Grim Fandango was the true outlier of my childhood.
Unlike all the other games I had goshed over as a kid, I could play this one almost immediately after it was released... why? Because my dad, ever the gamer, bought it on a whim after becoming enchanted by its box art, forking out a whooping $56 for a fresh copy at the local Musimundo, much to my mother's rage.
This preview drew me in like a magnet. How could I not love a game so weird and cool-looking?
I had been enamored of the game ever-since I first saw a preview of it on AZ-Diez magazine, but I had already written it off as yet another thing I couldn't try... the game looked so impressive as to guarantee that my system wouldn't be able to run it. And once I finally got that copy my fears were confirmed: my PC was lacking on all areas, with a specially painful situation on the RAM department -- Grim Fandango required more than double of my Pentium II's available memory. But did that stop me? Of course not! I was nine-years-old and I had a new game to play. Logic and limitations just took a back seat... which led to one of my most sobering gaming moments, in all senses of the word.
Even though I was unable to see much farther than this, that starting area really got my imagination going.
When I first ran the game, I was immediately blown away by its sleek presentation, but the thing behaved so strangely (jittering in places, almost shaking) that I thought for sure that it was gonna crash on me and etch its name on the --already huge-- list of gaming disappointments of my young life. Indeed, I thought that was exactly what had happened after the intro had stopped playing and nothing was moving on screen... had the game crashed already? It looked frozen and as if it demanded that I tried to forcefully quit it.
But when my tiny hands went to position themselves on the triangular shape required to push ALT+CTRL+SUP, their overstretched motion accidentally hit the arrow keys and my character started moving on screen... I almost couldn't believe that the game's graphics would be so good as to fool me into thinking that the intro had frozen. Was I really going to be playing a game THAT good-looking? Was this the future of gaming? I was blown away! Grim Fandango was the first 3D game I had ever played, and it made sure I knew it.
"Wait... am I really playing this?!" ~ Nine-year-old me.
I honestly almost regret playing this game when I did, because I was definitely way too young to properly appreciate it.
The almost philosophical dialogue that spoke of locking open doors? The powerful symbolism that represented one's final death through the humble beauty of flowers? The deep moral implications of the afterlife seen through the stories of those doomed to roam it? It all went over my head, and I'm almost ashamed to say that my kiddie brain chose to focus on the funny voices and outlandish visuals instead. It's almost a tragedy that the universe aligned in such way that I could cross paths with this one title exactly when I was less likely to truly appreciate it. Besides, I was an instant-gratification kind of gamer, so the idea of playing a graphic adventure game where the puzzles were solved in far more complex ways than, ejem, unaliving anything that moved proved to be just too "boring" for me, and I never ended up making much progress on the game, despite having a magazine by my side and an ongoing walkthrough of it on TV through NIVEL X.
And while I did, indeed, return to slay that dragon much later in life, the lingering aftertaste I had gotten was that of a missed opportunity that made itself felt on the back of my head as I got older and kept reading how well-loved this one game was. The idea of seeing just a little more of a much bigger story that teased itself by standing just beyond the edges of the few areas I had managed to unlock through sheer luck proved to be both a declaration and a challenge... as even the game's installer showcased the most breath-taking and wild imagery, and I wanted to know where those
screenshots were from. To know their contexts and to see them in motion.
But, believe it or not, none of that is what makes this game so worth writing about in my mind... no, this is a famous game that has been reviewed to death since the age of the internet began, so I really couldn't add much of value through my imperfect (and frankly rough) experience. What I could add, however, was the spin that made it into such a staple of my childhood and that guaranteed it would never be forgotten.
I didn't get to see Calavera Café until I became an adult... which I guess is fitting.
Do you remember when I said how anxious I was about my computer's ability to run this one? Well, I wasn't wrong... the game didn't crawl on screen or anything, but it did have some serious performance issues. Most notably: it would crash almost on command in certain areas through the incredible strain the lack of RAM would put on my system as the 3D environment and full animations began to play, with one particular puzzle freezing my system every single time I tried to solve it, forcing me to physically reboot the whole computer just to try it again.
Any sane person would have quit a game so unstable as to do that as soon as it had happened more than once... but I was not your typical kid. I was completely bedazzled with this one and I just wanted to keep on playing, so I did.
One particular day I woke up hellbent on solving that one puzzle and got to work, trying it over and over, crashing and rebooting my PC time and again as I tried to figure out the solution... and then, the biggest scare of my young life happened after the fifth or sixth reboot: the leds on my monitor started going crazy, racing through the case as the whole screen buzzed and showed nothing but diagonal lights that desperately tried to form into something more meaningful. It was almost like abstract art being displayed in there.
But the scariest thing was the thick smoke that started emerging from the back of the screen.
The monitor killer itself! For whatever reason this one puzzle would always crash my system.
I had never ran so fast in my life.
By the time my dad came to the computer room (which took all of three seconds from a standstill --as I had to wake him up--), he was both horrified and furious about what had happened, and ended up banning me from playing that game ever again, hiding the CD for good measure (and I never did find out where he had put it). Apparently the combination of a severely under-powered system and the constant reboots ended up frying the video card (or some other inner component), resulting on me spending three weeks without a PC to play on and an earful so massive as to rattle my head.
I guess it was only fitting that a game about death would end up with casualties.
Grim Fandango is a game I'll always remember... and the fact that it is not because of its beautifully-crafted story, but due to the perfect storm of circumstances that got me to play it in the first place just adds to the overall charm of the whole thing, and works as a great reminder of why I love gaming. Sometimes the best (or, at least, most enduring) memories are created outside the screen, and are all about the people we shared those games with or the fun things that happened while we played them... and if possibly burning the whole house down is what it took to really enshrine this one on that category for me, then I'm glad to have done it.
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