I found Grim Fandango in a pile of discounted games as a tween in the 2000s. There was a cool skeleton in a suit on the front cover, so I bought it based on that.

Even though I didn't understand most references and sarcasm, few games have grabbed my attention as Grim Fandango did. The art work, the music, the writing. The whole game oozes of style that I've never seen replicated.

Even some 20+ years later I can almost recite most of Act I from heart. If you haven't played this game and like adventure games, this is one of the best.

Thank you for linking OP, this made my morning.

Nice, Tim Schafer is someone whose writing I really admire, if you haven't checked it out yet Double Fine (the studio he leads) documented the entire (7 year!) development cycle of Psychonauts 2 in a 32 episode documentary series, and it in my opinion one of the best documentaries ever made. It covers a lot of cool stuff, like Covid, them getting acquired by Microsoft, big project leadership struggles. It's long as hell but it is really worth your time if you have an interest in creative work in large teams.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpM...

They are currently doing a company wide gamejam/game idea incubation thing, after surviving Microsoft undoing the acquisition and the same Documentary crew is doing a doc about that (they did a kickstarter campaign to fund it)

The small square box at the very end of the document, with accompanying text, is just delightful:

> To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you! → [__]

All over the document, you can see Tim Schafer "wasted his time" by adding personality (jokes, graphics, asides) to what is basically an internal document.

I think in 2026 a document lovingly crafted like this would be deemed a great waste of time, lack of efficiency and an affront to shareholder value.

I have started playing Grim Fandango with my kids (7 and 9) after we played through Day of the Tentacle together. Playing old adventure games on the TV and letting people take turns playing is a great family activity!

They aren't native English speakers and the story in Grim Fandango is considerably harder to follow compared to DoTT, so they lost interest a bit after we completed year 1. But as soon as their English skills improve, we'll get back to it, it's one of my favorite adventure games!

If you look at the 2nd to last page of the PDF you can see Tim Schafer's deception where he hadn't actually designed the ending puzzle by the time the document was due.

> We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.