Gabriel Knight 4 - blog

GK4Campaign’s Ingrid Heyn: I had the privilege and fun of interviewing Robert Holmes, well-known musician and composer of the music for the GK series. While many of you will already have read the article based on that interview, we’ve got something special for you now - the FULL INTERVIEW with Robert Holmes, published for the first time.

Enjoy!

This transcript is an as-faithful-as-possible rendition of what Jane Jensen had to say at the recent conference in Leipzig (24th August 2006) concerning Gray Matter. I was unable to make out several portions of what was said, due to either noise effects or very low volume of particular words. Anyone who is able to “fill in the blanks” will be highly welcome!

JANE JENSEN at the LEIPZIG CONFERENCE with ANACONDA

Well, first I’d like to really thank you all for coming to this press conference. I know it’s very early days in this production, and I appreciate your interest in this game, so… thank you for coming. As you can see from the opening cut-scene, we are in the art concepting phase of this project, and also working on the engine. It is a rare opportunity to be able to start a brand new computer game series. In fact, I’ve only had that opportunity one other time in my career, which you’re probably familiar with. It probably follows that it would be a paranormal mystery series, since I can’t seem to get away from doing that, even when I write books. But almost 14 years after Gabriel Knight was first concepted, there have been many TV series about the paranormal, many movies about the paranormal, many game series about the paranormal. So the challenge was to try to figure out what would be a fresh approach, something new that you haven’t seen before on this theme. So Gray Matter really takes a much more philosophical point of view. It’s a much more subtle and realistic and scientific approach to the paranormal. It asks questions such as “What is the nature of reality?” “How do our perceptions and prejudices… how do they affect how we perceive the physical world?” and “What powers might lie untapped in the human mind?” It’s more… It says that it’s more Matrix than Van Helsing, so you won’t be chasing a lot of werewolves and vampires in this series.

One of the main characters is Samantha Everett (Sam), whom you saw in the opening sequence. She is a very talented stage musician, very adept at sleight-of-hand, and she’s been bumming around Europe for the last few years, getting by as a street performer. But at the opening of our story, she is out of money and out of luck, and stranded in the middle of nowhere, as you saw in that opening sequence.

She finds herself through a series of coincidences (or maybe they’re not coincidences) volunteering to be the assistant for Doctor David Styles… This is a really rough really pre-model [in reference to the image shown]. Styles is an Oxford neurobiologist and he had a brilliant career at one point, but five years ago, there was a horrific car accident that killed his wife in the fire and disfigured him partially. Since that time he has been a recluse in his house, which is another character meaning Dread Hill House, conducting unknown experiments in his basement. It is possible that he’s half-crazy, or so his peers think, because he’s developed some very strange ideas about the potential of the human body.

This first game in the series, and I want to make it clear that it’s not an episodic series as much as it is a planned continuing series, hopefully, just like Gabriel Knight… So this first game brings the characters together and gives you an introduction to the series’ themes. This first game is called Such stuff as dreams are made of, and in the game, Sam is challenged to find six students to volunteer for Doctor Styles’ new experiment – and this is your first quest, okay? And that’s quite a challenge, because he has a very unsavoury reputation on campus, to say the least. But Sam does manage, hopefully, if you’re playing correctly, to find six students to volunteer. The students are called the Lambs’ Club, as in “sacrificial”. And at first the experiment that Dr Styles has in mind seems harmless enough. The game will use real neurobiology in the way that CSI, the TV series, uses forensics, as a kind of grounding wire in reality. An experiment that he’s doing is to map the brain wave patterns of the students as they visualise various physical exercises, and this is actually a cutting-edge area of research in real-life neurobiology. It turns out that, if you visualise an exercise like jogging in great detail, your muscles and cardiovascular system get 60 to 70 percent of the benefit that they would if you actually went out [impossible to hear over the groan of the camera’s movements]… Talk about the powers of the mind. So this is the experiment that he’s running, and at first it seems like a pretty normal neurobiology experiment, but before long, there are bizarre events that start happening on campus that seem to mirror the exercises and visualisation that the students are performing every night.

