But things never worked out with LucasArts, the original developer that also controlled the intellectual property for the game. or the supersaturated animals of the Star Wars Special Editions. He imagined the video game equivalent of a Criterion Collection Blu-ray, with special features but without the walkie-talkies of E.T. He and Double Fine tried for years to bring an updated version of the game to modern hardware. Plus, the longer they waited to do anything about it, the more the laws of physics would exact their toll on his games' saved data. The game remained playable, but that bug left huge plot holes for old and new players alike. He learned of grating bugs, like one that prevented Grim Fandango players from clicking on a character a second time. He knew and appreciated that Grim Fandango was still running, but he also knew that what ran was imperfect. Though his trajectory at Double Fine was aimed at doing new things, Schafer also wanted to revisit old things. He left LucasArts in 2000 and founded his own studio, Double Fine Productions, where for the last 15 years, he's created games like Brutal Legend, Psychonauts and Broken Age, the latter a modern adventure game that shattered Kickstarter records when it arrived on the crowdfunding platform in early 2012. They distinguished themselves from their contemporaries with their quirky characters and Schafer's baked-in wry sense of humor. More Paul McCartney than Axl Rose, he gained prominence in the 1990s at LucasArts creating now-classic adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, the Monkey Island series and Full Throttle. Schafer is one of the video game development industry's few rockstars. Over time, storage media like floppy discs and tapes degrade, as does the information written on them. Backing up isn't like chiseling the rosetta stone. Anyone can save and back up data - and LucasArts had a process for doing so - but, over time, that data becomes less reliable. While he's happy to know that fans of his games have kept them running, he's also worried about the original files. Polygon spoke with Tim Schafer, who wrote and served as the project lead on the original Grim Fandango, vice president of publisher and developer relations at PlayStation Adam Boyes, whose efforts culminated when he took the stage at E3 2014 to reveal Grim Fandango Remastered, and representatives from LucasArts and Disney Interactive to learn how, after so many years and false starts, they resurrected the beloved adventure game and brought the Land of the Dead back to life. And it wouldn't have been possible without the coordinated efforts of those advocates at Disney Interactive, Double Fine, LucasArts and Sony Computer Entertainment, many of whom played and loved Grim Fandango when it was first released - and some of whom built the original game. Today, more than 16 years after its release, Grim Fandango returns, officially, on modern hardware. Then, disc-by-disc and file-by-file, the San Francisco-based development studio founded by Grim Fandango creator Tim Schafer started making the adventure game again. Matt Hansen left LucasFilm with the source files for Grim Fandango.ĭouble Fine enlisted the help of an old LucasArts employee to help them unearth the data. He left with a storage tub full of outdated technology. United by their passion for the game, their frustration at its disappearance and their belief that it would thrive today, they worked out a plan.Īnd not long after that - after some awkward miscommunication, after everybody agreed and the deals got done and the papers got signed - developer Double Fine Productions producer Matt Hansen drove to LucasFilm, the parent company of LucasArts, to retrieve some old physical media. It remained in suspended animation until one day, not very long ago, a group of Grim Fandango advocates got together to see if they could change things. But officially, and for more than a decade, Grim Fandango was relegated to BitTorrent and eBay, without a sanctioned way to purchase or play it. A dedicated group of enterprising programmers even kept it running on modern PCs by reverse engineering its 3D-focused GrimE engine. Despite its official unavailability, Grim Fandango remained in the hearts and minds of many players, some of whom would go on to hold high-ranking positions at influential video game companies.
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