Grim Fandango was an adventure game released by LucasArts back in the day (1998 to be precise). While it gained critical acclaim, gamers of the time appeared to not quite be ready for this film noir-esque trip to the Land of the Dead, and the title didn't do so well in shops. In fact, the poor sales of the game contributed to the publisher closing their adventure game development, which in turn lead to the dismal decline of the once-popular genre.

However, the game did achieve a certain level of cult success, and the game's writer - Tim Schafer recently suffered a fit of nostalgia, digging through some old boxes to uncover the Puzzle Design Document for Grim Fandango, which we can share with you today.


If the name sounds familiar, Mr. Schafer has since gone on to head Double Fine productions, perhaps best known for the platformer Psychonauts and the upcoming Brutal Legend. He has won awards for his writing - including a BAFTA Best Screenplay videogame award for his work on Psychonauts.

Want to take a look back at (almost) where it all began? The Puzzle Design Document is 72 pages of game development documentation, and will give you an insight not just into how Grim Fandango was put together, but also how the industry works, how these documents are written, and what sort of crazy fellow Schafer really is.


In his own words, looking back at the document as he posted it on the Double Fine website:

Things I noticed:
-Man, game documentation sure has changed since 1996!
-People said the puzzles in Grim were super hard, and I’ve always maintained that this was due to a deep character flaw or mental illness on the part of the player. But now, reading this again, I’ve realized that holy smokes--Some of them puzzles were nuts. Obscure. Mean, even. I blame Peter Chan, because he will never read this post to know that I blamed him.
-Look how much stuff we had to cut just to get that game done in three years. The Pizza Demon! Giraffe Lady! Bernard, and my beloved Dillopede. And the five-puzzle action climax with Hector LeMans! If only we had one or two more years! Well, reading about them ten years later is just as good, right?
-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. As if anybody was going to read it all the way to the end anyway. Ha ha. Obfuscation triumphs again! I delight in Evil!

...so - anyone else suffering from a similar fit of nostalgia? Planning on dusting off the old disks tonight and trying to get the game to work under XP? (We do have a playable demo tucked away in the library!) ...or are you reading this with other things in mind? Is a career in game development now on the cards?

Double Fine's next title, Brutal Legend is currently without a publisher, following the Activision Blizzard merger, but fingers crossed that we'll still see it in 2009.