There has been a significantly tedious amount of quarrelling over the topic of games as art, all of which has led to a torrent of unreadable blog posts, the occasional academic dissertation, and lots of swearing and exclamation marks. Henry Jenkins, Clive Barker, Greg Costikyan, and other men with facial hair (oh, and Roger Ebert) have weighed in on the debate and proved, ultimately, conclusively, that this is a song that will never end – at least not until it’s settled in the Circle of Death (Kritik Kombat). So we propose a new and hopefully somewhat less contentious idea: art as games. No longer will we bicker over whether Gears Of War deserves a pedestal next to Psyche Revived By Cupid’s Kiss. Instead we will examine how the social, emotional, and historical value of traditional art can be heightened, or at least better understood, by placing the art in an interactive context. Which brings us, rather seamlessly, to Grim Fandango.
Before we go on, though, Tim Schafer, DoubleFine wheel and Grim’s project leader, wants a word. Much as he loves the game – it’s certainly the one he talks most about from his LucasArts days – he’s eager to clarify that it was never intended as an artistic statement. “People always talk about how I’ve chosen maybe to do something more arty over the commercial stuff,” he says, perhaps concerned about future publishing deals, “but every game I’ve worked on has been a direct attempt to reach a broader audience, or maybe even sell out. And Grim Fandango had the biggest one of all, which was abandoning 2D graphics. We’d worked on D for so long, and then I was, like, okay, we’re going 3D because it’s so hot right now.”
While Grim may have courted the technological mainstream, the game’s entirely bizarre premise lends a lot of doubt to Schafer’s sincerity. Picture this, if you will: an interactive love story based on film noir tropes, set in an Art Deco underworld populated by chain-smoking skeletons. In pitch form, it sounds quixotic in the extreme. As an adventure game, though, it blew away all that came before it (and since). Grim’s perfect synergy of styles – Mexican folklore, Chinatown, Sixties hot rods – resulted in something that was unfamiliar and unique, and yet immediately compelling.
The story focuses on one Manuel ‘Manny’ Calavera, a travel agent in the Department of Death (DOD), who determines in what level of luxury a departed soul is permitted to travel to their final destination, the Ninth Underworld, place of eternal rest. After noticing his recent string of bum jobs – and being threatened with redundancy by his boss, Don Copal – Manny steals a perfect client from his sleazy co-worker (and archrival) Domino Hurley. When he sees that his latest client, the utterly beatific Mercedes ‘Meche’ Colomar, is only eligible for the cheapest deal (a walking stick and a promise she’ll get there in about four years), he begins to suspect foul play, and so begins his epic journey.
‘In Medias Res’ is a literary term pertaining to the technique of starting ‘in the midst of affairs’, or, if you prefer, in the middle of a story. The narrative may begin at the height of a turgid battle, or perhaps just as a spouse announces they’re filing for divorce. It’s a device that evokes curiosity in the reader. They immediately want to get to know the characters involved and discover how this situation came to pass.
With Grim, Schafer went one step further and started at the end of a story. Perhaps even beyond the end: the characters are already dead, and their lives are never revisited or explained. When we first meet Manny, he’s left whatever he remembers of his waking years far behind, and we’re expected to do the same. It’s a game that’s wholly about the journey of death – not life – and is all the more mysterious and engaging for it.
“It gives the characters depth,” Schafer shrugs. “I’ll often write reams of back story for every character, but I’ll never reveal that to the player; it just informs the things they do and say. And in their actions, you’re given a tiny glimpse into that back story, but you never see it as a whole. We know Manny’s been around. We don’t exactly know what happened to him, or what he did to end up where he is – a civil servant in the Land of the Dead, which is considered as a sort of punishment – even though he seems okay, so he has a real complexity. He’s in a grey area.”
Throughout Grim’s story, the mystery of Señor Calavera remains the game’s biggest question mark. Who were his friends? Why does he care so much about doing right by Meche? And of course, how does someone so demonstrably noble and capable end up in one of the least-desirable positions a Land of the Dead citizen could occupy? This isn’t to say he’s opaque – in fact, he’s one of the few adventure game heroes whose motivations and methods make a certain amount of sense – but that the little things you don’t know about Manny make him a very intriguing and enjoyable character to play.
