Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango
Grim Fandango Lucas Arts Classics Cover Grim Fandango Lucas Arts Classics Cover
Developer(s)	LucasArts
Publisher(s)	LucasArts
Designer(s)	Tim Schafer
Engine	GrimE
Platform(s)	Windows 95 / 98 / ME / 2000 / XP
Release	September 30, 1998
Genre(s)	Adventure game
Mode(s)	Single player

Grim Fandango is a graphical adventure computer game released by LucasArts in 1998. It is the first adventure game by LucasArts to use three-dimensional graphics. Grim Fandango was lauded by critics and adventure game fans as one of the best games in the genre and beyond (see Reactions section), but was not a commercial success.

The game was the brain-child of Tim Schafer, who had previously worked on LucasArts' Monkey Island series as well as Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle. Based on Aztec beliefs of afterlife, the game charts protagonist Manny Calavera's four-year journey through the Land of the Dead toward the Ninth Underworld - the final destination of all dead souls - in search of a woman named Mercedes "Meche" Colomar.

Story

The story unfolds in four episodes, each set a year apart on the Day of the Dead, November 1. It is from this festival that much of the game's imagery is drawn — most of the game's characters look like skeletal calaca figures. Like these figures the characters are no skeletons but the depictions of souls.

Manny Calavera is a departed soul, serving the Department of Death in the underworld city of El Marrow by selling travel tickets to the newly-dead: the virtuous win passage on the Number Nine train, which takes their souls to Mictlan in four minutes instead of the four-year spiritual journey that sinners must take. When Mercedes "Meche" Colomar is not allocated the "Double-N" ticket she deserves, Manny realises his colleague Domino and his boss Don have been stealing these from the rightful holders and selling them off to the wealthy for profit, "sprouting" all who get in their way (shooting them with "sproutella"-filled darts, causing agonising death-within-death, flowers growing out through the bone). He joins the Lost Souls Alliance (LSA), a revolutionary group led by the charismatic Salvador, and leaves for the city of Rubacava in search of Meche, his demon driver Glottis in tow. Finding a job in a diner, he resolves to await Meche's arrival.

One year passes, and Manny and Glottis have become joint owners of "Calavera Café" by unknown means. He receives a message from Mercedes one night; she says she blames him for her struggles and when he tries to follow her onto a boat to Puerto Zapeto, she knocks him into the sea. Manny decides to follow her there anyway, lying, stealing and cheating his way to passage on the S.S. Limbo for him and Glottis.

One year passes, and Manny is somehow captain of the ship. After narrowly escaping assassins sent by Hector LeMans (pronounced "Lee-Mance"), leader of the Number Nine ticket racket, Manny and Glottis are shipwrecked and sink to the ocean floor - although, lacking lungs, Manny won't drown. He is captured by Domino and made to work for him in a factory on the edge of the world where enslaved angelitos (two child-angels) make light-bulbs for sale. Meche is there too and reveals to Manny that she only fought him off the boat to prevent him falling into Domino's clutches - ironically, Domino planned all along to set Manny working as manager of the bulb factory. Meche, Manny, Glottis, the angelitos and the other miners escape together on a salvaged ship. Domino chases after them and, after a melodramatic fight with Manny, he is crushed by coral crunchers attached to the ship.

One year passes, and after much arduous hiking across snow, they have reached the entrance to Mictlan. The rich who have purchased undeserved Number Nine tickets from Hector LeMans are not suffered to enter the gate: the train transforms into a dragon and leaps into a firey hell. Manny, Glottis and Meche return to El Marrow (via Rubacava, where they pick up femme fatale Olivia, an LSA sympathiser) to get Number Nine tickets. After winning them from Hector, Meche prepares to depart. But Olivia turns traitor, revealing herself to be Hector's girlfriend. She decapitates Salvador and forces Manny to enter LeMans' greenhouse. In true supervillain fashion, he shoots Manny with slow-acting sproutella, intending to inflict a lingering death but in reality giving him time to freeze the sprouting and help Salvador get final revenge on Olivia. He then causes the greenhouse sprinklers to spray sproutella on Hector, sprouting him. As Hector bursts out the greenhouse doors in agony, Manny throws his gun on the ground sadly, and walks away.

The bittersweet shows Manny and Meche departing on the Number Nine. As an earth-demon Glottis cannot leave, but tells them he is happy to remain. Meche askes Manny will they be still love each other in the next world. Manny says he doesn't know.

