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Le Tour Magdala. ( Zewan ) This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned . Henry Lincoln promised at the end of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil” that he would continue to investigate the case of François-Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château. He proved as good as his word. Over the next several years, he sidled steadily further away from his screenwriting career to dig his way deeper a...

Epilogue: Infinity Embraced

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned . Rennes-le-Château enjoyed its first watershed moment as a media phenomenon when Albert Salamon wrote his newspaper articles in 1956. Its second came when a documentary about the village was aired on French television in 1961. And its third arrived in 1967, when the first of the eventual hundreds of books that would be written about François-Bérenger Saunière a...

Chapter 15: The Trial of Galileo

(Wikimedia Commons: Jcb-caz-11 ) This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned . Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges; when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Wh...

Chapter 14: The Dialogue

This article tells part of the story of Jane Jensen . I think I became convinced when I went to CES [in January of 1997] and I walked around the show looking at all these titles that were the big new things, and not one screen had full-motion video. I realized that if I wanted anyone to look at the game, it had to be in 3D. — Jane Jensen Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is proof that miracles do occur in gaming. It was remarkable enough that the game ever got made...

Hi, folks… Just a quick note to inform you that the ebook for 1998 is now available on the usual page . I’m sorry this was so long in coming. I owe a huge thanks to my hiking buddy Stefaan Rillaert, who adapted Richard Lindner’s original scripts to run on Linux instead of Windows. We’ve elected to make the books available in .epub format only going forward. The .mobi format has been deprecated for some years now, and all but the oldest Kindle e-readers should have receive...

Chapter 13: The Shades of the Earth

This article tells part of the story of the Ultima series . Years ago, [Origin Systems] released Strike Commander , a high-concept flight sim that, while very entertaining from a purely theoretical point of view, was so resource-demanding that no one in the country actually owned a machine that could play it. Later, in Ultima VIII , the company decided to try to increase their sales numbers by adding action sequences straight out of a platform game to their ultra-deep RPG. The results managed to...

Chapter 12: The Harmony of the World

The idea of being in the body of a guy and making love to his wife — when she believes you’re her husband, even though you’re not — was a very strange position to be in. That’s exactly the kind of thing I try to explore in all my games today. — David Cage, speaking from the Department of WTF The French videogame auteur David Cage has been polarizing critics and gamers for more than a quarter-century with his oddly retro-futurist vision of the medium. He believ...

This article tells part of the story of real-time strategy . The first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game, those two genres that had come to absolutely dominate mainstream computer gaming by the end of the 1990s, were surprisingly different in their core technologies. The FPS was all about 3D graphics, as aided and abetted by the new breed of hardware-accelerated 3D cards that seemed to be getting more powerful — and also more expensive — almost by the month. A generation...

This article tells part of the story of post-commercial interactive fiction . After fighting the tendency for decades, I’ve finally learned to accept that I’m a bit of a conservative, if not a downright Luddite, when it comes to my interactive fiction — or my text adventures, as I still persist in calling them. Despite its name, parser-based interactive fiction doesn’t actually strike me as all that good at plot-heavy storytelling. What it does excel at is setting. And th...