Where Calavara piques your interest, it’s the environments that stun. BioShock’s ‘daring’ use of Art Deco visuals was widely praised, but Grim did it years beforehand and arguably to greater effect. From glorious metropolis El Marrow to the grimy port town Rubacava, Grim could be enjoyed on a visual level alone, but what truly made Schafer’s vision of the Land of the Dead so compelling was how he combined the Twenties architecture with imagery associated with Mexican folklore – more specifically, the festivities involved in the Day of the Dead festival, held annually on 2 November. This wasn’t a new obsession for Schafer – in fact, he’d been interested in the festival since college, and planned to do a game about it long before Grim actually went into development.
“I did anthropology in college, and we studied Mexican folklore. The festival the Day of the Dead was always a favourite of mine because of the way it was treated. It was this big festival and tourists loved it. It was a big party, but on the other hand, it was also a sombre event. It was about remembering your dead relatives and welcoming them back into your house. And they had these fascinating traditions: they’d put money in the coffin so they’d have money in the Land of the Dead, but they also stuffed extra money in the lining of the coffin, so no one could steal it when they got there.”
It was this strange idea that even in the world beyond our own, where souls go to rest, there’s a criminal element – that informed a lot of Grim’s less-scrupulous characters. Well, that and Chandler. “While studying the Mexican folklore,” Schafer recalls, “I read a lot of Raymond Chandler and other writers like him, and also watched quite a lot of film noir. No one had combined those elements before. And it just seemed ridiculous to me that even in death you’d have to worry about getting your pockets picked. It made me wonder about the world of crime in the Land of the Dead, and the two just sparked in my head. The idea came, you know, that maybe there was a scam going on down there, exploiting souls on their way to Mictlan, the Ninth Underworld.”
Much of the detail behind the ticket scam at the heart of Grim’s plot was derived from one of Schafer’s favourite films, Roman Polanski’s latter-day film noir classic Chinatown. In that film, private investigator Jake Gittes is hired to spy on the chief engineer of Los Angeles’ water department. When he discovers he’s been duped by his employer, who claimed to be the engineer’s jealous wife, he’s immediately faced with a lawsuit and the justifiable desire to uncover how this came to be. The plot, based on the California water wars of the early 20th Century, bears little resemblance to the fraud committed by Hector LeMans and his cronies in Grim Fandango, but the structure and atmosphere are instantly recognisable.
In doing this, Schafer took one of the most revered periods in cinematic history (and Polanski’s tribute to it), and demonstrated how its central tenets – expressive use of cinematography, emphasis on clever dialogue, and, you know, detectives – could easily mesh with the sleuthing and branching conversations inherent to the graphic adventure genre. In other words, Schafer created one of the most original and engaging works of film noir in recent cinematic history, but as a videogame. As a result, whether or not you believe videogames themselves deserve to be considered art, there’s little doubt as to Grim’s intrinsic artistic value.
Like many of Schafer’s games – including the upcoming Brütal Legend – Grim also draws from his childhood passions. Specifically, Manny’s some time sidekick Glottis. A giant, bear-like demon, Glottis is the DOD’s janitor when Manny first meets him. Once the player discovers his skill with cars, very soon thereafter, he sets to work on designing an Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth-style hot rod for Manny called the Bonewagon.
“When I was a kid,” Schafer laughs, “I just loved Big Daddy’s hot rod artwork for Kustom Kulture. They were crazy. And I loved how he’d draw the demons in them. What’s amazing is that they actually looked really happy – their tongues were flapping in their mouths, and they had these big, bloodshot eyes. I love that imagery. Interestingly, some of the figures created for the Day of the Dead festival looked a bit like Ed Roth’s demons. So that’s how I came up with Glottis. He’s a great character – he’s basically a child, really. He’s innocent. Manny’s the darker one, but Glottis lightens the mood, and provides commentary when Manny might be afraid to – he has no self-consciousness.”
Glottis was superbly written – he’s easily the funniest character in the game, and the one you least want to leave behind at the end – but what was most striking about him was his manic countenance. His appearance was simple to the point of being geometric, and the bulging eyeballs and twisting, spitting mouth stretched across his giant 3D head were strangely more emotive (and adorable) than anything modern graphics technology has been able to produce over the past few years. This doesn’t surprise Schafer – what was truly astonishing to him was what it took for it to be greenlit in the first place. LucasArts, after all, was the home of Ron Gilbert’s SCUMM, the 2D engine that had powered everything from Maniac Mansion to The Curse Of Monkey Island. And in the early days, if someone in the adventure game division suggested another technology supersede it, it was tantamount to blasphemy.
