The music for the video game Grim Fandango was composed and produced by Peter McConnell and published by LucasArts in 1998. The soundtrack is a mix of South American folk music, jazz, swing and big band sounds, for the game story filled with adventure and intrigue set in a unique combination of film noir and Mexican folklore's Day of the Dead. The soundtrack garnered critical acclaim and remained subject of positive reviews and inclusion in critics' rankings for the two decades after its first release. The soundtrack was praised both as a stand-alone musical experience, as well as for its outstanding contribution to the overall game experience; capturing the spirit of the game, "gluing" the story together, and becoming "integral" to the success of the game.
A Compact disc (CD) soundtrack was released simultaneously with the game in 1998. The soundtrack was remastered and orchestrated, and re-released in 2015. In 2018, celebrating its 20th anniversary, it was also released in vinyl format.
The score was awarded GameSpot 1998 "Best PC Music Award". It was also nominated for the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' "Outstanding Achievement in Sound and Music". Years after its original release, the soundtrack has also been included in lists of all-time best video game soundtracks.
Background and context The game
Grim Fandango is a graphic adventure video game directed by Tim Schafer and released by LucasArts in 1998. 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. 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.
The game is one of the most acclaimed adventure games of all time, considered the last great adventure game to be released during the golden age of the adventure game genre. While composer Peter McConnell himself credits the outstanding directorial work of Tim Schafer, critics emphasized that one of the key components in the excellence of the game was McConnell's outstanding soundtrack.
Team and collaborations Tim Schafer, Peter McConnell and other members of the development team had had long and overlapping careers from previous projects at LucasArts. For McConnell, who had joined LucasArts at the urging of Michael Land, another acclaimed composer of LucasArts, 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).
In composing for Grim Fandango, McConnell benefitted from having been a big jazz and film noir fan since his college time. 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.
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". After both of them departed LucasArts, they collaborated on titles including Psychonauts (2005), Brütal Legend (2009), and Broken Age (2015).
Original development Inspiration and influences
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, 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" that included hand percussion, violins, and charangos.
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".
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'".
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"; "one big cohesive flow of music and voice" that made it special to score.
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", and for the latter two being able to get copies of their scores from the Warner Brothers archives. 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.
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. It also coincided with Tim Schafer's brother having brought one such instrument from a trip to Mexico. 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. 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".
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. Finally, for ocean-related music, McConnell read scores of several Debussy works.
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" of the city that included rock clubs, jazz clubs, taquerias with mariachis bands, and Mexican folklore.
Composition process When later interviewed, McConnell noted his satisfaction of being given ample lead time to compose and produce the score; he first began to work on the project in early 1997, about a year and a half before the game's release. He developed three types of musical pieces: event-triggered episodes, ambient pieces, and underscoring for cutscenes. Tim Schafer's guidance and the cultures that shaped the game were the basis for the composition.
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. This was done using LucasArts iMUSE proprietary adaptive music system that McConnell himself had co-created with Michael Land a few years earlier.
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. 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.
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. 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".
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.
Themes and recording McConnell went on to compose and produce Grim Fandangos original soundtrack, which combined an orchestral score, South American (Peruvian and Mexican) folk music, swing jazz from the noir era, jazz from other periods, bebop, and big band music. It also included some elements from traditional Russian, Celtic, Mexican, Spanish, and Indian strings cultures. 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. On the other hand, the jazz parts were recorded live, something uncommon at the time.
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".
An example of the rich atmospheric goals of the music is recounted by the French online publication , 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". 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".
Especially given the disparate themes of Grim Fandango, McConnell kept the score cohesive by building it on a "backbone" of classic Max Steiner-style orchestral underscoring. The orchestral part was digitally created, 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".