Grim Fandango

Videogames are not for falling in love with. They are certainly not for shedding tears over. Unless of course you are a heartbroken Miyamoto rent boy suddenly tasting that bitter moment of self-awareness in which you finally see that Super Mario Sunshine is a truly awful thing.

I fell in love with a videogame once, and that time it was real – not for me anymore the sordid obsessions of my Championship Manager affairs, or the puppy love of Sorcery. This was the real thing. I was ready to commit my future and my sanity to Grim Fandango. Christ I would have sold all my consoles, got a proper job and taken-up golf for this wonderful, wonderful thing. More exactly I was prepared to live forever in the cloak-pocket of my on-screen avatar: travel agent to the dead Manny Calavera. But forever is impossible in videogames – I knew this would be a brief thing, a magnificent, thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime relationship that would burn to just 40 hours.

30 with a walkthrough.

He's all calcium he is.

Like all the best affairs, this love was unexpected, sudden, and deep. I found a GF screenshot by accident. I was actually looking for a helpfile, a patch, something, anything that would fix the ‘fuck me this is a pile of shit’ bug in LucasArts’ Star Wars Racer. But there instead was the cast shot from GF: a rich vibrancy of pastel colours accented in cartoon black outlines and worn by Mexican Day-of-the-Dead skellingtons. A whole other world in a single picture.

I loved every last one of them.

That world is one of 1930s art-deco tech populated by a wide range of characters, all of them dead, possessed of an extraordinary range of expression and, well yeah of character – it’s in their curiously warm skulls, the way they move, they way they talk, and the way they love. This is Technicolor film noir – it is skinless Poirot meets Raiders of the Lost Ark. Above all it is the ultra involving story of down-at-heal grifter Manny attempting to work off his debt to the world – trying to go straight inside a system that is against him. His goal is to get to the Ninth Underworld any way he can, every corpse for himself – until he finds love in a body bag.

A world where dahlias mean death.

Everyone knows adventures on computers ARE dead and so it’s fitting perhaps that adventuring’s finest moment is a story OF the dead and in particular one couple’s quest to find eternal rest. ‘It’s the emotion stupid’ said Bill Clinton and Grim Fandango piles on the emotion in layer after layer of story, puzzle, and reward. And I fucking love it, okay? I do: a couple of weeks play, a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there and I wanted so desperately to make things okay for Manny and Mercedes, hell I was even happy to see the idiot-savant mechanic Glottis grow as a character and achieve his own salvation of sorts.

Breathtaking.

Spoiler ahead, fuck if you’ve not played the game yet then you probably still won’t so, umm, sorry. That moment when Manny and Mercedes are sitting together on the Number 9 hurtling toward their final oh so deserved rest? That made me cry and smile all at the same time. I cried because it WAS so dammed emotional, after everything we’d been through together, after all the joy, frustration, challenge, laughs and silliness, I knew this was the end. Under the tears, the smile: my friends were okay. They had, against all the odds, beaten the game – they were setting off on another, so much happier journey to a new life of sorts.

I wished them well. Turned off the PC, stared at the blank screen for a while and then got up to go on with my own life. A little bit of me stayed with Manny and Mercedes then and it’s there now.

Games can do this.

I miss them both.

Superb walkthrough that doesn’t hand you the answers on a plate but that is genuinely helpful: http://www.gamespot.com/features/grim_gg/

KOWORLD, August 2004.

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