“Fortunately, Gabe grew to have a great personality – I tend to romanticise men, even the bad ones.” Meanwhile, Knight’s sidekick and sometime romantic interest, the upright academic Grace Nakimura, stemmed from sources rather closer to home: “She’s the bookish type who is attracted to the good-looking guy but very cynical and wary and is more prone to put him down than give him a foothold. I guess that was me in my late 20s!”

Intriguingly, prior to penning Sins Of The Fathers Jensen had never actually visited New Orleans, the Voodoo-themed mystery’s setting. “But I’m a big fan of southern gothic; Angel Heart starring Robert De Niro was my biggest influence at the time. I’ve visited the city since and love it”. She also reveals her thrill at listening to actors like Tim Curry, Mark Hamill and Michael Dorn breathing life into the game’s cast: “I’ve had some very glamorous experiences in my career – those are the moments that make all the dull, boring or frustrating ones worthwhile. And that was definitely the first, and one of the best. It was my first real experience of feeling like I’d somehow ‘made it’.”

The trilogy’s second chapter, 1995’s The Beast Within – where Bavarian werewolf mythology was injected with a Mad King Ludwig-inspired twist – was crafted during that fleeting time during the mid-’90s when the game industry briefly flirted with FMV-flavoured collaborations with Hollywood.

Many of the productions turned out during that period proved to be disasters – Night Trap, Snow Job and Harvester among the main offenders. Not so the critically acclaimed Beast Within, but why does Jensen think Sierra’s megabucks project bucked the trend? “Narrative was key,” she proposes. “It was dark, sexy and transcended the medium. Also, the live actors brought a lot to it; they didn’t treat it like a videogame. I actually love working with actors and personally believe they’re preferable to 3D models. But the medium of film simply wasn’t interactive enough for most games.”

Besides its controversial themes of implied cannibalism and latent homosexuality, The Beast Within is also notable for featuring a live-action ‘lost’ Wagnerian opera – in fact composed by Jensen’s husband Robert Holmes. An audacious, not to mention decadent, undertaking, it was testament to the amount of money being invested in graphic adventures at the time.