Over two hours of the three-hour score was overhauled. We ended up doing about a half hour of the score with live orchestra, and 45 minutes of re-mixed jazz tunes, including a few new live parts and some new solos, and then 45 minutes of music in which we replaced parts that were sampled with new, state-of the-art samples. Well we didn’t have an unlimited budget, so I had to choose very carefully which pieces would get the most attention and how. How did you approach re-recording the soundtrack? How much of it was re-recorded? That said, it was a miracle we were able to get those sessions to happen, especially under such a tight schedule. They are such a tremendous ensemble, and from working on Broken Age, we had developed a great rapport and rhythm in the studio. What was it like working with them again on new recordings of classic Grim Fandango tracks? You’d previously worked with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on Broken Age. All in all it was a chain of miracles, and if any of the links had not held up, we would have had very little to work with at all. As you can guess, it wasn’t much of a problem to replace those. ![]() ![]() In the end we got everything – every single bit of recorded music and session data – all except for two cymbal hits. I have Jory Prum at Studio Jory to thank for having just those things, and more importantly, for having the expertise to go through several drive units and get all the data properly extracted from those 16-year old tapes. But DLT tapes are an old medium requiring a DLT drive and an old Mac with SCSI connectors, and old software called Retrospect Remote. ![]() Then there was Derek Williams of LucasArts who actually found the box of DLT tapes which contained all the data. I owe a lot to a guy named Rob Cowles who had been in Marketing at LucasArts and had rescued the sound department backups when LucasArts was acquired. Finding the people who knew which inner recesses of the archives might contain the data was a job in and of itself. What condition were the original audio files in when you got your hands on them – did you manage to recover everything from the original game?įrom a musical point of view I like to call Grim Remastered “Grim re-arranged, re-voiced, re-orchestrated, re-recorded, re-mixed, re-mastered and – most of all – retrieved.” Getting that data actually took months. It’s truly amazing how many “friends of Grim” there are out there. Some of these people had worked on it, some had grown up with it as a favourite game. Then it turned out I was wrong – it turned out that there were folks at Disney, at LucasArts, at Sony and of course at Double Fine, who wanted to revisit it, too. But I had long given up on the idea that it could ever happen. ![]() Well I had always wanted the opportunity to revisit Grim because, while the original jazz music came out great, the “orchestral” music was all done with 1997-era samples and didn’t come close to what I imagined it could be like. How did you feel when you realised you were going to get the opportunity to remaster the soundtrack? Was that always part of the original remastering plan? I couldn’t believe it! How often in life do you get a do-over of something you really care about? You’ve continued to have a great working relationship with Double Fine Productions and Tim Schafer – do you remember when you first heard the news about Grim Fandango Remastered? Zombies: Garden Warfare, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Costume Quest and Grim Fandango Remastered. Since then I’ve been lucky to work on a bunch of cool projects: Broken Age, Plants vs. What have you been up to since we last spoke in 2012?Īt the beginning of 2012 I was just finishing Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. Hello Mr McConnell, thank you for your time and welcome back to Alternative Magazine Online!
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