[mwidell]

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?

[bmogilefsky]

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.

[mikhailbolton]

There was a GDC presentation by the iMUSE team (Michael Land, Peter McConnel and Clint Bajakian) in like 2000 or 2001 that I wish I could relive and share. They showed some of the iMUSE interface and how they would mock up the interactive soundtrack.

They started with cornering Tim and getting him to describe each area/room, including the soundscape, and then they would temp in music and sound effects and then went and got a lot of SF street musicians to record a lot of the music.

I remember them showing a build of the game that had Tim describing each scene instead of the final audio.

It was amazing to see behind the curtain.

[simonswords82]

I’d just like to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my childhood and engagement with computers all that more magical. I went on the make a career and a livelihood from them and games like yours shaped me.

You guys must have impacted thousands upon thousands of lives with your hard work and creativity.

[wanderingmoose]

As a funny aside, I had applied to lucas arts around 1996 and never heard back from them. I ended up getting a job at industrial light and magic (as they were both companies under lucas digital) thinking I could then transfer over to lucas arts.

I have a near identical form letter job offer from lucas digital as Tim Shafer posted re his application: https://www.doublefine.com/news/twenty-years-only-a-few-tear...

But we would visit for the company store, and I would be nosy and go talk to people. This was during production of grim fandango and there was a tangible ramp up of stress in that building as the release approached. I remember one of the testers sitting there staring at the manny character on his screen and bemoaning, "I used to love playing games".

The end result was truly a standout though.

[mwidell]

Wow, didn't expect an answer straight from the horses mouth :) Thanks for making one of the best games of all time!

[mzs]

Thanks for all the fun and I only pirated one game you were involved with!

[iisan7]

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)