Few things got a bigger reaction at E3 2014 when the crowd was whipped into frenzy over the return of a cult classic. Sony worked hard at its press briefing on June 9 to frame its PlayStation as the true home for serious gamers, and the announcement of the exclusive return of PC adventure Grim Fandango hammered that point home. LucasArts' beloved title is going to be commercially available for the first time in over a decade, in a completely remastered, presumably downloadable package.
First released in 1998, Tim Schafer's offbeat adventure game came at the height of his heyday at LucasArts, when he was churning out hit after hit like Full Throttle and the Monkey Island series. An adventure game melding elements of film noir and the Mexican afterlife doesn't sound like an easy sell, but Schafer had acquired some level of clout at LucasArts thanks to his prior successes, and somehow he was able to create the story of Manny Calavera, travel agent to the dead. Grim Fandango went on to win numerous awards and became a modest success.
Instead of fading from the spotlight as most games do over time, Grim Fandango's popularity has only risen in the years since its release, and a faithful community of fans has spent much of that time petitioning for a remake. Some of those fans have dug under the hood of the original game and upgraded its specs so that it can be played on modern computers. Amazingly, a few of them even fixed longstanding bugs and errors in the game. Where some developers might pursue legal action against anyone who alters and distributes their work online, Schafer did the exact opposite. After acquiring the rights to the game from Disney (which bought all things Lucas in 2012 and immediately sought partners for various corners of the Lucasverse) and joining up with Sony to finance the game, Schafer immediately asked for help from those very fans who'd patched the game over the years. Schafer's own developers at DoubleFine Productions will of course be working on the remake as well.
Should the Grim Fandango resurrection prove profitable, it's conceivable that other classic LucasArts adventures like Full Throttle or The Dig could find their way back to players via next-gen upgrades. We might even see LucasArts titles from other genres return to glory, such as X-Wing and TIE Fighter. In the meantime, DoubleFine is hard at work on Fandango's remaster, and Schafer has promised that it will eventually come to other platforms after a time of exclusivity to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
No release date has yet been announced for the remastered Grim Fandango.
