Music of Grim Fandango


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 soundtrack was released simultaneously with the game in 1998. The soundtrack was remastered and orchestrated, and re-released in 2015. In 2019, 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 , Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle.
In composing for Grim Fandango, McConnell benefitted from having been a big jazz and film noir fan since his time in college. He had his first experience in composing jazz in his work for Monkey Island; a team of composers split their work by the several islands in which the story of the game was set, and within McConnell's island, he experimented with clarinet sounds.
McConnell and Schafer's professional collaboration started with Day of the Tentacle, then continued with Full Throttle. 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, Brütal Legend, and Broken Age.

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 really 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.
. McConnell chose to use the Charango in the score in part after Tim Schafer's brother had brought one from Mexico. The Charango was traditionally made of an Armadillo shell, and which McConnell saw as being acoustically similar to a mandolin, but with an "earthier, more delicate, and haunting sound".
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 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 worked to develop 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 that were 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 15 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, a Roland GMIDI Sound Canvas, and one or two other sound modules.

Themes and recording

McConnell went on to compose and produce Grim Fandango's original soundtrack, that combined an orchestral score, South American 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.
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.
McConnell understood that the atmosphere of the game was bringing together a noir story that was familiar to the Anglo-American audience, with a Latin culture that may have been less familiar. So he developed the score to be based on the jazz that would be most recognizable, and taking the culturally specific part and weaving it into the score "sort of 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, 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" as evoking a general feel for Hispanic music: "the rhythm, the guitar chords, the flute... We are transported to Mexico, with some long notes of electric guitar reminiscent of the Western , a small side of 'rockabilly ballad' that makes us travel instantly to this corner of the planet, and that period at the onset of the twentieth century."
The Mission district was a source of inspiration with its rich and eclectic music scene, also turned out to be key in the recording of the score, with all the live musicians being connected to it. In recording with the performers, McConnell noted that one of the important ways to keep the recording "fun and efficient" was to be clear on what he wanted as a producer and to "discern what each musician can bring to the music"; some players may be shine as readers, while others improvise "something amazing" by just providing "a few melodic and stylistic guidelines and him or her loose". On Grim Fandango he quickly learned that with music heavily based on swing jazz, getting the best results often required not being too attached to the written score, no matter how good he thought his original ideas were.
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."
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.

