Tim Schafer's Grim Designs

Perhaps inspired by Jordan Mechner's recent decision to unearth some of the early reference video for the original Prince of Persia, Double Fine founder and high cleric of comedic video games Tim Schafer has provided us with a glimpse under the hood of another unforgettable game by releasing an original design doc for Grim Fandango. Take warning: this hefty PDF file is thick with puzzle solutions, so it's probably best appreciated by people who've already played through the game. Additionally, it's so bitchin' it might make you throw up.

While it's certainly fascinating to see the words on a page that would one day turn into such a superb game, it's no match for the stuff that didn't make it into Grim Fandango, from specific puzzles to a number of characters. My brain shivers trying to imagine how this cutting-room floor material would've looked in the final game. Perhaps the best touch, as Schafer himself points out, is the solution for the final puzzle, which they hadn't worked out by the deadline, so in perfect seventh-grade style, he wrote a bunch of nonsense and overlapped the text to make it look like a printing error. I'm almost surprised there was no double-spaced text thrown in for good measure.