Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]

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.

That's wild. My dentist was in that building for quite a while as well.

> ”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.”

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.

Totally agree. I must've restarted at least three times because the design/atmosphere was enticing, but I couldn't engage with the puzzles

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 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.

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 :)

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)

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 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.

They're still out there! Scroll down this recent thread for many, many, many examples: https://bsky.app/profile/grundislavgames.bsky.social/post/3l...

makes me think of Final Fantasy 7, which came out around the same time