The game combines this mythical underworld with 1930s Art Deco design motifs and a dark plot reminiscent of the film noir genre. The design and early plot are reminiscent of films such as Chinatown and Glengarry Glen Ross. Manny, whose job combines the roles of Grim Reaper and travel agent, turns detective when he discovers that deserving souls are being denied their rightful post-mortem reward of direct travel to Mictlan on the Number Nine train, bypassing the four-year trip that other souls must take. Manny's investigations draw him into a tangled web of corruption, deceit, and murder.

Several scenes in Grim Fandango are directly inspired by such film noir as The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, Key Largo, and most notably Casablanca: in the game's second act, two characters are directly modeled after the roles played by Peter Lorre and Claude Rains in the film. Despite this, Tim Schafer stated that the true inspiration was drawn from films like Double Indemnity, in which a weak and undistinguished insurance salesman is involved in murder and intrigue.

Title

The final title derives from a poem recited by Olivia in Act II:

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

Characters

Many of the characters are Mexican and occasional Spanish words are interspersed into the English dialog.

Most of the characters smoke a lot, which follows a film noir tradition. The user manual observes that everyone who smokes in the game is dead: "Think about it."

• Manuel "Manny" Calavera (voiced by Tony Plana) - In atonement for his sins in life (although he seems not to know exactly what sins he committed to deserve his fate), Manny works as a travel agent (in actuality a psychopomp, at once a Grim Reaper and a put-upon salaryman) selling travel packages to the recently deceased. The righteous dead have earned a four minute trainride on the luxurious No.9 train through the underworld to the afterlife proper; to those less deserving Manny can only offer a walking stick and a four year walk. Manny himself is trapped in the undead city of El Marrow, working for the Department of Death until he can earn his own passage. But his efforts are continually thwarted when the good clients are snapped up by his office rival Domino Hurley, and Manny's efforts to find out why embroil him in a dark conspiracy. Manny is emotionally attracted to Meche but shows signs of denial towards his feelings for her. Calavera is Spanish for "skull."

• Mercedes "Meche" Colomar (Maria Canals) - Meche is Manny's illegally obtained client, whose case puts him on track of the corrupted management of the Department of Death. Even though she has led a virtuous life, the DOD's computer system mysteriously does not grant her a ticket for the No.9 train, and Manny has to let her travel alone on foot the dangerous way to the 9th underworld. After being fired from the Department of Death, Manny, feeling responsible for Meche's fate, tries his best to track her down. Most of the time, however, Mercedes manages quite well on her own. She is not only good, she is tough and smart as well.

• Glottis (Alan Blumenfeld) - Manny's replacement driver and later on a trusted friend, Glottis is an enormous orange demon/elemental spirit, who served as a mechanic at the Department of Death. When Glottis is fired from the Department of Death for helping Manny, he becomes his companion in the search for Meche. Gifted with amazing mechanical skills, Glottis improves the DOD's standard car into a hellish hot rod, known as the Bone-wagon. Glottis was summoned up from the Land of the Dead and given, in his words "One purpose, one skill, one desire", to drive, or perform maintenance if no driving jobs are available. If he goes without doing either task for too long, he will become sick and die. Little else seems able to kill him: he spends a portion of the game without a heart, for instance.

• Hector LeMans (Jim Ward) - Based on actor Sidney Greenstreet and The Third Man's Harry Lime, Hector LeMans is the boss of the criminal underworld of El Marrow, specializing in ticket profiteering.

• Salvador "Sal" Limones (Sal Lopez) - Salvador Limones is the head of the LSA (Lost Souls' Alliance), an underground organization that fights against Hector LeMans by all means necessary. Limones recruits Manny in order to have access inside DOD's system.

• Domino Hurley (Patrick Dollaghan) - Domino is one Manny's fellow travel agents at the Department of Death as well as his constant adversary. At the beginning of the game, Domino and Manny have a tense professional relationship as the former is more popular and more successful at the DOD.

Production

File:Manuel Calavera in "Grim Fandango" (1998).jpg

Manuel Calavera, the game's protagonist, in a noir scene outside a nightclub

Grim Fandango was released on CD-ROM only and was fully voiced. The game was designed by Tim Schafer, co-designer of Day of the Tentacle and creator of Full Throttle and, more recently, Psychonauts.

