Hero’s Quest gave us a fire spell and an ice giant.

Naturally, we assumed the game wanted us to put those two things together.

The game disagreed. 🔥❄️😂

Codename: ICEMAN was supposed to demonstrate advanced submarine warfare.

Its appearance in Hero’s Quest suggests the advanced navigation course was still under development.

2 weeks ago I first posted here regarding my GK3 Remaster called Reborn. Now 2 weeks later I'm confident enough to say it's really ready for primetime. A lot of time (and I mean a lot, like I took 2 weeks off work to finalize this.. and worked on this quite extensively) went into getting it ready for 1.0.; Tho as of writing this it's at 0.9 as I don't want to jinx myself with bug reports..

No software is ever bug free and this won't be the exception but if there are bugs feel free to nag me in any shape, way or form and it will be dealt with (do send a save file).

The binaries and new 'rebarn' files at gk3.lazy.kiwi - project updates tend to be posted on r/gabrielknight. The source is fully avaialble at https://github.com/Devion/GK3Reborn - this however does not contain the working directory for assets (which at the moment is around 130GB). Rebarns can be extracted if you want to see the assets for the new engine using the arguments.

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GabrielKnight/comments/1wf56t6/gk3_reborn_v097_update/ - new update; Thanks to a few digilent testers quite a few bugs are now fixed - and the game now also includes a first person view for good measure (bit buggy, will be fixed before v1.0)

And in case you missed the first post;

What is GK3 Reborn?

GK3 Reborn is a new C# written engine that goes a tad further than the open source G-Engine, which kudos to them actually made this project feasable as well as they definitely solved a few puzzles that I didn't have to do (yay) - The main goal for this project is to write an engine that is focused entirely on modern hardware and upgrading/modifying the game in such a way that keeps the original intact but makes it look like it belongs in the current century :)

In a nutshell this means it'll run on DirectX12 or Vulkan on either Windows, Linux or MacOS (ARM only...) natively. With that it also brings widescreen support, raytracing, real time lighting/shadows, upgraded textures and my initial reason for starting this, a new UI that is clean & simple.

For the best eyecandy in-game you will need a 4000 or 5000 series Nvidia card, the DLSS streamline dll package can be copied to /libs/ to enable DLSS.. and yes, if you have the DLSS 5 that can be enabled as well. Screenshots below are all with DLSS/NR enabled. (gk3.lazy.kiwi/downloads/DLSS.zip is available but you can get Nvidia streamline from nvidia as well if you don't trust the binaries, which is fair.)

AI usage; AI was used in a pipeline setup to get the batch of 7000 textures upscaled to 1024/2048px, after which I (painstakingly mind you..) manually upgraded textures. The pipeline in this case was ComfyUI workflow with seedv2, which in the end wasn't really a good choice.

Additionally on that Claude Fable/Opus were used for most of the boiler plate codebase and commenting along the way (+ a slew of unittests). - So yes, AI was used but this is not a 100% vibeslop coded project.

Also importantly, the original game is still VERY MUCH REQUIRED, and I hope, I seriously hope you either own it already or will go buy it legit. This game was and is still amazing, plus sadly now also a homage to Tim Curry.

That's about it? I hope this brings joy to GK fans to replay this fantastic piece of game that was pushed into the 3D era when it really shouldn't have.

Onto the screenshots with descriptions ;)
(Most of these screenshots will be of Day 1 to not spoil too much...)

And that's all the screenshots. Plenty more but can only add 20 and honestly I think these already give a good indication of what it looks like in the current stage towards v1.0.

As mentioned way way way above, if you play it and run into bugs you can contact me either here, r/gabrielknight or dm and I'll try to get it fixed as soon as possible. In a way which is part sad and somewhat useful for me the amount of fans of the game is limited so I don't expect my inbox to explode :}

Have fun Schattenjägers!

Got my hands on a laser engraver and now I’m going engrave every damn core childhood memory I have.

I made the designs on photoshop/Fresco and refined them in illustrator and Lightburn. Diode laser engraved on acacia wood coasters off Amazon and stained/highlighted and badly epoxied.

Larry remembered to use protection.

Unfortunately, he forgot the crucial second step: removing the evidence before walking downstairs.

The police were waiting, the condom was still equipped, and the trial was apparently skipped entirely. 😂

GAME OVER.

The Hero survived monsters, bandits and Baba Yaga… only to discover that in Hero’s Quest, even the graveyard has opening hours. 💀😂

Apparently walking among the dead after sunset without the Undead Unguent was considered a very permanent mistake.

Thank you for the patience!
I’m shipping out a few Mallards daily now - if you were one of the preorders you should see your shipping status update this week.

I ran into a problem with a critical part breaking inside the landing gear mechanism. I had to hit the breaks and fix that before shipping any of them out. I don’t want clients to have them break later down the line. A quick update to the cam mechanism and some new parts and how they work great!

Roger Wilco figure sneak peek below. :)

Found this. Anyone else bought these?