Release

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

Critical reception

The soundtrack was very well received at its original release, and it continued to receive praise years after, often considered one of the best game soundtracks of all time.
At its original release, IGN called it a "beautiful soundtrack that you'll find yourself listening to even after you're done with the game". SEMO said "the compositions and performances are so good that listening to this album on a stand-alone basis can make people feel like they're in a bar back then". RPGFan said, "the pieces are beautifully composed, wonderfully played. has a stellar soundtrack with music that easily stands alone outside the context of the game. This CD was an absolute pleasure to listen to and comes highly recommended." Game Revolution in its game review praised it as one of the "most memorable soundtracks ever to grace the inside of a cranial cavity where an eardrum used to be." 20 years later ABC noted retrospectively that since the original release of the soundtrack it had been consistently praised; despite the technical limitations imposed on its original production "it was still considered a stellar album to listen to, even without the context of the game, which speaks to the composer’s tremendous skill and musicality."
Years after the release, the soundtrack continued to receive critical acclaim. Kotaku noted in 2011 that "it remains as killer today as it was when the game launched in 1998." PC Gamer in its 2014 list of Top 100 Games, acclaimed Grim Fandango for including "one of the best soundtracks in PC gaming history". In 2017 Fact magazine also listed it as one of the "100 best video game soundtracks of all time". Kotaku noted that even among other lauded games that were successful in incorporating jazz in their scores to great advantage, Grim Fandangos stood apart. Further comparing it with L.A. Noire, Kotaku added that it "doesn't come close to the variety and vivaciousness of McConnell's Grim Fandango score. From the dark, plunger-muted swing of 'Swanky Maximo' to the mellow, guitar-accompanied lobby-trombone of the appropriately named 'Frustration Man', it's simply good, video game-related or no." It further lauded "the epic saxophone of 'She Sailed Away', the chord-less free jazz of 'Blue Casket Bop', or the menacing bari sax/bass clarinet duet of 'Rubacava'" as highlights of an overall outstanding score. Alternative Magazine Online in 2015 noted that upon its original release it "instantly became one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time" and that the remastered version went even further.
When the game and its soundtrack were remastered and re-released, they also garnered praise. Radio host Emily Reese called the score "amazing", further adding how she really enjoyed how McConnell wrote the various sections of the orchestra: "It seems able to capitalize on really specific characteristics of the instruments; like you'll have the brass play in a militaristic style, or you'll have the bassoons or baby base clarinets being very mischievous, strings will do something where they are trembling." Fact noted of the game that the game returned twenty years later in a new edition "to the masterpiece-accolades it deserved all along. Its remastering kept the soul of the game intact while polishing what needed to be polished: the graphics, animation, controls, and most importantly, the music."
Several critics also noted how the music was a key contribution to enhancing the overall experience of the game. For example, at the time of the original release Computer Gaming Worlds review remarked that "a musical score accompanies the art to complete the experience." 20 years later, The Ringer noted that the best example in the game of the blending of cultures was its soundtrack, by combining elements of an orchestral score, with more traditional South American strings, and the jazz and swing music of the film noir era, becoming "commonly celebrated as one of the best video game soundtracks of all time. Great adventure games such as Grim Fandango feature worlds so cohesive and rich with detail that they’re transportive for the player and McConnell’s soundtrack is the glue that binds the game's elements." Kotaku noted upon revisiting the game in 2011 how "I was struck by just how much McConnell's soundtrack elevates the basic game." in 2015 Fact magazine noted that "few soundtracks have ever felt more integral to the success of a video game" and that "the game’s blend of styles would never have held together so well if it weren’t for McConnell’s masterful ability to fuse Mexican folk music with Duke Ellington-era big band jazz and noir scores in the spirit of Adolph Deutsch."

Awards and rankings

In 1999's Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the soundtrack was nominated in the category of "Outstanding Achievement in Sound and Music". It was also lauded by GameSpot, which awarded it the "Best PC Music awards", and included it in the "Ten Best PC Game Soundtracks" list in 1999.
At the time of the original release of Grim Fandango and its soundtrack, few video game music awards existed. Other video game music awards, such as from BAFTA or the, began to be awarded in the 2000s, and therefore Grim Fandango's soundtrack at the time of its release could not opt to compete for them. However, since then it has been included in several rankings of best video game music.
Publication or ceremonyAward nameResultYearRef.
GameSpotBest PC Music award1998
Academy of Interactive Arts & SciencesOutstanding Achievement in Sound and Music1998

PublicationRanking namePositionYearRef.
GameSpotTen Best PC Game SoundtracksIncluded in top ten1999
PC GamerTop 100 GamesNamed one of the best soundtracks in PC gaming history2014
Fact100 best video game soundtracks of all time47th2017
PC MagazineThe 11 Best Game Soundtracks Ever1st2014

Remastered soundtrack

Background and context

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 piano sample, he did not regret not recording the piano live as it would have meant compromising the quality of more important parts given the time and budget constraints. 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 time", and it suffered because of that. He also lamented that just two years after the release of Grim Fandango, orchestral recording in gaming took off.
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.
So when in 2013 Schafer offered McConnell the unique opportunity to remaster the soundtrack, McConnell was ready to jump in. 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. 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."
With the support of staff at Disney Interactive, LucasArts, and Sony Computer Entertainment, Schafer's Double Fine studio worked to remaster the game and re-released it in 2015.

Data recovery

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". 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. Subsequently, Derek Williams was credited for finding them.
Once the original tapes were found, the next challenge was to retrieve the data from within them. McConnell remarked how their retrieval was a technical feat requiring specialized hardware and expertise Jory Prum spent two months recovering the data, with the use of DLT drive, an old Mac with a SCSI drive, and an old piece of software called Retrospect Remote. 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. Except for the anecdotal disappearance of two cymbal hits, this process succeeded in recovering all the data of the three-hour score. 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." McConnell further gratefully credited the retrieval success to numerous people who were devoted fans of the game, calling it a "labor of love".

