This game was one of my favorites. And many years ago I was pleased to learn that the lobby in the game was inspired by my Dentist's office (450 Sutter St in San Francisco).
God I loved that lobby and the art deco + mexican combination art style. I found a high res version of that mural as a wallpaper at some point but am coming up short for the link right now.
> ”We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.”
It is honestly one of my favorite documents. With the thought put behind it, it is of no surprise the game was such a well crafted masterpiece.
Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code.
I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)
Perhaps my favorite game of all time. I liked all of the Lucasarts adventure games, but this one was special to me. Completed it 3 times since it came out. I think it is something about the characters, the story, the world and the ambience in it.
I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?
It was all written at once, during the pre-production phase. We had daily meetings to brainstorm settings, characters, goals, puzzles, etc. The next day Peter Chan would come in with sketches or storyboards. Meanwhile I tinkered on making the engine work. Once the doc was done (and some locations/puzzles/characters were cut out to reduce the production cost estimate) and the engine was able to display one character walking around one temporary room, we went into production, where the team size ramped up and we churned through the document building locations, modeling, texturing, and animating characters, etc. This doc became foundational for anyone joining the team to learn what the game was supposed to be like.
and the music! I remember saving snippets of the music that were posted online well before the soundtrack was available (and taping some of the background music). Great stuff, capitalizing on the San Francisco music scene. Great wikipedia page on it now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Grim_Fandango)
A fantastic game in terms of atmosphere, artwork, characters and story but I found the puzzles to be too difficult and/or illogical and gave up pretty early into the plot.
Overall I remember being somewhat disappointed because of my struggle to make progress. Maybe my expectations had been too high - I was a recent convert to point n' click at the time and of course LucasArts being masters of the genre, meant my anticipation had reached fever pitch.
The puzzle design in Grim Fandango really isn't anything to write home about, and if that's the only reason you play adventure games, you're going to be disappointed. But the characters, writing, art, and sheer style are all so good that it makes up for it in my opinion.
Grim Fandango is probably even better now, since you can easily look up solutions to some of the more frustrating puzzles. The remastered version is also very good, changing just enough to make it play well on modern systems, without fundamentally altering the experience.
Can relate, I was too blockheaded to get most of the clues. Played it on a Pentium 150, 32 MB RAM and there was a lot of idle time waiting for the rooms and places to load, which added some more frustration.
But at some point I followed instructions to complete the game along to the end. It's probably fair to say that following the journey of the game is one of the fondest memories of my life.
I highly recommend the remastered version from 2015 on Steam. I bought it and did another playthrough. It brought back so many emotions, and getting insight from the developers let me really connect with them.
I love the game and I'm nostalgic for when games were extremely difficult but for many the best way to experience Grim Fandango without such frustration might be by watching a commentary-free playthrough on youtube. I don't feel viewing the work is meaningfully diminished by not being the button clicker. Once one is familiar with the work there is a great developer commentary that is available on youtube also.
And the voice acting was amazing. Especially for a game.
I think I have rose colored glasses as I remember the game being difficult in the sense of lots of walking around trying to find the solution to the last couple of puzzles. Having played the remaster, it was clear how clunky the controls were. But wow, I still love that game.
Same. I played until the part where we get to a forest and watched playthrough after that. Watching the playthrough confirmed that I made the right decision.
Yeah. It's best played these days with a walkthrough on hand to look up any puzzle that isn't immediately obvious. The vast majority of the puzzles aren't worth the effort. Great art, story, voice acting, and music, though.
It is interesting to look back on the genre given that, as far as I know, it either died sometime in the 90s or grew into something unrecognisable.
I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking.
For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like Return of the Obra Dinn captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.
Perhaps I’m biased because I played the game when I was 14 and had much more free time to dedicate to it, but it’s my impression that Grim Fandango was known for having few of the rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-it type of puzzles.
