Nov 25, 2011

Why “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers” Should Be Remastered for the iPad

by olucho Blog 3 Comments

The old, nostalgic games of the 80′s and 90′s are making a comeback, offering game distributors a unique opportunity to re-release some of their beloved classics. AdventureReviews has a great post on The Continuing Growth of Retro Gaming and its Migration to Modern Devices. A few developers have picked up on the trend: last year Revolution Software released Beneath a Steel Sky: Remastered for the iPad and iPhone. LucasArts remastered their 1990 swashbuckling adventure “Secret of Monkey Island” for its 20th anniversary, applying beautiful new art, voices, and re-recorded music to the original story and puzzles. “Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition gives you the world you remember,” says their website, “yet it be shown to ya like only yer imagination could.” LucasArts went on to remaster Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. They could not have picked from their catalogue a better series to re-release – Monkey Island remains unequaled in its combination of clever and stimulating puzzles, intriguing story, and true hilarity. It deserves to be enjoyed by old and new audiences alike.

Yet there is another title from that golden age of adventure games that is just as deserving of remastering and re-lease. Rivaling LucasArts at the time was another king of adventure game publishing, Sierra Online, and in 1993 they released the supernatural mystery thriller Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, a game almost made to be played on an iPad, with a good pair of headphones, and the lights off. But let me start from the beginning…

Adventure games saw their heyday in the early ’90s, when computer graphics started getting good, but not too good, and before the Internet gained prominence. Brainy, extensive storytelling games were marketable, because they could be seen as enhanced, interactive novels. The concept was new and exciting: playing a character, picking up and examining objects, interacting with others and with the surroundings, gathering clues and resolving problems in order to advance the plot. It was incredibly rewarding to beat a game that required such a level of critical thinking because the walkthroughs were not widespread and easily accessible on the Internet yet. And Gabriel Knight epitomized the evocation of these sentiments, because of its quintessential murder mystery narrative, its dark atmosphere, richness of characters, and adequate level of difficulty.

Author and game designer Jane Jensen broke several stereotypes when creating the hero of this story. Gabriel Knight is a failed writer, making another attempt at a novel by researching a series of Voodoo-related murders in his native New Orleans. He has been haunted by nightmares since his childhood, nightmares which are now becoming more frequent and intense, and begin to demonstrate a frightening connection between the sinister events of the last few days, and the disturbing history behind Gabriel’s own ancestry.

I played Gabriel Knight as a teenager, growing up in the Amazon region of Brazil. It took me over a year to complete, and I often got stuck for long periods. My friend and I once came across a walkthrough in a PC gamers’ magazine. We agreed that the fun of the game was to solve the puzzles on our own, so we read the one solution we needed to advance, then tore the article into tiny pieces and threw it over the wall of my backyard into an empty lot overgrown with vegetation. Weeks later we were stuck in a different part of the game, and found ourselves desperately (and dangerously) making our way through grass 6-feet tall, equipped with flashlights, to retrieve the shredded magazine pages. We pieced them together just enough to read the one solution we needed, then destroyed them for good. We wanted to finish the rest without cheating… and we did. Arriving at the climax of this game was an indescribable experience, because we knew that, whether or not we solved all the puzzles on our own, we had earned it. It was 3:00 AM. The suspense was intolerable. We were scared out of our minds.

This genre was not only the most exciting, it was at the forefront of technological innovation at the time. Gabriel Knight used motion capture to create realistic character animation, and employed early 3D graphics for some of the backgrounds in the animated sequences. The Hollywood Reporter wrote at the time that “Gabriel Knight is the first time an all-Hollywood cast of name actors has been assembled for an interactive movie.” Among them were Tim Curry, Leah Remini, Mark Hamill, and Michael Dorn. The CD-ROM included a well-produced 20 minute behind-the-scenes featurette, which makes for a great retrospective of how significant this release was at the time.

