Music of Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango is a graphic adventure video game directed by Tim Schafer and released by LucasArts in 1998.[2] Set in the Mexican folklore's Land of the Dead and with a strong film noir twist, the story follows Department of Death's travel agent Manny Calavera who acts as a guide for recently departed souls as they travel through the Land of the Dead on their way to their final destinations.[2][20][4] This land, meant to be only a place of passage to the final heavenly destination, has been settled by undeserving souls turning it into a land full of film noir-inspired crime and corruption, and making the travel of many departed souls more difficult and treacherous. The player follows Manny on a mission to save Mercedes "Meche" Colomar, a good soul thrust into and trapped in this corrupted world.[2][1][20][4]

The game is one of the most acclaimed adventure games of all time,[1][4] considered the last great adventure game to be released during the golden age of the adventure game genre.[10] While composer Peter McConnell himself credits the outstanding directorial work of Tim Schafer,[21][22] critics emphasized that one of the key components in the excellence of the game was McConnell's outstanding soundtrack.[10][13][20]

Tim Schafer, Peter McConnell and other members of the development team had had long and overlapping careers from previous projects at LucasArts.[23] For McConnell, who had joined LucasArts at the urging of Michael Land, another acclaimed composer of LucasArts,[24] that included working on the music of other notable computer games, including Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), Day of the Tentacle (1993), Full Throttle (1995).[25][26][27]

In composing for Grim Fandango, McConnell benefitted from having been a big jazz and film noir fan since his college time.[24] He had his first experience in composing jazz in his work for Monkey Island; a team of composers (Michael Land, Clint Bajakian, and McConnell) split their work by the several islands in which the story of the game was set, and within McConnell's island (named Booty), he experimented with clarinet sounds.[23]

McConnell and Schafer's professional collaboration started with Day of the Tentacle, then continued with Full Throttle (possibly in part due to McConnell having a rock band at the time, which suited the genre of the game). However, it was with Grim Fandango that the relationship between the two became very close and set the stage for numerous subsequent collaborations, with McConnell becoming Schafer's "go-to man".[23] After both of them departed LucasArts, they collaborated on titles including Psychonauts (2005),[21][13] Brütal Legend (2009), and Broken Age (2015).[28][29][30]

Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of Sierra Madre were noir films that inspired the Grim Fandango soundtrack.[13][4][31]

Very early in the process, project leader and writer Tim Schafer handed to McConnell black and white concept art of the characters sketched by Peter Chan,[13][27][6][23] his collection of Humphrey Bogart films, and some vinyl records of a type Mexican folk music called Son, which McConnell described as "very raw, using crude folk instruments"[21] that included hand percussion, violins, and charangos.[21][13][32]

Having Schafer established the mood and tone of the project, McConnell said that aside from the listening material, Schafer did not give him much direction: "In my experience, Tim leads more by inspiring than by directing".[21][27][22]

When years later McConnell was asked how he reacted when he first played the game, he said that "some games just really strike you when you first see the main character in the game environment. You think, 'Wow, this is something really different'. I remember feeling that when I first saw Manny walking around in Rubacava: 'A walking skeleton? Cool! And in this dark wet street like something from a different time, yet colorful and beautiful'".[25]

McConnell also noted how the game's mélange of themes was musically very "potent" as it brought together diverse music styles, including folk, noir jazz, and classic underscore. To him, the whole game felt very inspirational, as dialogue, story, and the puzzles all worked together as an "opera";[22] "one big cohesive flow of music and voice" that made it special to score.[22]

Of the films provided by Schafer, McConnell focussed his attention in The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Casablanca; The first one scored by Adolph Deutsch and the other three by Max Steiner. He watched them "about a hundred times",[33] and for the latter two being able to get copies of their scores from the Warner Brothers archives.[31][34][21][33][13][23] He also acknowledged the influence of the films Glengarry Glen Ross and The City of Lost Children, the latter a French sci-fi/fantasy movie that informed the oceanic part of the game.[23]

One South American record that was influential was a Peruvian-style record by Gustavo Santaolalla titled Ronrocco released at the time, that made heavy use of charangos.[24] It also coincided with Tim Schafer's brother having brought one such instrument from a trip to Mexico.[22] All this led to McConnell eventually incorporating the charango as one of the unique sounds of the score, along with the Andean flutes quena and tarka.[22] Despite the strong Latin American influences and themes, McConnell decided to not attempt to compose a particularly ethnic score, but to be "organic" and to "evoke a texture that was real".[22]

