Where are they now? - Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

In 2014, the 20th Anniversary Edition of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was released which was originally designed and written by Jane Jensen

For today's Where are they now? let's take a look at a few of the key developers behind the classic Sierra point 'n' click adventure, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I played Gabriel Knight a long time after my first few years of playing Sierra point 'n' click adventures such as Quest for Glory, Space Quest II and Police Quest - which is probably just as well since some of the graphics were much better than these early Sierra games and the themes were darker, more adult. Anyway, the game was fantastic; I loved the music, I loved the fact you got to explore a real city (New Orleans), I loved the voice acting (Tim Curry as Gabriel Knight!) and it was just a great game overall. So it's probably no surprise that I ended up in possession of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the game (thanks to being gifted it for Father's Day).

But who were the people behind the development of this game? Well there are far too many to mention but I'll at least mention some of the key people (to me) and that would be its designers, writers and composers. In the case of Gabriel Knight, that would be Jane Jensen, Bridget McKenna and Robert Holmes.

Jane Jensen probably needs little introduction; I've already mentioned her in a previous "Where are they now?" post and it doesn't seem too much has changed since then, at least on the games development front. Jensen was responsible for designing and writing the original Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers but she was also responsible for designing and writing for the 2014 games Moebius: Empire Rising and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition. Since 2014, she doesn't appear to have worked on any other games but that's probably because she's been busy writing novels. Earlier this month, she showcased the cover of her new book called "In the Land of Milk and Honey" which is due for release in August.

Robert Holmes, Jensen's husband, composed the music for Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and has composed music for just about every game his wife has designed since, such as the Gabriel Knight sequels, Gray Matter and Cognition. More recently, he composed the music for Moebius: Empire Rising and remastered his original work for the 20th Anniversary Edition of Sins of the Fathers.

Bridget McKenna is credited as one of the writers for the original Sins of the Fathers, although it seems that she performed a lot of editing and documentation work for Sierra during the late 80s and early 90s. McKenna continued to lend her writing talents for a few games after Sierra, mainly MMORPGs like 1999's Asheron's Call, 2009's Aion and 2011's TERA. Nowadays she continues to write stories and publishes them as e-books. Her most recent e-book "Evenings, Mornings, Afternoons: Thirteen Stories", was released just last year. She also provides creative writing advice on her blog.

I unfortunately don't have the time to cover what happened to the entire development team but if you happened to be part of the original Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers development team, then let us know! We'd love to hear your stories and anecdotes! :)

LINKS:
[ MobyGames: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers ]
[ Wikipedia: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers ]
[ MobyGames: Robert Holmes ]
[ MobyGames: Jane Jensen ]
[ Wikipedia: Jane Jensen ]
[ Facebook: Jane Jensen ]
[ Official Bridget McKenna website ]
[ MobyGames: Bridget McKenna ]