Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight mysteries saw the light of day between 1993 and 1999, a volatile period in publisher Sierra’s chequered history. Among the best graphic adventures ever written, the mysteries melded classic detective noir with supernatural overtones.

Yet while most point-and-click stalwarts of the ’90s – like Sierra’s own King’s Quest, LucasArts’ The Secret Of Monkey Island and to a lesser extent Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky – focused on laughs, Gabriel Knight instead delved into grisly supernatural murders, including Voodoo murders in New Orleans, a spate of ‘werewolf killings’ in Bavaria, and even the apparent abduction of an infant by vampires in France.

Complex, mature and emotionally involving, 1993’s Sins Of The Father has retrospectively staked its claim as a major milestone in the history of graphic adventures. “It really was the first of its kind,” Jensen agrees.

“When I proposed Sins, marketing had an adverse reaction to the darkness of the concept and even Ken Williams [founder of Sierra Entertainment] said: ‘OK, I’ll let you do it, but I wish you’d come up with something happier!’ Sierra and Ken were good like that, though. They granted us a great deal of creative freedom. It’s something you don’t really see any more.”

If the prevailing, brooding theme of Sins is hardly cut from the stereotypical adventure cloth, then Gabriel Knight himself – a wise-cracking, chauvinistic failed author turned bookstore owner who discovers he’s the last in a line of demon-slaying schattenjägers (shadow hunters) – is hardly a run-of-the-mill Threepwood or Wilco lone either.

“Gabriel himself emerged from that process of looking for a new game series when I had the opportunity to propose one at Sierra. He wasn’t actually in my head beforehand, but he derived from graphic novel influences like Sandman and Constantine,” recalls Jensen.