I've talked often about how important the Mass Effect video games were to my becoming a writer. But long before there was Mass Effect, there was Gabriel Knight. Gabriel Knight 3, to be precise.
My husband was a lifelong PC gamer and Sierra Online fanatic, and GK1 and 2 had already won multiple Game of the Year awards and much critical acclaim. But me? I was an attorney, a former bookworm who no longer had much desire to read, write, or generally have any fun whatsoever. Well, GK3 came along, and he saw his chance. He wooed me in with teasers of a fabulous mystery, vampires, the Holy Grail, and a female computer nerd as a playable secondary main character. So I gave it a try.
I was enraptured! I devoured the game, twice in a row - the first video game I'd played since Super Mario Bros on the NES. Enraptured enough to then go back and play GK1 and 2, both equally incredible stories. So why were they incredible? A couple of reasons, but above all, due to creater and writer Jane Jensen. She envisioned telling complex, nuanced, novel-worthy stories within the medium of video games - then figured out how to do it.
Right person, right idea, right time. The Gabriel Knight trilogy spans several leaps in the technological capabilities of video games, from the 2D point-and-click adventure style of GK1, to the industry's brief (and weird to our modern eyes) experiment with full-motion video in GK2, to the arrival of 3D graphics and a free camera in GK3. Each leap forward gave Jensen more tools with which to tell a deeper story, and she took full advantage of them all. The gameplay of each installment can be clunky to modern gamers (each one in its own particular way), but the stories are as rich and compelling as anything we have today.
I didn't rush off to embrace my inner writer immediately upon completing my Gabriel Knight binge. But I DID become an avid video gamer because of it, and the first spark of creativity, that in time burnt away the lawyerly outer shell, was lit. And when Mass Effect crashed into my life 8 years later, I was ready for what happened next.
Why do I post this today? Because journalist Elías Casella has published an excellent deep dive into the making of these games and how their development interwove with Jane Jensen's journey, the rise and fall of Sierra Online, and the technological leaps that transformed PC gaming in the 1990s. If you are at all interested in this topic, give it a read: https://www.421.news/en/gabriel-knight-sierra-games-en/