Grim Fandango was an attempt by LucasArts to rejuvenate the graphical adventure genre, which by 1998 was in a terminal decline. It was the first LucasArts adventure since Labyrinth not to use the SCUMM engine, instead using the Sith engine, pioneered by Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, as the basis of the new GrimE engine. Unlike Jedi Knight, though, Grim Fandango mixed static pre-rendered background images with 3D characters and objects.

Visually the game drew inspiration from various sources: the skeletal character designs were based largely on the calaca figures used in the Mexican Day of the Dead festivities while the architecture ranged from Art Deco skyscrapers to a Mayan temple. Staying true to its film noir style storyline, many of the game's locales visually evoke a feeling of a stylized post-war America, with its roadside diners, shady bars, hot rods and neon signs. Grim Fandango successfully mixed all these elements, with GameSpot noting the "beautiful art direction" and calling the visual design "consistently great".

The game's music, featuring a mix of an orchestral score, South American folk music, jazz, swing, and big band sounds, was composed at LucasArts by Peter McConnell and inspired by the likes of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman as well as film composers Max Steiner and Adolph Deutsch. The period music further helped to support the noir setting of the game and earned Grim Fandango recognition by GameSpot as having one of the best ten game soundtracks ever. The score featured live musicians, including a mariachi band from San Francisco's Mission District, and enjoyed a limited release as a stand-alone soundtrack album.

Gameplay

Grim Fandango was the first game to use the GrimE game engine. The player controls the protagonist, Manuel Calavera (Manny for short), with a keyboard, a joystick or a gamepad as he walks through the faux 3D environment. Manny automatically turns his head to look at objects with which he can interact; the player can then command him to do so. This can be slightly problematic where there are several items close to each other but in these situations, the player can scroll between the objects in sight.

Reactions

Grim Fandango received nearly uniformly positive reviews. GameSpot praised the game, saying "Grim Fandango thankfully avoids the obvious" and "derives its humor from its situations and characters [...] without making fun of itself, helping to create a believable world." PCZone emphasized the production as a whole, "with its expert direction, costumes, characters, music and atmosphere [Grim Fandango] would actually make a superb film." The review at Game-Revolution had Manny himself explaining that "as far as an artistic accomplishment goes, my adventure gets all 5 leg bones", while IGN summed its review up by saying: "the bottom line is that Grim Fandango is hands down the best adventure game we've ever seen."

On the other hand, the WomenGamers review, though enjoying the "creativity of the storyline, the characters, [and] the Mexican feel of the environment", found the interface clumsy, stating that it made the reviewer feel "like I had much less control playing the game due to these restrictions", a criticism also voiced, to a lesser degree, by GameSpot and IGN.

Despite its high quality, good reviews and numerous awards — including GameSpot's Game of the Year Award for 1998, beating classic titles such as real-time strategy StarCraft, first-person shooter Half-Life, and action-adventure The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Grim Fandango was viewed by many as the final nail in the coffin of adventure games. It has been often stated as a fact that the game failed commercially, even though, according to LucasArts, "Grim Fandango met domestic expectations and exceeded them worldwide". However, Grim Fandango failed to be a blockbuster hit unlike many previous LucasArts adventure games, thus tarnishing the image of the demand for adventure games for years to come.

Awards

Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences

• Game of the Year (nominated, 1999)
• Outstanding Achievement in Art/Graphics (nominated, 1999)
• Outstanding Achievement in Character or Story Development (nominated, 1999)
• Outstanding Achievement in Sound and Music (nominated, 1999)
• Computer Adventure Game of the Year (won, 1999)

GameSpot:

• Induction into The Greatest Games of All Time (2003)
• Best of E3 PC (1998)
• PC Adventure Game of the Year (1998)
• PC Game of the Year (1998)
• Best PC Graphics (Artistic Design) (1998)
• Best PC Music (1998)
• The Ten Best PC Game Soundtracks (1999)
• 10th, The Ten Best Readers Endings PC (1999)

IGN:

• Best Adventure Game of the Year (1998)
• 15th, Top 25 PC Games of All Time (2007)

GameSpy:

• 7th, 25 Most Underrated Games of all Time (2003)
• Hall of Fame (2004)

AdventureGamers:

• 7th, Top 20 Adventure Games of All Time (2004)

See also

• LucasArts adventure games
• Film noir
• Art Deco
• Day of the Dead

External links

• Grim Fandango Design Diaries
• Grim Fandango at IMDb
• Grim Fandango at Game Rankings