Grim Fandango scored 94 on Metacritic, won Game of the Year awards, and now sits in the Museum of Modern Art, yet it was blamed for killing the adventure game genre. This episode explores the Eighth Underworld, where Manny Calavera works off a debt at the Department of Death selling travel packages to the newly deceased, and how Tim Schafer fused a UC Berkeley anthropology lesson on Aztec burial beliefs with Casablanca-style film noir.

The hosts cover the sprouting mechanic that lets skeletons die again, the GrimE engine’s pre-rendered backgrounds and 250-polygon Manny, the game’s early commercial use of the Lua scripting language, and Peter McConnell’s score recorded with a live mariachi band from San Francisco’s Mission District. They then explain why tank controls and a 1998 market shifting to Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid produced roughly 500,000 sales, how LucasArts abandoned the genre, and how Double Fine’s 2015 remaster required digging up obsolete DLT tapes, tracking down former employees, and borrowing code from a fan who had already fixed the controls.

• Aztec folklore meets film noir: how two bags of gold implied a criminal underworld of the dead
• Sprouting, the Number Nine train, and the conspiracy behind Hector LeMans
• Why static backgrounds forced tank controls that frustrated players into quitting
• How one game’s sales became a referendum that ended LucasArts adventure development
• Digital archaeology: recovering lost audio, missing source code, and a Melbourne Symphony re-recording