McConnell explained how, since his college days, Duke Ellington had been a "huge influence" for him and kept a headshot in his office studio at LucasArts. For this project, McConnell listened to Ellington's opus copiously.[21][33][13] Finally, for ocean-related music, McConnell read scores of several Debussy works.[33]

Time and place had an important influence as well; McConnell was drawn to and inspired by the vibrant and diverse culture (musical and otherwise) of the San Francisco Mission District, which he called the "crown jewel"[13] of the city that included rock clubs, jazz clubs, taquerias with mariachis bands, and Mexican folklore.[13][6][21][22][23]

When later interviewed, McConnell noted his satisfaction of being given ample lead time to compose and produce the score;[13] he first began to work on the project in early 1997,[23][35] about a year and a half before the game's release.[36] He developed three types of musical pieces: event-triggered episodes, ambient pieces, and underscoring for cutscenes.[33] Tim Schafer's guidance and the cultures that shaped the game were the basis for the composition.[13]

In order to create a soundtrack that would follow the story of the game and mesh with the different settings within it, McConnell and his team created a digital interface system of little buttons that represented places in the game as a way to visually represent the score. They then recorded Schafer talking about the game and turned it into little snippets assigned to those plot points. Each point could then be clicked and hear Schafer's explanations of it.[13][22] This was done using LucasArts iMUSE proprietary adaptive music system that McConnell himself had co-created with Michael Land a few years earlier.[35][37]

McConnell would then come up with a theme by humming a tune, record it in a cassette, play it back to Schafer, and eventually replace the plot points narration with those tunes.[13][22] Then they developed a MIDI score to serve as a "mock-up", leading to the recording of the final score that would include live musicians for some parts.[13]

Rather than fully develop each piece one at a time, his approach was to create a short sketch for each situation in the game of about fifteen seconds long and then move on as soon as he felt he had hit the target and gotten the gist of the mood. This allowed him to be more productive, as it was easier and less stressful to later on in the process develop full pieces based on already existing sketches, instead of rushing to develop completely novel compositions from scratch as the completion deadline neared.[33] At his peak rate, he noted that there were weeks during which he composed as much as two minutes of finished music a day, which he considered a "heavy regimen".[33]

McConnell used the limited MIDI composition palette of the time, a couple of EMU E4 samplers (with 128 MB of RAM each), a Roland GMIDI Sound Canvas, and one or two other sound modules.[35]

McConnell went on to compose and produce Grim Fandango's original soundtrack, which combined an orchestral score, South American (Peruvian and[33] Mexican) folk music, swing jazz from the noir era, jazz from other periods, bebop, and big band music.[3][38][39][8][33][6] It also included some elements from traditional Russian, Celtic, Mexican, Spanish, and Indian strings cultures.[40][8] In the original production, the orchestral elements of the score were digitally synthesized due to the common budgetary and technological limitations on gaming audio of the time.[5][4] On the other hand, the jazz parts were recorded live, something uncommon at the time.[23]

Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) procession in San Francisco in 2006. This procession is part of the Mexican folklore that can be found in the Mission district of San Francisco, and that imbued the spirit of the game and soundtrack.[23]

McConnell understood that the game's atmosphere brought together a noir story that was familiar to the Anglo-American audience, with a Latin culture that may have been less familiar. He developed the jazz score to be most recognizable, taking the culturally specific part (the Latin jazz and the Latin folk music) and weaving it into the score ("taking it for granted rather than pointing it up") with the goal of naturally leading the audience from their comfort zone and then make an "unfamiliar world more familiar".[23]

An example of the rich atmospheric goals of the music is recounted by the French online publication Gameblog, that described the "Mr. Frustration" track as "sometimes bebop, sometimes melancholic, sweet or sensual" and observing that "whether led by a saxophone, a trumpet or a guitar, jazz is the predominant style of the Grim Fandango soundtrack, all reminiscent of the snug atmosphere of casinos and bars between the two world wars".[20] It also described "Lost Souls' Alliance", with its rhythmic arrangement and the use of an Andean flute, as evoking a feel of Hispanic music, with the tremolo baritone guitar reminiscent of the Western: "a little 'rockabilly ballad' that makes us travel instantly to this corner of the planet and to that period, at the beginning of the twentieth century".[20]

Especially given the disparate themes of Grim Fandango, McConnell kept the score cohesive by building it on a "backbone"[33] of classic Max Steiner-style orchestral underscoring.[33][42] The orchestral part was digitally created,[5] as the team did not consider doing live orchestra because at the time "games didn't occupy a place in the culture that could obtain that level of production".[27][43]

