Grim Fandango’s composer on the invention and remastering of his classic score

LucasArts is dead, but one of its best composers, Peter McConnell, is doing just fine.

After starting his career in video game music by working on classic LucasArts games like Outlaws and Full Throttle, he became famed game designer Tim Schafer’s go-to man. He’s worked on Double Fine games like Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and Broken Age.

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However, his most famous score might be the one he created for the classic adventure game Grim Fandango in 1998. Another collaboration with Schafer at LucasArts, the music features a unique blend of classic noir soundtracks, swing, and Mexican folk. Now, thanks to the recently released Grim Fandango Remastered, McConnell had the chance to improve his famous score with new orchestrations.

We were able to chat with McConnell about the remastering process, as well as discuss his work on the original Grim Fandango soundtrack and his early days at LucasArts.

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GamesBeat: When was it decided to re-orchestrate the score for Grim Fandango Remastered? Was that a pretty early decision?

Peter McConnell: In my mind, it probably happened about the time the game was originally released. I was always very proud of one aspect of the score, which was that we were able to do nice live jazz recordings for a game in 1998, which was — in those days, that was not very common. We were able to do a really nice job with some super-talented Bay Area musicians. It was just really fun. I look back at the folks who played on the original tracks, it’s just awesome. Bill Ortiz, who now plays with Santana. Derek Jones, the bass player, has played with all kinds of folks, from Jay Leno’s band to — I was lucky to get this guy Ralph Carney, not to sound like a name-dropper here, but he’s Tom Waits’s main lead player. Just a really awesome collection of folks. Hunt Christian, the cello player, he’s a new-age artist. He tours all over the country. Anyway. Just a fantastic group of folks.

So there was this aspect of the score that I was really happy about. And people loved it. There was definitely a recognition of it when the game came out. Whoever heard of doing swing in a film-noir game about skeletons? So in some sense, it felt sort of like a gift at the time. But there was still an aspect of the score that I was really — two aspects of the score that are similar, that just inherently bugged me going out the door. One was, there just weren’t enough sample sounds. Some of the aspects weren’t that convincing. In particular, number two, the orchestra was done with what at the time were decent samples, but it just didn’t sound much like an orchestra. So you had this one aspect of the score that was really getting across the vibe, really convincingly, and then this other aspect of the score that was … kind of pretend? Like, “I’m not a real score, but I play one in a game.”

Whenever I would listen to that music, I was like, wow, this is pretty nice writing. I wonder what it would really sound like. It’s always bugged me a bit, in the sense that Grim’s music was a little bit ahead of time, but it suffered in a way that things do when they’re ahead of their time. The pipeline isn’t quite ready to do it. Not that long, a couple of years after that, people started doing a lot of full orchestra scores. You couldn’t do it at the time. But it wasn’t a long time before that was a feasible idea. The bottom line is that I’ve always wanted to do this. When I heard it was being remade, that’s pretty much the first thing I said. 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.

I was lucky to have a relationship with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra from working on Broken Age together. The music administrator there is a fan of the music, a backer of Broken Age. He’s done a huge amount of work to get everybody in MSO excited about doing music for games. Grim in particular was a tough job because as I said, I never expected that I would actually get the chance to do this live. So what I did was the best I could with those old samples. I tried to make the pieces sound as organic as I could with those limitations. One of the ways I did that was to be very free with the tempo so it would sound like a guy was conducting while watching the game, old-school movie style. No click track. You look up there and see the screen and you’re sitting there waving a baton and the orchestra’s just going with you. That feel, for those out there who work with sequencers — a sequencer is a tool you use to write music with — I wasn’t paying any attention to bar lines. I was just playing music. It was too much trouble to change the temp to make it follow to what I was doing as I was playing. I just wanted to make it sound very musical.

So it was extremely organic. Not quantized. These are all terms for people who do this stuff. As a result, when we came back to it, I looked at it and said, “Oh my God, I would never do this today.” I’d never have the tempo move around like that. How are these guys gonna play this? It was a real job to capture, to make sure that the music didn’t change. It was a real job to break it apart in sections and make it achieve all the fluidity, which because of the dynamic nature of the music — in order to do that, we had to break it up in sections and record it bit by bit and assemble it later. It was a big task, I would say, for the orchestra and their fabulous conductor, Brett Kelly. And for me in terms of grabbing it all and getting it all to make sense, doing real bar lines in there. But it happened. Now I can say, that’s what it sounds like!

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GamesBeat: So it’s not as easy as just opening a file and printing sheet music for them.

McConnell: No, it’s not. Anytime you’re doing this, you go through a process where you compose it by whatever method you do. Most people these days use a sequencer with samples. Some people still sit down at a piano to test things out. I do a little bit of work with pencil and paper. But I was definitely raised in a recording studio. Most of it I do with a sequencer. What the sequencer does — then you use ProTools, what they call a digital audio workstation. It’s a facility for turning what you play into notes. But it’s very crude. You have to work with it a lot.

When I’m working, I actually look at the score version of what I’m doing as I play it. Then I make sure that all the parts, the musical lines, are there, written basically well, in a notation program called Sibelius. I send that to an orchestrator to make sure that everything’s doubled right, everything’s marked with the proper dynamics. There are all kinds of things that you do there. Orchestrating is a fine art. Then, during the recording sessions, we’re sitting there watching what’s going on in Australia, making comments, and playing it again.

GamesBeat: Take me back to working on the original Grim Fandango. When you were first approached with this idea, was it something that was hard to visualize at first?

