Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was originally released in 1993 and the music in the game has withstood the test of time and most of the tracks are still beloved by adventure game fans to this day. And going back to the roots of the series for the 20th anniversary remake has been a journey for composer Robert Holmes as he tried to recapture the magic from the original and update it for today’s audience.

Composer for both the original and 20th Anniversary releases of Gabriel Knight.

The technology to compose music was a lot different twenty years ago. While today you can synthesize pretty much anything you want, back in the 1990s everything was done using MIDI and the output was done using less powerful sound cards or even the PC speaker itself. Mark Seibert, the music director at Sierra, tried to keep the company up-to-date with the most “bleeding edge” music technology at the time, but even so there were limitations to what could be done back then.

Robert had been a part of the Sierra family for a couple years working on soundtracks, but when Gabriel Knight came up he was paired instantly with Jane Jensen to work on the music for the game. Because he was brought in during the formative stages, he knew exactly what Jane wanted soundwise. The darker adult themes fit perfectly with his background and interest in the old Hollywood style and pop music. He wanted to make the soundtrack memorable so that you could instantly recognize it even when not playing the game and listening to it on its own. And he succeeded in this as a lot of the tracks are still very memorable today.

Gabriel Knight’s soundtrack took a subtle approach in its ambiance

They wanted to stay away from traditional New Orleans and Cajun music as it had been already done many times before. A “new” kind of darkness was what was needed to make Sins of the Father stand out both as a game and form of media. A more subtle ambiance that “bubbled” up the subtext of the subject being represented through music. There were several influences to what would become the soundtrack to the game, including movies like Promised Land, Key Largo, and Gone With the Wind. And, of course, musical influences like Elton John, Genesis, and Brian Eno.

When it came time to re-score the game’s soundtrack for the remake Robert actually had to relearn a lot of what he wrote. He had forgotten most of the music and needed to relearn how it went. As they went back and fine-tuned the tracks, Robert had the time to look back on his choices twenty years ago. There is little changed in the overall mood of the music between then and now beyond updating it for the new generation of fans. How fans of the original will react to the 20th anniversary edition isn’t clear, but music is one of the areas of gaming that really give an emotional impact to the overall story.

Serena Nelson
Social Media Intern
Phoenix Online Studios