To make the digital pieces sound more "organic" and "not quantized" and orchestra-like, McConnell tried to be "very free with the tempo" so even though he was using a sequencer, it would sound like the conductor was watching the sequences of the game during the performance, following the old-school movie scoring methods.[23]

The full length of the score within the game was about three hours long,[13] with an approximate 110 pieces.[33] A 43-minute version with 32 tracks was concurrently released in 1998 as a CD album, sold at the LucasArts online company store.[6][14][44]

McConnell had made the most of the resources he had for the score's original production, which meant devoting more of them where they could make the greatest impact while cutting corners in other areas. Even though, for example, he wished he had been able to find a better-sounding sampled piano, he did not regret not recording an acoustic piano as it would have meant compromising the quality of more important parts given the time and budget constraints.[33] However, he had long wished to revisit the score if the opportunity arose, to fix and enhance the various aspects that had not been viable during the original production. He noted that "Grim's music was a little bit ahead of [its] time",[23] and it suffered because of that.[23] He also lamented that just two years after the release of Grim Fandango, orchestral recording in gaming took off.[23]

The Grim Fandango game had been originally developed and published by LucasArts, which in 2012 was acquired by Disney. In 2013, Disney made the strategic decision to turn LucasArts into a publisher-only of video games, and licensing out its intellectual property. Tim Schafer, who had also long been eager to revisit and re-release the game and make it available to new platforms and to new generations, seized the opportunity and was able to acquire the rights to the game, in partnership with Sony.[54][55]

When in 2013 Schafer offered McConnell the unique opportunity to remaster the soundtrack, McConnell was ready to jump in.[56][13] He believed that while the original jazz music came out well, the orchestral part, done with 1997-era digital samples and a limited budget, did not fully match his vision.[27][43][22][23] He believed that remaking the latter would make the greatest difference: "If you want to do something really great with this score, biggest bang for the buck is going to be to take those orchestral movements and record them live".[23]

With the support of staff (who McConnell called "friends of Grim" by either having worked on the original project or had grown up with it as a favorite game)[27] at Disney Interactive, LucasArts, and Sony Computer Entertainment, Schafer's Double Fine studio worked to remaster the game and re-released it in 2015.[54][57]

Jory Prum in his studio in a photograph of 2005. Prum was heavily involved in the retrieval of the original data, as well as doing the orchestral mixing for the remastered soundtrack.

The remastering of the soundtrack started with the retrieval of the original 16-year-old data, in a process dubbed by Polygon as "digital archeology".[54] The music tracks were on archaic DLT backup tapes stored in the LucasArts/Disney archives. Rob Cowles, a marketer at LucasArts was credited for saving the assets while LucasArts was being acquired by Disney in 2012.[54][21][27][57][23] Subsequently, Derek Williams was credited for finding them.[21][27]

Once the original tapes were found,[21][13][23] the next challenge was to retrieve the data from within them.[21] McConnell remarked how their retrieval was a technical feat requiring specialized hardware and expertise[13] Jory Prum (who then did the sound mixing for the orchestral pieces) spent two months recovering the data,[13] with the use of DLT drive, an old Mac with a SCSI drive, and an old piece of software called Retrospect Remote.[21][27] The fact that McConnell was able to open a Pro Tools session from 1997 on a new version of Pro Tools also proved key in being able to use the files.[13] Except for the anecdotal disappearance of two cymbal hits, this process succeeded in recovering all the data of the three-hour score.[13][27] McConnell called this recovery process "a chain of miracles" since "if any of the links had not held up, we would have had very little to work with at all".[27] McConnell further gratefully credited the retrieval success to numerous people who were devoted fans of the game, calling it a "labor of love".[13]

Just like with the original game development, project lead Tim Schafer had very little input into the soundtrack's re-mastering, except that "he was very supportive of the effort to make the music the highest quality possible".[21]

Given the unique opportunity to re-visit a project first developed 17 years earlier in his career, McConnell was asked how different would the soundtrack be if he had developed it from scratch at the time of remastering. McConnell noted that if he were to start from scratch he would have taken the exact same approach, with the exception of the "crazy tempo"[21] changes that he had never thought a real orchestra would have to perform;[21][4] some parts were originally played live into a sequencer without regard for bar lines and retrospectively he would have taken a different approach.[21][4] He also noted that there had been a small number of things that had long "bugged"[21] him from the original release ("the occasional klunker, or ham-fisted move")[21] that he finally got the chance to fix them. Ultimately, overall, "the pleasant surprise in the process was how well much of the original material held up".[21]

External video
Grim Fandango Remastered: "The Resurrection of Sound" with composer Peter McConnell Official making-of documentary of the remastered soundtrack (8:20 minutes)