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McConnell: That would have been maybe early 1997, when I first started to work on it. Let me see if I can remember things right. I saw some concept art, I saw some sketches of Manny very early on and I was like, “Wow, what is this?” Grim came out at a time — it was very much a perfect storm of cultural stuff going on. Swing music was pretty hip at the time. Maybe just after Grim came out was when Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played the Super Bowl? There was this whole new swing movement that was happening somewhere around the time. It was very current in that sense.

I had been in a band around that time. The Mission District of San Francisco is where a lot of the clubs are, and in particular, there are a bunch that play jazz, that would play acid jazz or new swing, maybe right around the corner from a cantina. Basically, the entire Grim score — you could hear it walking around the Mission. Or at least you could hear everything but the orchestra. The orchestra would just be playing in your mind, I suppose. Really, all the players were from bands who played in those clubs. Or in the case of the mariachi band in the cantina around the corner. Even the guy who played the ethnic flutes, who played on some of the folkier sections of music, lived in that same area, lived in the Mission. They have a big Day of the Dead celebration there as well. Literally, it came from there. Really, even in some senses before I saw the art, I was already in that scene.

Getting back to your question, how it developed or came together, Tim came to me with his collection of Bogie movies. He loaned me his collection of Bogie movies for a super long time. I had watched them a lot of times, in particular Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and The Maltese Falcon. All of which figured into various parts of Grim. And also Glengarry Glen Ross. That was a big influence. So is this movie that doesn’t get mentioned much in articles, City of Lost Children. It’s a really interesting sci-fi/fantasy French movie. It informed the oceanic part of the game. So that was all percolating around. And then Tim also loaned me some really interesting folk music from Mexico that was played on a scratchy violin. Listening to that, probably around early 1997, and walking around humming melodies into my handheld tape recorder — we still used tape recorders in those days — that’s sort of how it started.

GamesBeat: Was it difficult to combine those two sort of different styles, the Mexican folk style and the noir, jazzier style?

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McConnell: Not at all. Another thing that came out around then, by the way, although I’d have to check this, but the Buena Vista Social Club. I remember even seeing that and going, “Wow, we should look at [that].” I’m gonna google it now. I’m pretty sure that I saw the movie before. Nope, it came out right after. It must have been cosmically connected in some way I don’t understand. Anyway, in answer to your question, no, we didn’t really see those two things coming together, and we were about to in Ry Cooder’s record, that sort of Cuban jazz. That’s what it’s all about, the meeting of those two worlds. That’s a good example of how prescient Tim is, right?

The challenge with Grim in that respect was not to make it — I’m trying to say this very clearly — but not to get too ethnic with it. Not making it so that you’re doing sort of a spoof, where you’re coming from a perspective of some sort of Gilbert and Sullivan thing, where the cultural world is just a fun backdrop to be funny with. One way, the way that I found to be respectful of the music — I hadn’t played a whole lot of Latin music at that point — was to kind of come at it as something that’s there and in the atmosphere, but is part of — it’s not something where you’re saying, oh, here’s folk music.

Most of the score is jazz, which is a more familiar format to an Anglo-American audience. It’s a way of taking the culturally specific part, the Latin jazz, the Latin folk music — sort of taking it for granted rather than pointing it up. So in that sense the music — some of the music is more just standard noir music, because in the end it’s a noir story. That’s the comfort zone, the turf of Grim Fandango. It’s a way of making a world which is not familiar to the wider audience in the U.S., say, more familiar by connecting it through more familiar music. And then finding the place in the music that touches the culture that the stories really come from. It’s a hard thing to articulate, but it was important to the game to not be forced about it, to be natural about it. One way to be natural is to start from your comfort zone and make an unfamiliar world more familiar.

GamesBeat: It seems like a bit prior to Grim, most of the LucasArts games had multiple composers, usually including you, Michael Land, and Clint Bajakian. When did it turn into a thing where you guys were working on separate projects, and why was that?

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McConnell: That first started with Sam & Max. The only games that we really did as a team — it was sort of a natural evolution. I’m really glad we did it this way. We started by writing together. It was really, in some cases, kind of Lennon-McCartney-esque. Mike would write the bridge to a tune that I started. The Largo music in Monkey Island, he did a Largo piece and I did a Largo piece, and we were both like, “Well, let’s put them together.” It worked really great. You have the bridge music that’s a nice contrast to the head. But it still has this one single character, this sort of obnoxious guy. We started out tossing tunes back and forth, and what it did was allow us to develop the sound together and also learn to use the system we were working on together, the iMuse system. That happened for Monkey Island.

But even in those cases, when we did Monkey Island, we pretty much each took an island. There were situations and characters that went back and forth between the islands where we shared the music, but we each took an island. It was all in the same game, though, and it was one score, so we were working together. Indiana Jones, Monkey, TIE Fighter, X-Wing, Day of the Tentacle, and that’s it. Those were all done as a trio. Sam & Max, I wrote a few of the main themes, and then Clint took it over entirely. I started to work on Full Throttle. I think it was after TIE Fighter that we said, okay, guys, it’s time for us to have the concept of a lead composer. The other two guys might work on that game, but the lead composer is going to be responsible for the whole score. The idea of being responsible for a score was the first step.

With Sam & Max, Clint became responsible for the score. After that was Full Throttle. I was responsible for that score. I did all the score that wasn’t rock music. I think after that was The Dig, and that was Mike. And then Outlaws — actually, we branched off into separate paths of musical responsibility around about 1995.

GamesBeat: How did it happen that you got Grim Fandango?

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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.

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]

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.