The graphic novel that was originally included with “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers” and provided the background story, would be perfect for viewing on an iPad, and could be integrated into the same app as the game.

Computer Gaming World and Computer Game Review both declared “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers” the Adventure Game of the Year. Adventure Gamers ranks it among the top 5 greatest adventure games of all time, stating that by far, the best thing about it is its mood: “Every inch of the game drips with gloominess and tension, and the sense of dark foreboding that something is very, very wrong in New Orleans.” All of this acclaim raises the question: why remaster and not simply re-release the game to properly work on newer platforms?

First: the visuals. The quality of the original artwork was substantially downgraded due to the limitations of the time. Influenced by the style of film noir and graphic novels, the visuals would lend themselves perfectly to viewing on a device about the size of a comic book – the iPad and other tablets. But in the original release, the backgrounds and cut-panel sequences, which play such an important role in establishing the mood, are highly pixelated. (Note that the images in this post don’t look that pixelated because they’ve been shrinked). I do love the pretty pixelated look, but playing Gabriel Knight is about the realism as much as the nostalgia, and the pixelation makes it difficult at times to fully understand the action, and to become immersed. Specifically during gameplay, the characters are made up of big blocks, which makes for some awkward and distracting animation at times. The resolution is also not consistent throughout. Certain elements are displayed in quite sharp detail, such as the characters’ portraits during dialogue (example below). Some objects (for example, the magnifying glass and pincers on the table at the bookstore) are a lot more detailed than the rest of the background, which make them immediately stand out as objects to be picked up. Other times, objects are just as pixelated as the background, making it difficult to identify them as hotspots at all, resulting occasionally in a frustrating pixel hunt. The idea of redesigning these elements with today’s technology, while remaining faithful to the original, is a no-brainer. I recently came across this gorgeous collection of original Gabriel Knight artwork owned by a fan. In light of this, perhaps the greatest argument for the need to remaster the original artwork is how beautiful those paintings really are.

Second: the sound. While there is a certain charm to the original MIDI soundtrack, it sometimes competes with the other sounds in the game, making quieter dialogue difficult to hear. Robert Holmes’ beautiful gothic score could assume even more dark and foreboding proportions if recorded in high quality and with real instruments. This is what LucasArts did with the Special Edition of Monkey Island, with great results. The voice actors in Gabriel Knight give memorable performances, but the sound quality is quite compressed, resulting in distortion, and an overall buggy listening experience, by today’s standards. In the game settings, players can individually adjust the levels of the voices, sound effects, and music, a feature which to me only contributes to poor and unpredictable mixing. A new mix would allow the audio to play seamlessly, layered with subtle and well-timed sound effects that would enhance the atmosphere, and with perfectly crisp and audible voices. One would hope that someone has kept an archive of the original, uncompressed voice recordings, which could be used for a high quality remastering.

A valid concern when updating such a challenging and extensive game as Gabriel Knight for today’s audiences, and to be played on today’s platforms, is whether it would be simply too difficult, too time-consuming, and require too much attention to detail to retain a contemporary player’s interest. I am inclined to say that it shouldn’t matter, that faithful representation of the original would be the priority, and that the quality of the game would make the challenge worthwhile. At the same time, when playing these games on a mobile platform, the likelihood is that the average player would be starting and stopping often, rather than playing for long uninterrupted periods as they would on a desktop computer. The fragmentation of story immersion could make it difficult to pick up on all the clues necessary to complete the game.

However, there is an elegant solution used by certain adventure games of the ’90s. When starting for the first time, the player could choose one of two modes: Full or Abridged (or Difficult/Easy). The Full Mode would include all of the story, dialogue and puzzles of the original. The Abridged Mode would reduce the amount of dialogue the player needs to go through, simplify some of the more difficult puzzles, and reduce the number of puzzles needed to advance. LucasArts, on the other hand, integrated a hint system into the Special Edition of Monkey Island, under the premise that if the solutions are available online anyway, why force the player to interrupt gameplay to go look them up? An option worth considering, though the easy accessibility of hints may irritate players seeking a challenge.