To stay within the budget, McConnell felt he had to choose carefully which pieces would get the most attention and how.[27] After the original Pro Tools project files were recovered, he found that some of the digital samples he had used originally did not sound good, and the team opted to re-mix, re-sample, add additional tracks,[56] and re-orchestrate different parts of the score.[54][21][56][58][4]

These tasks were assigned to three teams: an audio team at Sony recorded live tracks and remixed 45 minutes of jazz tunes[21][57] (which included a few new live parts and some new solos);[27] another team at Pyramind Studios in San Francisco replaced old samples with better sounds in another 45 minutes of music and re-mixed all of the cut scenes in six languages;[21] and finally the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) recorded about 30 minutes of orchestral music.[4][21][59][23]

Picture of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The orchestral part of the original soundtrack was digitally synthesized. One of the major improvements in the re-mastered release of 2015 was the recording of the orchestral parts by the Melbourne symphony orchestra.[4]

The involvement of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) in the orchestration of the Grim Fandango soundtrack grew out of several prior collaborations that McConnell had had with the orchestra. The connection first happened when Special Projects Manager of the orchestra Andrew Pogson reached out to McConnell in early 2013 to do a pops concert performance of Grim Fandango. At the time, McConnell had been working on the soundtrack for Broken Age, a new adventure game by Tim Schafer.[21][22] Pogson, having been a financial backer for Broken Age, pushed to have MSO record that score, making it the first time for the MSO to be involved in such a project. After that collaboration coming to fruition, working together in orchestrating Grim Fandango became "the next logical step"[21] and it felt "like working with old friends".[27][21] McConnell praised MSO, for their outstanding level of musicianship and focus and care; how they worked well together and reinforced yet again his notion from his early days in LucasArts that having a great team was of the highest value.[21]

During the original production of the score, McConnell had never imaged that it would one day be re-recorded with a live orchestra. That meant that his composition was unconstrained by considerations of flow and changes of tempo that a real orchestra would have to contend with.[22][23] Rather, in order to make it sound more lively during the original digital production, McConnell had intentionally incorporated many tempo changes.[23] While it would have been possible to do live recordings of full songs with big tempo changes, it would have required an intensive rehearsal, meaning more time and costs. So when the opportunity came to re-record with the MSO, McConnell tried to save time by planning the recording by breaking cues into smaller segments,[22] recording those one at a time, and then put them back together like a puzzle.[22]

Pyramind studios composers Clint Bajakian and Jeremy Garren imported McConnell's original audio mixes into Cubase 7 along with MIDI tracks that were assigned to modern sample libraries residing on two slave PCs running Vienna Ensemble Pro loaded with leading sample libraries. Bajakian also added live classical guitar parts that were not covered in 1998 using the same instrument he played back then. The team faced the challenge to adjust MIDI parameters to maximize realism and sonic quality while preserving McConnell's original artistic intent.[35]

To accomplish this, Garren noted that "this meant focused attention to mixing, EQ'ing, and programming articulation data on an individual instrument basis to bring each phrase and gesture in line with Pete's original intentions. It meant a constant back and forth with the original music and imagining, 'What should this sound like today?'"[35] and Bajakian added: "For us to do this right, we had to also wrap our minds around the 'extra-musical' content of the music – the concepts, the references, the puns – the ideas that interact like characters in a play".[35]

McConnell noted that the one element that he and his team did not get "so perfectly" in the original release was the film noir orchestral part and that that was what they were "really able to do in a big way" with the remastering work. He also noted that between the remixes and the live symphony "it turned out to be the score the way it was always meant to be heard",[13] also adding that "I have to say I'm glad I took extra care on the themes because I feel they were really able to blossom in the new live recordings".[56]

McConnell estimated that he put in himself about 800 hours into the remastering project, in arranging, sample replacement, preparing for orchestration, mixing, and reviewing the music, resulting in over 2 hours of music that was completely overhauled, in addition to the 45 minutes of music the team had already recorded live in the original version.[21][22] The outcome was described by McConnell as a score that had been "re-arranged, re-voiced, re-orchestrated, re-recorded, re-mixed, re-mastered and – most of all – retrieved"[27][23] (and in a couple of key spots, even "re-composed").[35]

The stand-alone remastered soundtrack was released concurrently with the remastered game in 2015 (17 years after the original release). The soundtrack was distributed under Nile Rodgers' label Sumthing Else.[7][53] In 2018, to celebrate the 20th anniversary, the remastered soundtrack was released in vinyl.[1][60][61]