Meanwhile, in another sub-plot, David is receiving visits in Dread Hill House
from his late wife.

So as a player, you will need to uncover the mystery of exactly what is going on in the house and in the experiments on the Oxford campus.

As a player, you play as both Sam and David. A lot of the puzzles are traditional inventory / dialogue puzzles – inventory-based puzzles, logic puzzles, riddles. Sam is involved with a magic club called the Daedalus Club which has some really interesting scavenger-hunt type riddles in the game. In addition as Sam, she will have an interface to do sleight-of-hand magic, which she has a tendency to use to get her own way in just about any real-life situation. As David, you’ll have an opportunity to do some puzzles that are involved with neurobiology, such as hypnosis and memory recall.

And these are some additional early concept sketches for the game.

This is not final… with the art.

Questions and Answers

What will Gray Matter be – a point and click adventure, or will it use 3D? How will I [garbled], how will I see Gray Matter?

JANE: Well, we did Gabriel Knight 3 in real-time 3D, and I think in general the adventure game audience does not enjoy navigating in real-time 3D. So for this game, we’re planning 2 ½ D, basically full 3D backgrounds that are pre-rendered, and then 3D characters on top of that. It will be mostly point-and-click, but there will be a context-sensitive cursor, and also in some instances, like when you’re doing the magic with Sam, there will be a small menu that pops up where you select your options.

A couple of years ago, Gray Matter had already been in development with another publisher. Has the game changed in the last years… have your plans changed? Yes, it was announced in 2003 that we would be publishing Gray Matter with Dreamcatcher. The game at that point did not have a developer, and we spent some months searching for the right development team, but in the end, Dreamcatcher would not come up with the funding for the game, so it was cancelled. So this is an opportunity for Gray Matter to finally find a realisation, and hopefully, I think we’re much farther along now than we were at the time of that [too soft to hear]. But the game itself, the game bible, is identical. [too soft to hear].

QUESTION ABOUT PUZZLES: Well, having worked in the casual game for the last few years, I think I’m… I’m definitely much more in favour of having a game that is very accessible to the mass market, and providing a very seamless entertainment experience with not a lot of road-blocks that come up, especially early in the game, where you’re not, you know, invested enough yet to not just give up and decide to play something else. So I think that there will definitely be some challenging puzzles in Gray Matter, and some, you know, I can’t resist writing riddles… some people find those very hard to solve. But in general, I’d like to make it more of a seamless flow… You can get into the story and not be too disrupted by very difficult puzzles.

Question about integrating action into the game, such as in Dreamfall: I think it can be done successfully. Even the old Sierra games that I grew up on had action sequences and… in fact, Gabriel Knight has always had a little bit of that. I think it just makes a nice variety in gameplay, but there really isn’t actually much in Gray Matter because it didn’t really go with the theme. In general, I’m not in favour of sort-of hardcore action adventure with a big mix of fighting and adventure, because I think that these traditional adventure audiences really don’t like fighting, so it’s sort-of an interesting mix.

I think it can work; it just depends on the game and if it can be incorporated really well into the story. As I said, be accessible enough to the adventure audience.

CAN YOU DIE IN GRAY MATTER?: I think the only place that can happen is at the very end because, you know, some choices you can make that will lead to you, but not through most of the game. Again, there’s not really any… you’re not fighting rebels in this game, so there’s less opportunity for you to get hacked and slashed.

ABOUT THE MUSIC: No, but we’re in discussions with Robert Holmes, who happens to be my husband, so maybe I can persuade him to do some themes for us this time around.

ABOUT GAMES JANE HAS LIKED OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS: I really liked Syberia, and Longest Dream, quite a lot. Syberia in particular really impressed me with just how much of a seamless experience it was, and that it was very cinematic.