After the success of “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers”, Sierra went on to release two sequels: The Beast Within in 1995, and Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned in 1999. Both were excellent games in their own right, although “Sins of the Fathers” remains, in my opinion, the best of the trilogy. If remastering the first game proved feasible, the sequels could follow suit, although there would be different challenges involved. “The Beast Within” used full motion video instead of animated characters, and photographed rather than hand-painted backgrounds. Even after splitting the game into 6 CDs, the video still needed to be highly compressed. Thus it seems that a remastering would be most effective for the cinematic sequences that depict the game’s key moments. What remains to be seen is whether the quality of the original scenes, both in technical and artistic terms, would hold up well in a High Definition rendition, or whether that would only serve to magnify their shortcomings. While I remember being mesmerized and completely immersed when “The Beast Within” was first released, I don’t believe it stands the test of time, in purely visual terms. The characters during gameplay are not merely pixelated – they look chunky and don’t fit with the background. The quality of the backgrounds themselves vary from shot to shot, and often appear murky. I wouldn’t be opposed to a complete remake in full motion video, if it meant more professional sets, cinematography and acting. The story itself is the most epic of the three, opening in the snowy mountains of Bavaria, and from a simple investigation into a village girl’s death, building masterfully to a climax that is quite literally operatic.

“Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned” is perhaps in greater need of a makeover, both in terms of visuals and of gameplay, and a remastering (bordering on a remake) could drastically improve its widely acknowledged weaknesses. Many fans of the series would say that, while Jane Jensen’s command of storytelling and plot design never faltered, the third game may be the least satisfactory because of its primitive 3D graphics and interface. The player was given the ability to move the “camera” freely around the environment, which was an interesting idea at the time, but turned out to be more of an unnecessary distraction. On other technical aspects, such as sound design, Gabriel Knight 3 excelled, and Adventure Gamers claims it contains “one of the most complex stories ever told in a computer game”. Therefore the reconstruction of its 3D environments, characters and controls would provide fans with a second chance at enjoying, unencumbered by the limitations of its original release, this suspenseful tale of intrigue, involving numerology and secret societies inhabiting the remote French village of Rennes-le-Chateau, a story which predated Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, and frankly, blows it out of the water.

Finally, there is the question of who would take on the project of remastering “Sins of the Fathers”, or perhaps the whole trilogy. Unless Jane Jensen herself owns all the rights to the Gabriel Knight franchise, Activision Blizzard may have ended up with the rights to the three games, after the series of mergers that put Sierra under its umbrella, before being dissolved. Activision Blizzard is unlikely to be interested since it’s mostly focused on war games. They would also be inadequate for the task, having no experience with the genre. Whatever production company were to take on the project would have a lot to live up to, and would not satisfy fans with anything less than excellent. In the absence of a willing and able developer, perhaps the series is best left untouched, and a mere adaptation of the first game for newer platforms such as the iPad would satisfy a need that already exists.

With the 20th anniversary of the release of “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers” approaching in 2013, a good game developer able to obtain the rights would have an excellent opportunity to revive one of the treasures in its possession, one that has gained wide following and recognition, and has stood the test of time. One need only look at the number of fan sites Gabriel Knight has collected over the years, and the number of people taking elaborate measures in attempts (not always successful) to make the game work on their modern PCs, Macs, and tablets. For the most part, the game industry is stagnant, pumping out mind-numbing, cookie-cutter material, and players are going retro, scouring their attics for the modest, intelligent and riveting adventures of yesteryear.

The time is ripe for Gabriel Knight to make his return.

UPDATE: After further consideration of Telltale Games’ track record and body of work, I have to admit they do not appear to be a good fit for such a project, and I’ve edited the article to reflect that opinion.