SINS REVISITED
HOW THE 2014 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION REIMAGINES A CLASSIC
“They just basically took over the whole market. Adventure games fell out of favour very quickly.”
Despite this uncertainty, Gabriel Knight 3 was greenlit and the decision was handed down that it should make the move to 3D. “I would have liked to have done it in live‑action,” says Jane, “but that wasn’t even on the table.”
Jane reveals that she got the idea for GK3’S story after reading The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, a book full of speculation about Jesus’ bloodline, secret societies and lost treasures. “I just dove into it head‑first and got every book I could find on the subject,” Jane says. “It really worked with the mythos of Gabriel Knight’s family. Then I had to have some kind of supernatural element, so ended up pulling in vampires. It’s kind of crazy!”
The unstable situation at Sierra and the struggles that the adventure genre was facing in the late Nineties meant that Jane’s passion for the subject wasn’t well-reflected in the development process. “It was a much more long and painful process to get the third one out,” Jane remembers. “We went through three producers.
Even the team, you could really tell the difference. On Gabriel Knight and Gabriel Knight 2, the team really believed in the project. They were really passionate. On Gabriel
Knight 3 it felt like it was kind of a slog. People weren’t really that engaged in it. It felt like I had to push it uphill a lot more than the first two games.”
Though 3D wouldn’t necessarily have been her own choice, Jane tells us she thought carefully about how to best employ the new technology. “I really didn’t want to get into bringing a lot of action into it like they had tried with King’s Quest VIII. It just didn’t seem like that was the right way to go,” she explains. “For me, it was about making puzzles more geometric and more spatial. We had that whole La Serpent Rouge puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 which was about landscape and using viewpoints. I tried to use the abilities of 3D to make interesting new puzzles.”
The game again received positive critical praise, but emerging in a context where adventure games were a dying breed, it had little chance of commercial success, signalling the end of what Jane had always hoped would be a long‑running series.
“I think even before it shipped it was clear the company was going in a different direction,” says Jane. “The management changed and they were all about doing 3D shooters. I tried to pitch Gabriel Knight 4 after Gabriel Knight 3 came out but it wasn’t really happening. I had a couple of ideas,” Jane reveals. “Scotland was in there at one point, I wanted to do witches for sure. If there’s a publisher that would invest the money in creating it I would love to design it, but I’m not holding my breath,” says Jane on the possibility of reviving the beloved series.
The chances of a Gabriel Knight return do indeed seem slim, but there’s no doubt that the series made a well‑deserved impact. In delving head‑first into darker territory, Gabriel Knight was a pioneer that’s earned its spot in adventure game canon and left a deep impression on players sucked in by its tantalising mysteries and richly conceived paranormal mythology.