ABOUT ADVENTURE GAMES AND TRADITIONAL STORY-TELLING FINDING ITS AUDIENCE: Well, I think what happened was, when I joined Sierra Online back in 1989, it really was a family game company, and at that time PCs were not fast enough, processors were not fast enough to run action and arcade games; those were reserved for the big machines in the malls. So we had a lot of adventure games at the time, and other games that were slower-paced kind of product, but once processors got fast enough to run action games well, then those essentially took over the market entirely, and I think that’s still the case in North America, unfortunately. I mean, there hasn’t been a big budget adventure game developed in North America really since Gabriel Knight 3, since 1999. So… I think it’s really unfortunate, because I think the industry has disenfranchised a lot of users who are just not attracted to that kind of product. And I’ve never been of the mind that there was ever anything really wrong with adventure games as they were done; I think that… that’s not to say that we can’t improve it, and, you know, that ten years later we’re not going to do things differently, as I said. I think that there are many things about the really old-school classic adventure games that don’t need to come back, like pixel-hunting or some of the really obscure, you know, bubble-gum on the horse-hair, you know, to pick a lock. I think some of that stuff is kind of passé at this point, but I still really believe in the idea of playing a character in a story and actually going through the story yourself manually as opposed to just reading it. And I think there is an audience for adventure games. I think the big challenge in North America has been to find that demographic, because what’s happened is that the perception of games has hardened into all these action games with big breasts and therefore they’re for my sixteen-year-old son and not for me. So people who might like adventure games tend to simply not go into computer game stores at all. So it has a role right now very much like the comic book industry where there’s just a very limited demographic that’s even going to try it, so… I think the challenge for us has always been to reach the people who would like this kind of game, and there are some things that we can do this that. One of them is to approach the online market, which is a much older demographic. And also, as we’ve seen, games have really come back in Europe, which… I think, even for Gabriel Knight, I used to get a lot of letters from Denmark and Germany and Austria and France. So I think there’s always been more of a stronghold in Europe for intelligent story-based games.

AGE-GROUP: Yeah, I would say 16 and up. I mean, you know, if you’re an intelligent 13 or 14-year-old… It’s not any more mature than Gabriel Knight, and there were certainly people in that younger age that played Gabriel Knight.

HOW LONG TO PLAY: Well, you know, I can’t write a simple story; it’s just not within my capacity to do a 20-hour game, so… It’ll probably be about the same as Gabriel Knight, probably about 40 hours.

I have kind-of a love-hate affair with the word “linear”. I’m a storyteller, and I’m a big believer in the fact that there is “a” story… and… even when you write a story, you find as you slowly uncover it that you’re uncovering “a” story that has almost really existed long before you thought of it… With Gabriel Knight, we had two endings, and people would write to me, saying, “Well, I got the bad ending first, and then I found the right ending”, so I think people know when they’ve uncovered the right story, in a strange sort of way. The way I try to approach non-linearity in a game is that at the beginning of a chapter, there’s a story sequence, and I know exactly what the player knows, at that moment in time. But then, as the chapter progresses, there are a lot of things that you uncover in the story, and you can uncover those things in any order, and… as a designer it’s my job to make sure that if you talk to Mr Snowball before you’ve seen the red shoes and after you’ve gotten the green cloak, then you get the appropriate response. But… so it gets very broad in the middle of the chapter, but when eventually you’ve accomplished all the tasks, at the end of a chapter there’s another cut-scene that brings you back to a single point in the story. So that’s the way I try to approach non-linearity. There is in this particular game two possible endings, actually, because it just worked out thematically, but there won’t necessarily always be that… as it happens.

WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO PLAY SAM AND DAVID SIMULTANEOUSLY OR CHAPTER BY CHAPTER? It’s chapter by chapter in this story. I think it’s something I would really like to do and something I had planned to do for Gabriel Knight 4 is to be able to hop back and forth. But for this particular story, it just worked out better to play chapter by chapter.

I didn’t get around to posting last week, but here is this week’s haiku. It is about the silver offerings at the pilgrimage chapel at Altötting.

