A video posted over the weekend to the Double Fine YouTube channel shows off the game's first public footage of the classic Grim Fandango running on a PlayStation 4 in anticipation of the game's upcoming remastered port.
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Other than giving a tantalizingly brief clip of Grim Fandango running with a DualShock 4, the video also talks to several members of the Grim Fandango Remastered development team about the running theme of the various difficulties that come with trying to release a 16-year-old game for a modern audience. It's no secret what kind of progress video games as a whole have made in the last decade or two, and audience tastes and expectations have grown alongside them. What used to pass as a hit game needs quite a bit of polishing to stand up to most consumers today.
Some of the compression technology that was necessary to get a game running on older machines led to graphical issues like color banding in the original. Fortunately for the team, they gained access to many of the game's original assets, previously stored in an old archive. Having access to original files before compression should allow the developers to make a new-generation port that is more faithful to what the original developers had in mind.
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According to Double Fine founder Tim Schafer in the video, the goal of the remaster is mostly to clean up the visuals for a new audience, leaving as much of the original in tact as possible, down to the original aspect ratio. The developers also upgraded other details like the collision detection.
Have a look at the video to get a sense of how it feels for these developers to deal with such old and classic source material. As it turns out, getting a remastered port of an old adventure classic is exciting for more than just the players.
