“The fact that GK1 was successful gave us leeway with Beast that we wouldn’t have dared on Sins. Plus, everyone had big visions about FMV and Hollywood,” explains Jensen. “Personally, I’ve never been one to imagine small things, and Bob was just crazy enough to go along with the concept – and I think he nailed it! The really fun, albeit challenging, part was casting the opera singers and shooting the sequence. Still, it’s definitely among my top ten career experiences.”

Amid much clamouring by fans, the final instalment in the trilogy – Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned – finally emerged in 1999 after an extended stint in development purgatory. At the time, its gigantic budget dwarfed all previous graphic adventures, but storm clouds were already gathering over the once-mighty point-and-click empire, and Jensen’s world at Sierra was threatening to tumble down about her ears.

“It was definitely a completely different vibe working on Blood compared to the first two,” she admits. “Previously, Sierra had been fully committed to advancing the point-and-click genre, but by the time GK3 was in production Sierra had been sold and the Williamses were no longer in charge. No one believed in adventures any more, but the management had no idea what else to do. Hence the final King’s Quest being a mixture of action and adventure, and GK3 going 3D. I was the last dinosaur on the block, no doubt about it.”

Happily, Sierra’s awkward stumbling into the third dimension enabled Jensen to push her innate talent for puzzle design to hitherto unforeseen heights. “I really liked the interactive freedom of 3D and was able to build in conundrums that simply would not have been possible with 2D or FMV. For example, the Le Serpent Rouge puzzle [revered by many hardcore point-and-click fans as the most fiendishly brilliant graphic adventure conundrum ever devised] has a lot to do with the 3D landscape. But, man, it was such a dense and difficult production, just huge and unwieldy.”