illuminerdi

Was it difficult for you to get the rights to remake GK1 - did Activision require a lot of convincing, or were they pretty eager to let you remake it?

Were they involved at all in the remake, or were they more hands off since this isn't really an "active" property for them?

Also, I too would love to see remakes of GK2 or GK3, both games have aged considerably poorly compared to GK1, since the FMV of GK2 is just corny these days, and also lead to the game moving incredibly slowly, and the super-early polygonal graphics of GK3 has led to it looking incredibly dated and difficult to control...

Wait, I missed 17 other GK games? Oh man, I'm going to Ebay right now! ;)

On a more serious note - I'm glad to hear that the remaster takes a softer touch with death. I hated having to constantly jump into the save menu - I don't mind actually dying in a game like this, but if it means I have to go back to my last (manual) save it gets annoying and discourages exploring.

Did you eliminate ALL the [known] dead ends in the game? That one also used to drive me NUTS in old adventure games - a missed item from hours ago meant you were now unable to progress, and worse, sometimes you didn't even KNOW you were missing that thing (because if you knew you needed it, you'd have grabbed it, right?) and could spend hours trying to get past the current section only to finally give up and consult a walkthrough. That was always my biggest pet peeve with Sierra adventures. KQ6, though I loved it, drove me nearly out of my mind because I'm pretty sure I had to restart it no less than 3 times due to missing pickups.

Love your games - GK1 is one of my all time favorite adventure games, so I'm very excited for the remaster. Anyway, my question is about game mechanics:

Do you feel that death (or more accurately: frequent/easy/unexpected death) makes for a good mechanic in adventure games?

I loved games like KQVI and GK, but it was so easy to die in them that it often felt like I had to either save before I did anything, or avoid exploring the environment fully/thoroughly, which would either lead to missing game content or actually getting progress-blocked because I failed to find a key item earlier. I didn't play adventure games that lacked death (Lucasarts, etc) until many years after playing every Sierra game I could get my hands on, and it really changed the way I approached them when I couldn't die, and I'm curious whether or not you feel it's a good mechanic for adventure games or just a thing that Sierra refused to experiment with.