- Joined
- Mar 26, 2013
Grim Fandango has some great trivia
- Much of the game's characters and dialogue are lifted directly from movies. Chowchilla Charlie is based on Peter Lorre's many performances, Manny's role in Year 2 is based on Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. There's several more obscure ones. Carla in Year 2 is based on a character from the Big Sleep who Humphrey Bogart seduces for instance. Chowchilla Charlie's name comes from an event in Tim Schafer's life when he heard about a bus full of school children from Chowchilla that were abducted. And later he met someone named Charlie who was from Chowchilla and this became a running joke between them.
- The rooftop of the Department of Death building in Year 1 is based on the rooftop of a building Tim Schafer used to work in. It also had a square enclosed roof and he was told they had to regularly remove bird shit because it would weigh the roof down too much. There was so much of it up there he had to use a shovel.
- The Department of Dead building's lobby is based entirely off of a building in San Franciso that Tim Schafer's dentist resides in
- The Day of the Dead festival outside the player's office was originally supposed to be explorable by the player in a Chrono Trigger style. (And there's a great deal of concept art showing Manny exploring the festival) As was Max's cat race track in Year 2. However budget concerns arose during development with creating the amount of characters they wanted. The Diner Manny visits in the Land of the Living during Year one was going to be in El Marrow but was also cut.
- All of the lip syncing in Grim Fandango was done using this program for animating Microsoft's Clippy in your own applications.
- Most of Year 3 in terms of premise and style is lifted directly from the film The City of Lost Children
- In Rubacava when you go to Max's cat race track. You can hear an announcer calling out a cat race. What most people don't know is this is an elaborate script that calls out a full cat race and calls out different responses each race based on who it decides is going to be the winner. And this script runs in the background of the game (so if you leave the track and come back there's a different race playing) and it continues running even after that segment of the game. It only stops running during the end credits.
- It's clear the player returns to Rubacava in Year 4 because of limited space on the disc and pacing concerns. Year 4 takes place on the same game disc as Year 2 (The longest segment in the game with the most ingame areas) and it bares no differences between visits. It also explains why SS Lola and the anchor puzzle at the start of Year 3 were so forced and why Puerto Zapato is never seen despite being talked about very often.
- There's a secret in the game that the dev team actually worked very hard on that's notoriously hard to trigger. I didn't find out about it until around 10 years after the game came out. It's well known now though, it's the Rusty Anchor Easter Egg in Year 2. Triggering this moment requires you do this very specific series of events to get this particular item. (And it's very easy to lock yourself out of doing this). Which is a slip of paper with the words "Rusty Anchor" written on them that you're supposed to give to a tattoo artist. However if you show it to your demon friend Glottis instead he plays a song for you on his piano. Notably Glottis's lip syncing here was hand animated as opposed to automatic like all of the other characters.
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