We reflect the light
Our lives depend on a prayer
Grant us salvation!
—————
Altötting is a town in Bavaria. Its octagonal church is a site for pilgrimmage to many. It is also a landmark that is shown in Gabriel Knight 2, along with Ludwig’s castles and the Wagner and Lugwig II museums.

The pilgrimage chapel at Altötting has been called the shrine that has never been destroyed. It has survived through wars as well as other devastations.

People often visit Altötting because they are seeking a miracle. Silver replicas of body parts are often given as offerings to the shrine to heal the person who has that ailment. There are also gifts of gratitude that are displayed at the church from people and families who have been cured, receiving their miracle.

I think in a way that this campaign is our silver offering. It embodies our efforts in hopes that something good will come out of this. We are hoping to send out a message to others to join our cause by spreading the word about what is so great about these games. Maybe, just maybe, we can also appeal to the big guys over at Vivendi to give us our miracle because Gabriel Knight does give us joy.

For more information about the pilgrimmage chapel at Altötting, click here.

This week’s haiku is about fate/destiny:

I tried to escape.
No one can evade their fate.
I fought it; it won.
——————–
A reoccurring subject that is depicted in the Gabriel Knight series is fate/destiny. A lot of the characters/villains suffer from family curses. Mainly, they are forced to live a certain way because they are born into it.

I have read up on the subject of fate/destiny. Although nowadays, the words are synonymous and interchangeable, they do have their distinctions.

Both are predetermined course of events, but with destiny, the person willingly follows that course. With fate, outside forces interject to make sure events happen as they should.

For example, you could say that it is the destiny of the Ritter men to be the shattenjager because up until Gabriel’s grandfather, Harrison, they did willingly accept that that was their duty; to serve the light.

I think when Harrison decided he didn’t want to be the next shattenjager, he took hold of his destiny but fate intervened. He had nightmares that haunted him and ultimately, he paid with his life.

Gabriel’s father, Philip, was born into this life he did not know anything about. The reason simply was that Harrison did not want the schattenjager life for his children or his children’s children. Although Philip never knew about his father’s past, it still affected him. He was haunted by the same nightmares. His death was eerily like the death of his father.

I do not think it was a coincidence that both Harrison and Philip died in their 30’s, nor that when they died, their sons were 8 years old. By trying to rewrite the book of destiny, I think Harrison gave life to a new family curse (haunting nightmares and early deaths). Not only that, but Gran said that Harrison often felt guilty, that he felt that he should be doing something else.

Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Gabriel was investigating this voodoo murders case that lead him to find out about his family’s past. It could have been a push from fate. I think when Gabriel took on the role as Schattenjager, he was in essence finishing what Harrison should have started.

When I asked how could I help, Almirena said I could contribute to the blog. My next question was, well what do I write? “Whatever whacky thing you’d like to write,” was the response I received. I will first say that I will not post any sort of fan-fic because if I write anything longer than a paragraph, it ends up being stupid. Sure, it might start off sounding decent, readable even, but then it starts to get stupid, then stupider, and then when you don’t think it could get any worse, you suddenly find yourself throwing your hands up in the air shouting, “Why that’s the stupidest thing I ever read!” (and you’re not even a hands-thrower-upper) Then you go set fire to your eyeballs because I warned you and you didn’t listen.

I have decided that I will write haikus. I’m going by the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Sweetheart). *smirk* A haiku is short and you’re limited by the 5-7-5 rule, but with the use of different words, added punctuation, whatever, you can change the entire tone.

So without further ado, I present to you two haikus about coffee (Gabe’s favorite drink).
————
Caffeinated bliss…
Without you, I do not work.
One word: Heavenly.
————
Dark, rich, and fresh-brewed
You’re my reason for being,
Your scent drives me wild!
————
Coffee is a great metaphor for the adventure games. Without fans, they do not exist. Why bother to make them if no one will drink the finished product? It’s true, but maybe people just do not know how good it really is. For example, 20 years ago, instant coffee was all the rage.

