Pixelhunter – Gabriel Knight returns

Following the mixed fortunes of her long awaited project Gray Matter, which was perhaps inadvisably given a commercial boxed release, Jane Jensen recently turned to Kickstarter where a landslide campaign allowed her to not only start work on a new game, Metaphysical thriller Moebius, but also start her own studio, Pinkerton Road. Now she has announced that Pinkerton Road is remaking Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, the game that made her name, having licensed it back from behemoth Activision, which has many such classic properties languishing in its cobwebbed vaults.

Gabriel Knight was a classic early 90s Sierra Point and Click series, which followed the fortunes and foibles of an eponymous New Orleans bookshop owner, pulp novelist and investigator of the paranormal, who discovers he is descended from the Schattenjäger, a line of German demon hunters. Over three classic games Knight bumbles his way around the world poking his nose into ancient conspiracies and maintaining a will-they-won’t-they awkward romance with his long suffering assistant Grace Nakamura. Obvious comparisons could be drawn to Charles Cecil’s iconic globe-trotting protagonist George Stobbart, who also dabbled in his fair share of ancient, pre-Dan Brown conspiracies, but whilst they shared a somewhat sarcastic tone Stobbart always seemed a more wholesome hero. Knight, meanwhile, was racked with self doubt and shot through with negative traits from mild chauvinism right the way down to simple laziness and incompetence, but in spite of it all still managed to come off as sympathetic. So few modern videogame heroes have such gaping flaws so hopefully Knight won’t become mellowed with age.

Depending on your stance towards the original game’s sometimes clunky, though undoubtedly pioneering voice acting, you may or may not be disappointed to hear that following the loss of the original masters the game will have to be recast. Sins of the Father was made at a time when voice acting in games was a novelty and managed to cast a group of famous actors early on in their careers including Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn and of course Tim Curry as Knight himself – all of whom would be well outside the budget of an independent game.  Personally I always found Tim Curry’s over wrought New Orleans accent jarring and preferred the understated performance given by Dean Erickson in the FMV sequel The Beast Within, which perfectly conveyed the feel of a man out of his depth.

So few modern videogame heroes have such gaping flaws so hopefully Knight won’t become mellowed with age

Jensen has been working on the game with Phoenix Online Studios, whose recent series Cognition: An Erica Reed thriller, about an FBI agent with crippling psychic powers pursuing a serial killer responsible for murdering her brother, has given them a good deal of experience with pulpy supernatural thrillers. The game will be made in Unity, with fully 3D character models, something which might give many fans pause given that the original was a delightful pixel art classic. Recent remakes of Broken Sword and Monkey Island managed to update their look and feel whilst maintaining the 2D aesthetic that evokes so much nostalgia, and Jensen has claimed to have been inspired by those titles in getting this project off the ground, so hopefully she won’t try to over modernise. Although it’s hard to imagine a genre as old fashioned and nostalgia laden as the adventure game being at the cutting edge of anything, the Gabriel Knight series was always synonymous with pushing the technological envelope, its sequels using then cutting edge FMV and early 3D environments.

In an interview with Game Trailers Jane Jensen teased that the remake might open the door for future Gabriel Knight games, and that she has two such ideas sitting on her hard drive. I for one would certainly like to see where this series goes, especially in light of Broken Sword getting a new adventure. If you want to follow the game through production you can sign up for Pinkerton Road’s Community Supported Gaming initiative on their website.