Improvements and re-recording

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."
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" changes that he had never thought a real orchestra would have to perform; some parts were originally played live into a sequencer without regard for bar lines and retrospectively he would have taken a different approach. He also noted that there had been a small number of things that had long "bugged" him from the original release that he finally got the chance to fix them. However, overall, "the pleasant surprise in the process was how well much of the original material held up".
To stay within the budget, McConnell felt he had to choose carefully which pieces would get the most attention and how. After the original Pro Tools sound 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, and re-orchestrate different parts of the score.
These tasks were assigned to three teams: an audio team at Sony recorded live tracks and remixed 45 minutes of jazz tunes ; 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; and finally the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recorded about a 30 minutes of orchestral music.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

The involvement of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra 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. 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" and it felt "like working with old friends". 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.
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. Rather, in order to make it sound more lively during the original digital production, McConnell had intentionally incorporated many tempo changes. 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, recording those one at a time, and then put them back together like a puzzle.

Pyramind studios

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.
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?’” 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”.

Outcome

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", 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."
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. 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".
The stand-alone remastered soundtrack was released concurrently with the remastered game in 2015. The soundtrack was distributed under Nile Rodgers' label Sumthing Else. In 2019, to celebrate the 20th anniversary, the remastered soundtrack was released in vinyl.

Track listings

Releases

The first stand-alone release of the soundtrack was in a CD in 1998. It contained 32 tracks totalling 43 minutes from the about 3 hours of the full length of the game score. An extended version of 128 tracks was later available online. 17 years later, in 2015, the remastered soundtrack was released. It was produced under Nile Rodgers' label Sumthing Else. It had a standard release of 37 tracks, as well as a Director's Cut with 14 extra tracks. It included the original score from the LucasArts archives, new compositions by Peter McConnell and new orchestral arrangements, as well as new extended versions of jazz pieces re-mixed at Sony Computer Entertainment America. In 2019, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the original release of the game, the soundtrack was released for the first time in vinyl format. It included all the songs of the 2015-release of the Director's Cut.
Main albums
NameDateLabelFormatCatalogNotesReference
Grim Fandango Original Game Soundtrack: Big Band, Bebop and Bones1998LucasArts Entertainment Company LLCCD1097929CD originally sold exclusively in the United States' LucasArts online store. Later released for free as MP3.
Grim Fandango Remastered - SoundtrackMay 5, 2015Sumthing Else Music Works, DisneyMP3SE-3139-2
Grim Fandango Remastered Original Soundtrack Director's CutMay 5, 2015Sumthing Else Music WorksMP3Sold exclusively through Sumthing Else website. The site closed in 2019.
Grim Fandango 2xLP Vinyl Soundtrack2019iam8bit, Double Fine ProductionsDouble LP8BIT809820th anniversary release; Director's cut of the remastered soundtrack, in vinyl format.

Compilations
NameDateLabelFormatCatalogNotesReference
The Best Of LucasArts Original Soundtracks2002LucasArtsCD8127927LucasArts 20th anniversary compilation of original game soundtracks, including excerpts from The Dig, Outlaws, Grim Fandango, and the Monkey Island series. This release won the 2003 "Best Original Soundtrack Album" award from the.
Level 5 - Video Games LiveAugust 15, 2016Mystical Stone Entertainment, LLC; Video Games LiveMP3, CDCompilation of video game soundtracks, from concerts organized by Video Games Live, and performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Includes one song from Grim Fandango.
Gaming in SymphonyJune 14, 2019EuroArtsMP3, LP2067701Concert performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra with the Danish National Concert Choir and various soloists, conducted by Eímear Noone. Includes Grim Fandango's main theme song, among music from other computer games.

Live performances

In 2013 McConnell collaborated with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to do a pops concert performance of Grim Fandango. Around 2015 McConnell prepared a suite of music for performance by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, a live performance of script-reading with live music was performed at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018. Later the same year, an evening gala was organized in tribute of the soundtrack during the inaugural edition of the Game Music Festival in the National Forum of Music of Poland. Parts of the score was performed live, with a 100 pages of musical arrangements prepared by Bartosz Pernal in cooperation with McConnell, who attended and performed in the event. In 2018, Grim Fandango main theme song was one of the pieces performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and subsequently included in the album Gaming in Symphony.