What if someone told the founders of Starbucks that no one would pay $5 for a cup a coffee when they can make it at home for about 10 cents a cup?

The fact is that there is a demand for adventure games, even though some people might not realize it yet. Maybe they’ve never had good coffee, only drank that really bad bitter stuff that’s been sitting on the burner for hours. The fact is Gabriel Knight is the king of coffee. It is the best adventure game series I have ever played. If you think you don’t like adventure games and you haven’t played Gabriel Knight, then maybe you should. I think it would change your mind.

Like with coffee, you can always discover something new that you didn’t notice the first time, maybe a different aroma than last time. When I replay the game, I always notice something I didn’t before, whether it is finding a clue I missed before or understanding the story better. Maybe the first time you played, you just played to beat it. I challenge you to play it again and this time, give the story and detail the attention it deserves.

Going back to the KISS principle, what do I want? I just want another Gabriel Knight game.

I do not personally know Jane Jensen, but her storytelling is phenomenal. She is like this master weaver and she weaves this intricate tapestry, yet just as she introduces this amazing new pattern, she leaves the room leaving you in awe, wanting more. Well with GK3, it’s like Jane left this beautiful yet unfinished thing, it has tons of loose ends. I don’t even think a GK4 could be the end all because there is just too much of the story that needs to be told. It would be like fitting a giraffe into a matchbox, it just wouldn’t work.

Haiku#2 definitely speaks about passion and that is why I’m here, when you feel passionate about something, you can’t just idly wait, you must take action even if it’s a small step.

Behind the scenes at the Campaign office, so much is happening… It’s frantic. Phones are ringing, reporters are dashing in and out, research is being done, articles are being written, ideas are being thrown about like pancakes by a great chef.

Oh well, I’m exaggerating about the phones and the reporters. But everything else is true!

There are are new articles up for reading. Gabriel Knight fans will be delighted to read about Voudoon (voodoo), which puts Gabriel Knight 1 in context. And what about the articles that talk about computer games not necessarily or especially being for children? Thought-provoking ideas abound in those two articles tackling this pivotal point.

Of course, if your interest in Wagner was tickled by Gabriel Knight 2, you might want to read about the real man and his music. What an arrogant creature he was! Talented, yes - but you wouldn’t want to lend him any money or trust him with your wife or daughter.

Check out the REAL history of vampires; find out a little about the real Marie Laveau; take a look at the real King Ludwig of Bavaria. Was he mad? Was he murdered? Fascinating stuff…

And Gabe… I hope you can hear me. I hope you realise we’re doing everything we can to help you. I don’t know where you are, but I hope you know that much. We want to see you live again in further struggles over the dark powers you’ve already faced. Darkness itself has so many faces… and so many ways in which to attack its foe. We need our Schattenjger back again…

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Gabriel
Happy birthday to you!

Many happy returns of the day along with the wish of a great comeback from the world of shadows you currently live in. Even at the age of 43 you are the best. And by the way, good luck with Gracie.

Hugs

The GK fanbase

“Ghost are the symbol of regrets” said once Jane Jensen during an interview.
This made me think of what kind of regrets Gabriel could be facing at the moment. Does he feel responsible for the death of Wolfgang Ritter and Malia Gedde? And what about Frederick Von Glower, the charming, intelligent, ambitious and sensitive werewolf whose curse was his very bloodline?
We left Gabriel at the age of thirty-eight in an empty hotel room in Rennes-le-Château, alone for the first time in his life. The company of thousands of fans has not been enough: the Schattenjäger probably packed his things the day after and returned to his priesthoodlike isolation in Rittersberg. I believe he has not been with a woman since the events of that night. The last trial has been trial by fire, it has completed the process begun five years before when in an overrealistic dream a dragon burnt away the past of a New Orleaner writer: Gabriel has changed deeply since then.
During all this time spent in Schloss Ritter, sealed in the Schattenjäger library as if it was a crypt Gabriel has had the time to think. How many wrong choices has he made?