Excerpt

While Jane Jensen shared much in common with Roberta Williams, an interest in creating sing-song worlds filled with fairytale characters was more her mentor's domain. "At the time, I was a fan of graphic novels like Hellblazer and [the works of] Neil Gaiman," Jensen told me. "I wanted to do something that was a mystery, something that had a paranormal element to it. I came up with the idea of a guy descended from a long line of inquisitors who fight evil."1

Jensen kicked around several themes and settings for her inquisitor to explore. One of her first concepts was the backwoods of Germany, the setting of a string of murders that locals attributed to a werewolf. Jensen liked the idea, but saw a flaw. An inquisitor who jetted around the globe to solve murders would already be comfortable in his own skin. Established. For her first solo game effort, she wanted to tell an origin story.

Setting aside theme and setting for the time being, Jensen concentrated on fleshing out her protagonist. The name "Gabriel Knight" had a strong ring to it. She envisioned Gabriel as a modern-day Indiana Jones: A professor who specialized in the paranormal and had a penchant for adventure. Naturally, Gabriel got wrapped up in cases that contained supernatural elements.

Jensen considered her Indy Jones-style leading man, then dismissed him. One of her favorite archetypes was the flawed hero. Unlike Graham of King's Quest fame, Gabriel struck her as a scoundrel. Handsome and bright, yet more likely to chase skirts than mysteries and hard work. He would also be a struggling writer. "At the time, I had tried to write a novel and didn't get good responses from the agents I'd sent it to. I guess some of Gabriel's writer-dom reflects some of my experiences at that time."

Jensen turned to some of her favorite media for influence. She'd devoured Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire series of novels during college and became spellbound with New Orleans, the setting of the novels. While working at Hewlett-Packard, she had gotten hooked on Angel Heart, a psychological horror film starring Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke. Rourke played Angel, a down-on-his-luck P.I. who walked a dark path littered with obstacles like voodoo priestesses and demonic possession.

Intrigued by the culture and mysticism of New Orleans, Jensen plunged down the rabbit hole. "At the time I wrote Gabriel Knight, I had never been to New Orleans. I really did all my voodoo and New Orleans research pretty much with books. Now everything I do is Googled, but at the time, I actually called a New Orleans bookstore and had them send me some picture books of New Orleans."

The more Jensen learned, the more she fell under the spell of New Orleans' voodoo scene. During the early 1720s through the early 1740s, most slaves exported from Africa arrived in the state of Louisiana. They carried no material belongings, but they did bring their religious practices and beliefs. When their slave owners attempted to convert them to Catholicism, the slaves played docile and pretended to accept their new doctrines. In private, slaves and gens de couleur, "free people of color," carried out voodoo ceremonies.

On the evening of August 21, 1791, a voodoo priest called an underground meeting on the island of St. Domingue, a French colony. The meeting boiled over into one of the largest slave revolts in history. Hundreds of thousands of slaves and gens de couleur raped, pillaged, and plundered until the French withdrew and declared St. Domingue—later renamed Haiti—a free state in 1804. Not everyone was interested in staying. Citizens of all ethnicities fled to New Orleans, a city whose French culture and language seemed comfortable and familiar.

Over time, New Orleans' mish-mash of voodoo coalesced into a practice known as Louisiana Voodoo. Practitioners believed there was one god; that He did not interfere in the lives of his people; and that spiritual forces acted as His liaisons, able to influence events on his behalf. Spirits entered the flesh of believers through dance, song, snake worship, and the use of special components called gris-gris (pronounced "gree-gree").

Emerging from her research, Jensen set to work on an outline. "Generally, on all my games, I tend to write the story first. For Gabriel Knight's story, I had just taken a class by [screenwriter] Robert McKee on story and screenplay writing. It was really, really inspiring. Sierra sent all the designers to that class; it was a three-day session in L.A. It was focused on things like positive and negative beats, subtext, and just a lot of things I'd never really thought about as a writer. I worked on Gabriel Knight's story outline to include stuff I'd learned. So the story came first; then I had to figure out how to make it work as a game designer."