Legacy

Grim Fandangos soundtrack is considered a classic, receiving critical acclaim in its original release of 1997, and remaining a critics' favorite in ensuing years, including 17 years later in its remastered re-release in 2015. Its ability to "glue" together the game's elements and "elevate" it is seen as one of the high points of the video game music genre.
The Grim Fandango score remained decades later one of McConnell's most famous scores. For McConnell personally, he saw this as a special project in his musical career, calling Grim Fandango "almost like an opera" for how integrated the music was with the story. The project cemented a close working relationship between Schafer and McConnell that continued for decades after their work together at LucasArts.
The fact that the soundtrack had stood the test of time, was attributed by McConnell to a combination of "story and the world are so rich and potent, and deal with timeless themes on a level rarely attained in a game", the rich musical heritage of film noir scores and freedom of jazz, the talent of the musicians inspired by the musical effervescence of San Francisco's mission district; "The score was literally in the air, like it was meant to be. All you had to do was catch it." And while the video game soundtracks are meant to be created in support of the larger goal of an integrated interactive experience of dialogue, graphics, story, and sound, Grim Fandangos soundtrack also stands on its own, with critics noting that it can be appreciated independently of the game it was created for. The music was also performed for live audiences.
The soundtrack is also notable for being one of the best examples of early adaptive music systems. With McConnell having created tracks for almost every location and character in Grim Fandango, these were weaved into a continuous sequence of music, seamlessly transitioning to different pieces as the player progressed through the game, making it the most cinematic soundtrack of any LucasArts game. This was accomplished with the use of the pioneering iMUSE software, previously created by McConnell and Michael Land, and it heralded the age of dynamic and cinematic music experiences in video games.

Personnel

McConnell dubbed the Grim Fandango score as "the mission district score", as virtually all the performers and a lot of the inspiration came from it.
Original release
Production team:
  • Peter McConnell – Composer, producer
  • Jeff Kliment – Music engineering, Mixing, Lead sound design
  • Hans Christian Reumschüssel – Additional Music Production
  • Michael Land – Sound production supervision
Performers:
  • Ralph Carney – Clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, slide clarinet, baritone and bass saxes
  • Sheldon Brown – Clarinet and bass clarinet
  • Paul Hanson – Bassoon, clarinet, alto and tenor saxes
  • Bill Ortiz – Trumpet
  • Dan Armstrong – Trombone
  • Shane Norman – Trombone
  • Hans Christian – Cello
  • Clint Bajakian – Guitars and melodica
  • Peter McConnell – Guitars, charango and violin
  • Derek Jones – Bass
  • Paul van Wageningen – Drums
  • Jorge Molina – Quena
  • Geresh Cruden – Tablas
Remastered soundtrack
Production:
  • Anthony Caruso – Mixing, at Sony Computer Entertainment America
  • Jonathan Mayer – SCEA Mix Project Manager
  • Camden Stoddard – Mixing music with ambient sound effects for in-game play.
  • Clint Bajakian – Midi re-orchestration and mixing, cut scenes mixing
  • Jeremy Garren – Midi re-orchestration and mixing, cut scenes mixing
  • Jonathan Buch – Midi re-orchestration and mixing
  • Mike Forst – Cut scenes mixing
  • Jonathan Buch – production assistant
  • Ophylia Wispling – production assistant
Melbourne Symphony recordings:
  • Performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
  • Brett Kelly – Conductor
  • Andrew Pogson – Special Projects Manager
  • Haig Burnell – ABC Producer
  • Chris Lawson – ABC Sound Engineer
  • Nick Mierisch – ABC Sound Engineer
  • Russell Thompson – ABC Sound Engineer
  • Karim Elmahmoudi – Orchestration
  • Jory Prum – Orchestral mixing
Data management:
  • Rob Cowles – Original data safeguarding
  • Derek Williams – Original data recovery
  • Jory Prum – Original data retrieval
Album art:
  • Holly Rothrock – Album Art