Then in 1992, Gilbert left to form Humongous Games. “Everything changed,” says Schafer. “When I first came to Lucas, Ron was king. He made SCUMM and worked on it, so as long as you were comfortable with the technology, you didn’t have to worry about that side of things. So, we focused on story. It’s just the way it worked. After he left, though, I guess people wanted more control over the technology, and tried some different engines. But most didn’t do as well as SCUMM because everyone knew about SCUMM. Eventually we felt the same way and just thought there was more stuff we wanted to do than what SCUMM could provide. So we made our own engine.”
The engine, in a tribute to SCUMM, was called GrimE (grime). And for the first time in Lucas adventure history, it was based on 3D technology. As Schafer is wont to remind us, this was a purely commercial decision. That said, he was eager to make the new and crude technology work for his vision. “3D games were really ugly at first,” Schafer admits. “At Lucas, we had artists doing gorgeous 2D backgrounds, and we’d become very proficient at that. 3D, though, was totally unfamiliar. Characters in 3D games then looked like big boxes with, you know, the details spray-painted on top. It was awful. But you know what? I realised that the papier-mâché skeletons they have on the Day of the Dead – they were little vignettes of life, like going to the dentist or going shopping, but with skeletons – were just like what 3D could do at the time. Little 3D figures with the skeleton painted on. So it worked for us, because our art reference became these 3D, simple sculptures.”
If the technology was unfamiliar, the writing made Schafer feel right at home. Although he’d become very adept at the sort of slapstick humour seen in Monkey Island and Day Of The Tentacle, with Full Throttle (1995), he started exploring darker territory. With Grim Fandango, however, he was given the chance to do so on an epic scale. “I think what was missing from a lot of the LucasArts games was sadness,” Schafer explains. “So I wanted to examine that and have that in the game. Of course, we also need to write for what’s appropriate to the story. The characters in Day Of The Tentacle needed that slapstick humour. You’re not going to have Bernard discover anything about himself, or something like that, because that’s just not funny. For Manny Calavera, however, slapstick comedy doesn’t work for him. It’s still got comedy in there – especially with Glottis – but sadness and despair is talked about in Grim. It’s not talked about in Monkey Island or Day Of The Tentacle. And I think it’s important to have some of that. People don’t get enough sadness and loneliness in games. They don’t examine that enough.”
One of the most tragic scenes in the game is when Lola, Manny’s friend, is found dying – in Grim’s world, a lethal gunshot wound causes the victim to crumble and sprout a bed of flowers – in Rubacava.She expresses her love for Manny, which she knows won’t be reciprocated – after all, he remains hopelessly in love with Meche. After that, she decays, and the flowers that have grown from her body are scattered into the wind. It’s not exactly box-quote material. Schafer laughs again: “I had a hard time selling it. They said no one will want to be a dead guy. Touché. I guess a lot of people don’t really fantasise about being dead. You know, they want to be a psychic kid, or a pirate, or a biker. But I sold it on the 3D premise. I was, like, we need to join the modern world. We’re going to be highly commercial.”
Unfortunately, three dimensions wasn’t enough to sell a game about skeletons in love. (Go figure.) While claims it was a Waterworld-esque flop are unwarranted, it certainly didn’t make as much as Schafer’s previous adventure. “I made money from it,” Schafer shrugs, “But it sold half as much as Full Throttle. But, you know, I guess that makes sense: Full Throttle was about a big tough-guy biker. More people are going to be attracted to that than a picture of a skeleton smoking a cigarette.”
Some say that because of its disappointing sales, Grim was, quite ironically, one of the final nails in the adventure game’s coffin. Frankly, though, Schafer couldn’t be happier. “There’s no need to keep it alive just for the sake of it,” he says. “It’s best to learn from it – take what you can from adventures, and apply it to other genres, as I did with platformers in Psychonauts, and as I’m doing with open-world action in Brütal Legend.”
The graphic adventure remains alive – and, occasionally, commercially viable, as we’ve seen with Telltale’s episodic games – but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that nothing has come close to what Grim offered over ten years ago. As a piece of interactive art, too, it remains largely unmatched. In an age when we’re rolling out top marks for anything with vectorised graphics, a nonsensical name, and made by under five people, Grim remains pure class. You may not be able to appreciate the art of it, but you can’t deny the art in it. And that, gentlemen with facial hair, is all you should ever need.