it was ultimately printed in the September 2006 issue of Edge Magazine .
In the game The Night of the Rabbit , Jerry Hazelnuss has to deliver a letter from "M. Calavera - Travel Advisor".

Web links

Grim Fandango at MobyGames (English)
Grim Fandango in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Grim Fandango at Tentakelvilla.de

Individual evidence

↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . No. 3, 2015, p. 29.
↑ Bengor: Grim Fandango Setup and Launcher; version 1.5 ( english ) github.com. September 1, 2011. Retrieved November 7, 2011: “ There are two parts to this project; an installer and a launcher program. A replacement installer (setup program) for Grim Fandango. The installer that comes with the game can be problematic with newer versions of Windows and refuses to work at all on 64 bit Windows. An improved version of the launcher program that shipped with Grim Fandango, it has a number of features not present in the original launcher. "
↑ Grim Fandango in the official Wiki of ResidualVM (eng)
↑ Tim Schafer: Twitter message from May 9, 2011 ( English ) In: Twitter account of the Double Fine Chef . Twitter . March 11, 2012. Retrieved March 15, 2012: “ Um, people… three million dollars… that was the budget of Grim Fandango! "
↑ ^a ^b ^c Peter Kusenberg: Grim Fandango . In: PC Games . January 1999, p. 204.
↑ Nova Barlow: Walk, Don't Run ( English ) The Escapist . March 4, 2008. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
↑ PCGames.de: Grim Fandango: Tim Schafer interested in further remakes. Retrieved April 19, 2018 .
↑ Announcement on Twitter
↑ ^a ^b Metacritic.com: Grim Fandango. Retrieved June 1, 2017 .
↑ gamestudies.org: A Conversation with Tim Schafer
↑ Blog entry on GameSpot
↑ grim-fandango.com: Grim Fandango Movie?

[Retro-1] Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . No. 3, 2015, p. 29.

[2] Bengor: Grim Fandango Setup and Launcher; version 1.5 ( english ) github.com. September 1, 2011. Retrieved November 7, 2011: “ There are two parts to this project; an installer and a launcher program. A replacement installer (setup program) for Grim Fandango. The installer that comes with the game can be problematic with newer versions of Windows and refuses to work at all on 64 bit Windows. An improved version of the launcher program that shipped with Grim Fandango, it has a number of features not present in the original launcher. "

[3] Grim Fandango in the official Wiki of ResidualVM (eng)

[4] Tim Schafer: Twitter message from May 9, 2011 ( English ) In: Twitter account of the Double Fine Chef . Twitter . March 11, 2012. Retrieved March 15, 2012: “ Um, people… three million dollars… that was the budget of Grim Fandango! "

[PCG-5] Peter Kusenberg: Grim Fandango . In: PC Games . January 1999, p. 204.

[escapist_10_years-6] Nova Barlow: Walk, Don't Run ( English ) The Escapist . March 4, 2008. Retrieved June 17, 2011.

[7] PCGames.de: Grim Fandango: Tim Schafer interested in further remakes. Retrieved April 19, 2018 .

[8] Announcement on Twitter

[MC-9] Metacritic.com: Grim Fandango. Retrieved June 1, 2017 .

[10] studies.org: A Conversation with Tim Schafer

[11] Blog entry on GameSpot

[12] rim-fandango.com: Grim Fandango Movie?