Grim Fandango Remastered is being given away for free on GOG.com until Thursday, and you should grab it.
Not necessarily specific to Grim Fandango in particular, but the old Icons documentary about Tim Schaferâs career up to and right after launching Double Fine and Psychonauts is a fun watch, mainly for the nostalgia of revisiting the early 2000s era of games.
The studioâs story was one of my main motivational drivers for getting into the games industry, so itâs interesting to look back on now that Iâve sort of accomplished that goal.
Thereâs something that doesnât quite sit with me with the premise of this piece, despite making some interesting points.
Itâs hard to recommend a game this old without being able to say why itâs important, without being able to say that it represents some seminal moment where a new idea emerged into video games. Grim Fandango was not such a moment. It is very much an artifact of its era, one that I love. But I canât make a case for it as required reading, because it finds itself at the dead end of its ideas.
Itâs this bit.
Firstly, this very idea of ârequired readingâ - itâs something I very much dislike in discussions of art. The idea that something becomes important enough that you absolutely need to have seen/read/played it in order to be able to effectively take part in discussions feels like a kind of intellectual gatekeeping. Required reading suggests that if you havenât, you are somehow unequipped.
Secondly, even if I give a charitable interpretation of ârequired readingâ as someone saying that itâs something they highly recommend people play because of its significance, I feel a bit weird about the idea that we judge what counts as this on the criteria of âimportanceâ, what influenced later work. It is indeed interesting to discuss why someone was influential and what things were influenced by it. And something being that kind of watershed moment in the development of an artform is definitely a reason for it to be talked about, and re-played for its historical value, arguably.
Buuut⌠is that really the only reason something should be required viewing/playing/reading/whatever? I like the first Back To The Future for all I think that it has a ton of flaws in its themes and characters. I think itâs just a fun ride and itâs always been a favourite of mine. But more than that, itâs often a film that is taught in film schools because it does a particular thing really well - itâs really tightly edited. Nearly every moment in the film is doing something to advance the plot. Itâs really lean, it just does that particular thing super well. And thatâs enough for it to be ârequired viewingâ according to a lot of people teaching film.
But break it down, and itâs pretty obvious itâs not really an important film. It isnât doing anything with editing that was never done before or set the stage for future film making. Itâs just an excellent example of editing for plot and stands up as that.
Canât we say the same about Grim Fandango? That it does certain things particularly well? If nothing else itâs a game whose writing still feels sharp, witty and human at a time when the most popular games - first person shooters were at the sophistication level of the first Half Life. Thatâs not nothing. The ambition of its soundtrack too was quite something, and the art direction. I guess what Iâm saying is if we have to have a concept like ârequired readingâ, isnât it qualifying enough that is does certain things really, really well?
This is 100% on point. Especially in the case of genre games like Grim Fndango. Graphic adventure, platformer, one on one fighter, none of the most highly regarded games that fall squarely into one genre are groundbreaking, they just, like Back to the Future, did a few things extremely well in one package.
And thereâs no better âselling pointâ point than that. But I think thatâs what the author intended by ârequired reading,â not that youâre a lesser player for not playing Grim Fandango, but that itâs a peak representation of its genre. I can understand that, whenever a friend or family member gets a Raspberry Pi and asks me for retro gaming recommendations or is interested in all the 2D games on the PS4 or whatever, I mean Art of Fighting 3 is an extremely interesting and ambitious fighting game that I love and could write 1,000 words about but Iâm still going to suggest a King of Fighters game instead.
I donât think games should be suggested to people based on an arbitrary innovation metric. Again if someone gets super interested in a specific genre than yeah thatâs one thing, but otherwise nope.
