Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango is a wonderful graphical adventure game from LucasArts. The Grim homepage used to have a welcome page showing only a really cute animated skeleton toy, which you clicked on to enter the real site, but they removed the welcome page a while ago. The image itself, though, can still be found in its original location, and looks like this:

There’s a story here. Grim Fandango is from 1998, back when 3D graphics for games where still only beginning to become popular. LucasArts wanted to make their first 3D adventure game. One of the creators of Grim stated in an interview that he got the basic idea for the game from the skeleton toy above. He saw one in a toy store, looked at it, and thought: “Hmm, texture mapped skulls would be really cool.”

In the spring of 2001, a friend of mine gave me a toy of the exact same kind. There were some slight differences, so it’s been painted to look more like the original — the pants, shoes, and the bow tie are all painted on — I just don’t have the “Grim Fandango” sticker, but otherwise they’re identical. Here’s what my toy looks like:

Presently, my toy is occupied giving my monitor at work a nice nerdy touch.

One day, I might make an mpeg movie of it waving its little arms.

It glows in the dark. Obviously.

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Updated 16 May 2002 by traal.