GamesBeat: How did it happen that you got Grim Fandango?
McConnell: You know, I don’t really remember. I know that we all three worked on Day of the Tentacle. I actually think I was a little bit at loggerheads with Tim on a couple things with Day of the Tentacle. That’s how our beautiful relationship was formed. [Laughs] I remember, just on a couple situations, where Tim and I actually disagreed on stuff that the music should do. I don’t know, maybe that’s what made it interesting. I think I just got annoyed at him once when one cutscene that had been really long got suddenly shortened. Whatever it was, Full Throttle we worked out.
I don’t remember whether it was Tim who said — I don’t know who was involved in saying, “OK, he’s gonna do Full Throttle.” It might have been a number of factors. I had a band. It was a rock genre. We kind of looked at the genres of things and said, well, this is more my turf, you might say. There was some kind of combination of that and just an affinity for what each of us was doing. I loved Tim’s stuff. He seemed to like what I did musically. But I don’t remember how, what moment it was where we said, Pete’s going to do Full Throttle. But Full Throttle was in any case a pretty big success artistically, even if it was quite an adventure wrangling the band and putting all the elements together. So after that I had the opportunity to work on Grim. On Grim was where the bond, the relationship between Tim and I really became close. It worked really well.
Above: Really well.
GamesBeat: You were talking earlier about how you each took an island for Monkey Island. Which one was yours?
McConnell: I think it was called Booty Island? I forget the names of the islands. Melee was the one that had Wood Tick on it? That was Mike. Fat had Governor Fat, and I know Clint did the Governor Fat music, the awesome Governor Fat music. Booty was where I started messing around a little bit with jazz. A couple of things on that had a clarinet sound, some things that were a little in that direction.
GamesBeat: Talking about Day of the Tentacle, we know that game is getting a remastering. Is that another soundtrack you think you’re going to get back into?
McConnell: We’re in such an early stage on that, I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I imagine it being more of a rendering of what’s already happened with better sounds. Day of the Tentacle is just not quite as inherently orchestral as Grim is. It’s from an earlier time. But I have no idea. I’d love to do whatever we can with it. Maybe it depends on how well Grim sells. [Laughs]
Above: Soon.
GamesBeat: Is there anything else you’re working on right now that you could talk about?
McConnell: I’m certainly working on Broken Age. We’re wrapping that up as soon as we can. That’s got some new orchestral music in it. That’s a very exciting score because we’re working with the MSO. We have Act 2, which is epic, and so that’s pretty much what’s taking up a lot of my time at the moment. There’s other stuff that I can’t quite talk about yet, some things coming down the pike. I wish I could say more about that, but you know how it is. Then you end up sounding annoyingly coy.
GamesBeat: No, I understand how these things work.
McConnell: Things just haven’t been released and announced, so I can’t talk about that yet. But it’s very exciting stuff that I’m working on now. I’m a lucky guy. I love what I do, and I’m glad that enough people like it that I can keep doing it. While I’m at it, I should probably express some appreciation to other folks who helped make the Grim remastering possible. It was a giant effort. We didn’t even know that we would be able to do a tenth of it, because the tapes, all the stuff was backed up on something called DLT. It’s a tape format. Those tapes, first of all, they were very hard to locate. They were burning a hole in some crate a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, somewhere in the Lucas archives. Just tracking them down was a major job that involved some very — a lot of extracurricular work by a guy named Rob Cowles, who was a marketer at LucasArts. When LucasArts was transferred to Disney, he took it upon himself to rescue a lot of the audio assets. So first it was tracking down the tapes, which literally took a couple of months.
Then it was actually extracting the data from them. That was done by a guy named Jory Prume, who also mixed the orchestral music. Then there was all the work, like I said before, of turning the music into something that could be read by musicians. That was my work, and also an orchestrator named Karim Elmahmoudi. Then there was also a lot of stuff that we weren’t able to do live, but the sample sounds were recorded by Pyramind Studios in San Francisco. They also did all the cutscene music, which sounds fantastic. Finally, there was my friends at Sony in the audio department there. They helped me record some new parts and mixed all the jazz stuff. That was a giant, giant undertaking to remaster it. Really, the subtitle of the game should be Re-Voiced, Re-Orchestrated, Re-Recorded, Re-Mixed, and Re-Mastered.
GamesBeat: It definitely sounds great, so it was worth all the effort.
McConnell: Well, I appreciate it.