As for your question about “what is the player being challenged to do?” I had to sit and think for a bit. I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. You certainly aren’t being challenged to solve a mystery, but I’m not sure it really matters. I’m not sure if you mean it like Chess challenges you to vanquish your opponent and The Witness demands color/pattern/maze analysis.
It shone, pale as bone
As I stood there alone
And I thought to myself how the moon,
That night, cast its light
On my heart's true delight,
And the reef where her body was strewn.
Off sick from work - quite by coincidence I decided to start playing the remastered version after hearing many good things and people saying it was the best thing they've ever played etc etc.
I must say, it has not really grabbed me.
It sadly suffers from the common problem of these sort of games where you have to combine seemingly random items to make any progress. There are so far very few actual "puzzles" that you can solve, but instead mainly you just need to brute force the combinations of items to find that One Weird Combination that does something - most recent example: use a piece of coral on a rope so you can then climb the rope... wtf?! This is made even worse by the sheer tedium of having to walk backwards and forwards across the screens and trying everything on everything. Please game designers if you are forcing me to walk around aimlessly please at least make it quick to move around!
[+] [-] dunham|1 year ago|reply
https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter
[+] [-] makmanalp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diegs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jmacdotorg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] killion|1 year ago|reply
[first] "This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." -Winston Churchill
[last] "To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!"
[+] [-] krykp|1 year ago|reply
Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code.
Another one is `The Sims` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273
I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)
[+] [-] mwidell|1 year ago|reply
I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?
[+] [-] bmogilefsky|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iisan7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] derriz|1 year ago|reply
Overall I remember being somewhat disappointed because of my struggle to make progress. Maybe my expectations had been too high - I was a recent convert to point n' click at the time and of course LucasArts being masters of the genre, meant my anticipation had reached fever pitch.
[+] [-] ARandumGuy|1 year ago|reply
Grim Fandango is probably even better now, since you can easily look up solutions to some of the more frustrating puzzles. The remastered version is also very good, changing just enough to make it play well on modern systems, without fundamentally altering the experience.
[+] [-] jstimpfle|1 year ago|reply
But at some point I followed instructions to complete the game along to the end. It's probably fair to say that following the journey of the game is one of the fondest memories of my life.
I highly recommend the remastered version from 2015 on Steam. I bought it and did another playthrough. It brought back so many emotions, and getting insight from the developers let me really connect with them.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blamazon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wanderingmoose|1 year ago|reply
I think I have rose colored glasses as I remember the game being difficult in the sense of lots of walking around trying to find the solution to the last couple of puzzles. Having played the remaster, it was clear how clunky the controls were. But wow, I still love that game.
[+] [-] ksynwa|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pingohits|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|1 year ago|reply
I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking.
For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like Return of the Obra Dinn captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.
[+] [-] wishinghand|1 year ago|reply
As for your question about “what is the player being challenged to do?” I had to sit and think for a bit. I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. You certainly aren’t being challenged to solve a mystery, but I’m not sure it really matters. I’m not sure if you mean it like Chess challenges you to vanquish your opponent and The Witness demands color/pattern/maze analysis.
[+] [-] coldpie|1 year ago|reply
They're still out there! Scroll down this recent thread for many, many, many examples: https://bsky.app/profile/grundislavgames.bsky.social/post/3l...
[+] [-] mikhailbolton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] test1235|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewOMartin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] michelb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|1 year ago|reply
I must say, it has not really grabbed me.
It sadly suffers from the common problem of these sort of games where you have to combine seemingly random items to make any progress. There are so far very few actual "puzzles" that you can solve, but instead mainly you just need to brute force the combinations of items to find that One Weird Combination that does something - most recent example: use a piece of coral on a rope so you can then climb the rope... wtf?! This is made even worse by the sheer tedium of having to walk backwards and forwards across the screens and trying everything on everything. Please game designers if you are forcing me to walk around aimlessly please at least make it quick to move around!
[+] [-] vibhurishi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] curtisszmania|1 year ago|reply
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