1996 Grim Fandango puzzle design document resurfaces on Hacker News
A scanned internal puzzle-design PDF for LucasArts' 1998 adventure game Grim Fandango, first posted online in 2008, gets a fresh wave of attention.
What to know
- The item is a resurfaced 1996 internal puzzle-design document for the adventure game Grim Fandango, hosted since 2008 at gameshelf.jmac.org.
- Coverage is limited to its Hacker News submission (64 points, 10 comments) and mirrored RSS/Mastodon postings, with no additional reporting or named commentary available.
kelseyfrog Hacker News submitter
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Document resurfaces on Hacker News
User kelseyfrog submits the decade-old PDF link to Hacker News; the submission reaches 64 points with 10 comments, and is also picked up via the HN Frontpage RSS feed and cross-posted on Mastodon.
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Nice, Tim Schafer is someone whose writing I really admire, if you haven't checked it out yet Double Fine (the studio he leads) documented the entire (7 year!) development cycle of Psychonauts 2 in a 32 episode documentary series, and it in my opinion one of the best documentaries ever made. It covers a lot of cool stuff, like Covid, them getting…
2 more of the top 3 · 17 posts in this stretch
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Loved this as a teen, although I actually don't think I ever got past year 3.It's interesting to see how the "non-linearity" is still very linear, it's just that you have three different goals at once.I just finished re-playing Day of the Tentacle with my kid, and what's amazing about that is the intersecting non-linearity. The three different…
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I found Grim Fandango in a pile of discounted games as a tween in the 2000s. There was a cool skeleton in a suit on the front cover, so I bought it based on that.Even though I didn't understand most references and sarcasm, few games have grabbed my attention as Grim Fandango did. The art work, the music, the writing. The whole game oozes of style…
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background
Document is uploaded to gameshelf.jmac.org — The scanned PDF of the 1996 puzzle document is published at gameshelf.jmac.org, where it remains hosted.
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background
Puzzle design document for Grim Fandango is produced — A document cataloguing the game's puzzles, dated 1996, is created during the game's development.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by HN Best, 3d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 13 voices from 1 site · best of 17 · verbatim
- Sep 22
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Fun fact: Brad went on to lead 18F. As someone who has worked professionally with him, it's wild to come to grips with the impact he's had on the game industry from Lua to leading divisions of Sony Playstation. He's a humble and sharp guy.
- Sep 21
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Phenomenal game and a fun fact: Grim Fandango was AFAICT the first high-profile game built on Lua and became the catalyst for industry adoption
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Late to the party here: If you liked Grim Fandango you will probably get a kick out of Sam and Max Hit the Road:
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This is one of those masterpieces that I'm surprised hasn't been scooped up by Netflix and turned into a movie.Its not that I don't like it as a game, but it's just so chock full of character.The premise alone is so compelling; in the Land of the Dead, even dead men chase money. Even with the literal afterlife a train ticket away, you have conmen…
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If you look at the 2nd to last page of the PDF you can see Tim Schafer's deception where he hadn't actually designed the ending puzzle by the time the document was due.> 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…
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I never understood why people like Grim Fandango so much. I know many people who absolutely love it (and some more here on the replies) but I never did.I've finished it with a walkthrough so I've seen the entire game. Between an art style that didn't age well and didn't grab me even then, obscure puzzles and a theme that doesn't interest me so…
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When I initially saw the game characters, I thought "this is janky". But by the end of the game, their personalities had won over my heart.Tim Schafer is really good at this. Psychonauts has a large cast of deformed-looking characters, but you'll love them all by the end.
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Grim Fandango is interesting because they are responsible for Lua’s popularity as a gaming scripting language:
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I have started playing Grim Fandango with my kids (7 and 9) after we played through Day of the Tentacle together. Playing old adventure games on the TV and letting people take turns playing is a great family activity!They aren't native English speakers and the story in Grim Fandango is considerably harder to follow compared to DoTT, so they lost…
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I first played it in my 40s when the remaster came out, and it's one of the best games I've played. It holds up incredibly well, particularly with the modernized controls.So if anyone is wondering if this is just nostalgia, or if the game actually holds up, it's the latter. Just play it.
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I've been playing most of Lucas Arts games with my 10 y/o daughter. Grim Fandango is the one she has liked the best. It is not perfect, has lots of bugs (crashed on several occasions) and weird things, but the atmosphere is so cool.Monkey Island comes second of course.
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The small square box at the very end of the document, with accompanying text, is just delightful:> To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you! → [__]All over the document, you can see Tim Schafer "wasted his time" by adding personality (jokes, graphics, asides) to what is basically an internal…
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I have never played through Grim Fandangoo in full, but in my peer group memes from this game permeated so thoroughly that when I see a pigeon I will too often end up shouting at it, "Run you pigeons! It's Robert Frost".