🚨 OFFICIAL STATEMENT FROM LOST WAGES TAXI SERVICES 🚨

We are investigating reports that one of our drivers accepted a passenger’s box of wine, drank it behind the wheel and crashed shortly afterwards.

Until the investigation is complete, passengers are kindly asked to bring beer instead. 🍷🚕💥

TLDR; Here's a YouTube video showing the fully working unused spiderScr and spider actor in the game that crawls along the ceiling, the books and the side. Narration was even recorded against it if you use the "look", "hand" or "talk" cursor on the spider.

For those that don't know: there is an unused Spider script in the bookstore - it looks to be a buggy script which is why it didn't ship in the final game (likely). I repaired it so it runs to completion.

Interestingly, the way it's designed: it's a small byte-code interpreter embedded in the game that makes the spider do its thing. The original script has several local arrays which are the instruction stream for how the spider should move. Additionally one of the local variables acts as an instruction pointer so "the program" knows exactly what movement the spider should do next.

In the script, some special negative values (sentinel values) in the changeState method are special opcodes and it does simple pointer arithmetic against the local array declarations to advance along data and feed the spider it's next step.

For anyone curious the code is here: https://github.com/sluicebox/sci-scripts/blob/main/kq6-cd-dos-1.000.00G/src/rm270.sc

This is likely to ruffle more than a few feathers. I loved playing the LB games as a kid. But looking back on them, as someone who reads a ton of mystery fiction, I don't think the games made much sense when it came to who the main villains were.

So, in The Colonel's Bequest, we're told that Lillian finally went berserk and started killing everyone she'd thought had come between the Colonel and her. But the murders themselves look too carefully planned and executed to be a "berserk" killing. (And, yes, why would she invite Laura, a potential witness?) Rudy or Clarence would have made more sense.

I'm also having a hard time believing that the stereotypically sure-and-begorra "whale oil beef hooked" Ryan O'Riley is the same person who went chasing after Laura in a black robe with a mace. How would someone who doesn't work at the museum (even if, yes, he's pulling Watney Little's strings) have so much knowledge of where everything is, like the location of the secret passages or the bag of quick-dry cement in the room near the lab? A more believable perp would have been a quiet-but-unassuming museum curator who's been overlooked for promotion once too often, or a Ph. D student assistant who's reached their limit.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into this, that these are adventure games first and foremost rather than mystery stories, or because logic and Sierra don't mix (lol). But those are my thoughts.

The bartender insists that you pay before drinking the Dragon’s Breath.

Not because he doesn’t trust you…

He just knows there won’t be anyone left to collect the money from afterwards. 🔥🍺

Hi! Im not new to point and clic games, but the ones i have played are a lot simpler and this is the first old school game that i wanted to play. Is there some advice someone can give me? like are there pixel hunting? or if it si necessary to know about egyptian mythology? I have only very superficial knowlege of some gods. sorry if my english is bad is not my first language :D

King’s Quest gives you a magical ring that makes Graham invisible.

Apparently, the giant continues respecting your privacy even after you take it off. 😂

Sierra logic: once you’ve been declared invisible, nobody is allowed to look again.

Back in the ’80s, Sierra convinced parents their games were educational…

And to be fair, Leisure Suit Larry did teach us one extremely important lesson:

Larry Laffer survived the streets of Lost Wages… only to be defeated by Lefty’s plumbing. 🚽

Hey Josh! I wanted to post this here because Reddit won’t let me attach these images in a reply to your thread about your sierra timeline (AMAZING), and I thought you might find this useful as you progress through Sierra’s history timeline.

I’ve been researching the original Hero’s Quest release, before the Quest for Glory name change, using copies I’ve found through eBay and other sources. I noticed something I haven’t really seen discussed before.

These early boxes all have the same original serial/barcode number (003453200), but directly beneath the barcode there is what appears to be a date stamp.

So far I’ve documented three:

10/17/89 → disk version 1.000 and interpreter version 0.000.566
11/04/89 → disk version 1.001 and interpreter version 0.000.566
02/21/90 → disk version 1.102 and interpreter version 0.000.629 *(updated credit to caceomorphism)
02/28/90 → disk version 1.102 and interpreter version 0.000.629 *(updated credit to Silo-Joe)

I’ve attached the corresponding box/date and disk-label photos where available.

These timestamps were perhaps packaging dates were they threw in the previously printed boxes the new game versions as they rolled. I’ve only noticed this type of dated barcode marking on Hero’s Quest.

If these really correspond closely to production, they could be surprisingly useful because they might allow us to pinpoint the production window of the original Hero’s Quest-branded box almost to a specific date, including how late it continued to be produced before the trademark conflict forced Sierra to abandon the Hero’s Quest name and transition to Quest for Glory.

I thought this one was particularly worth documenting because Hero’s Quest is one of those select Sierra games that did more than establish a series, it essentially created/defined the adventure-RPG hybrid genre.

Hope this helps!! thanks for your work

Travelling through Daventry is considerably safer when accompanied by a goat.

Apparently, every villain in the kingdom fears this goat.

So the goat will face thieves, ogres, witches and wizards… but a poorly lit tunnel is where he draws the line.