IncGamers - Jane Jensen Interview

IncGamers posted a new interview with Jane Jensen about her remake of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. So here are a few questions. and answers I took as a quote.

TM: I suppose the most obvious question to start with, then, is: why remake Gabriel Knight? It was extraordinarily well-received and lots of people have very fond memories of it, so… why remake something that’s still so beloved?

JJ: Well, the original game was released in 1993. It’s very low-resolution – the characters are cute little blobs, and it really doesn’t impress a modern market. I guess our old fans still play it, but there aren’t too many new people that have adopted it.

Ideally, we’d like to bring back the Gabriel Knight franchise. We’ve been talking to Activision and we thought the best way to approach it was to redo the first game, which was basically like a pilot episode; it shows how Gabriel Knight becomes a Schattenjager. And from there, we might be able to proceed with new episodes.

TM: So was introducing new people to the franchise the primary reason for the remake, then? From what I understand this isn’t just a graphical update – you’re changing some of the puzzles, too.

JJ: We’ve added some new puzzles and some new scenes, and a couple of the older puzzles were changed as well, but it’s mostly the original gameplay with some additional material.

TM: Out of interest, which of the older puzzles were changed? I remember with not-much-fondness the clock puzzle in Grandma Knight’s house, amongst other things. Most of them were fine, and logical, and great! That one, though…

JJ: [Laughs] Well, that one hasn’t changed!

On… Day Six, I think it is, you sneak into Mosely’s office, and the original puzzle involved distracting the cops with a beignet vendor. It was sort of a silly sequence, and by that time in the game I felt like the mood should be much more serious and scary. So that puzzle has been revised, and we’ve added a new cutscene in there. How you get into his office is a brand-new puzzle sequence.

We’ve also added some exteriors to try to increase the feeling of being in the French Quarter of New Orleans, as a lot of the original game’s rooms were interiors, so we’ve added some nice exterior shots. Little things like how you get the snake scale at the crime scene has changed, too.