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"This is not just another of your..." Yeah. Woah. Where did he go? Really? Where did he go? Some speed games have dozens of dizzying tricks, but sometimes there's just one dumb thing you hammer over and over. Today, I want to tell you about a game that speedrunners destroyed with a single key press. [music] The year is 2012. Adventure Game veterans Jane Jensen and Robert Holmes launched their Kickstarter campaign for a new game studio, Pinkerton Road. Jane is most well-known for the Gabriel Knight series of supernatural thriller adventure games. "What can you tell me about Voodoo?" To put it mildly, adventure game fans love Gabriel Knight. The fans were enthusiastic about the Kickstarter, but Jane didn't own the rights to Gabriel Knight, so she couldn't promise a new entry in the series. The Kickstarter pitch was a little unorthodox. Backers pledged for membership in what was called "community-supported gaming." "So, Dad, tell us about this new CSG model." Well, it's actually based on organic farming. In organic farming, a CSA is a community-supported agriculture group, and if you're a member of a CSA, you sign up for a year and you get a basket of fresh fruit and vegetables every week. So, we figured, since we live on a farm, why not have a CSG? So that means it's community-supported gaming. So as a member of our CSG, you get access to every game that we produce during the year, and you also get great visibility into concept art and production process, and you get to be a great part of our feedback loop and help us make decisions on games. They had three game ideas, and backers voted on which game to make for the first cycle. The options were... Moebius. Anglophile Adventure and Gray Matter 2. Before the campaign ended, the votes landed on Moebius: Empire Rising. There was also a stretch goal to make a second game that cycle. How confident were How confident were you that the Kickstarter would make its funding, or was it sort of nail biting the whole way through? You know, it was pretty nail biting. Hi, I'm Robert Holmes, composer, producer for Sierra Games and more. You might know me from GK and Gray Matter and other things that I've done with some person I know named Jane Jensen. We knew, you know, we had been out of the public eye for quite a while. And also at that time, you know, Kickstarters were fairly new. So it was a little bit untested in terms of the results. When the Kickstarter ended, they had met and exceeded their goal. Pinkerton Road did not meet the stretch goal for the second game. But... There is more than one way to skin a cat or make a cat mustache. Funny. Listen, since you're so smart. Why don't you tell them about the big news? Well, we have in the last few weeks been talking to some publishers and we will indeed be making a second adventure game this year. We're calling this new game Mystery Game X. On October 8th, 2013, Mystery Game X was revealed: a 20th anniversary remake of the first Gabriel Knight game. But this wasn't the original plan for Mystery Game X. While we were going through the campaign, we actually had already been in discussions with Activision and we were actually moving with Activision to do GK4. - That would be Gabriel Knight for a brand new sequel to the series. - We had been very excited. We had kind of thought, wait until people hear that this is actually about GK4. And we got about three months down the road and they pulled out. And this was mainly because they were having a lot of problems with developer groups that they were utilizing internationally. And this, I think this was a time internally at Activision when there was a changing of the guard as well. And whenever that happens, a lot of games and projects get canceled. So when we couldn't, they wouldn't allow us to move forward and do a GK4, then it was kind of like, ooo, what could we do that they would still find valuable? And the remake was kind of a, well, this isn't as great, but maybe people would still be into this. And so we just kind of tried to make the best of that. - Jane and Robert received permission to develop the game, but they no longer had Activision's financial backing or talent pool. Phoenix Online Studios would program the game. The artwork, music and voices were redone with Robert Holmes revisiting his old scores himself. How did it feel to come back to that? - It was very interesting, especially 20 years later and going back and a lot of that stuff I hadn't heard for so long. I don't know if you've ever had like an old friend or somebody in your life who you haven't seen for a long, long time, and then you get back connected to them. And in a lot of ways, neither of you have changed. And I think it was kind of like that. (piano music) - We're very proud that even with all the challenges that we had and the fact that we actually were doing three games on a budget of less than half of a game, that we still managed to deliver in the timeframe we said we were going to. And, you know, made good on our commitments. - The 20th anniversary edition released in October of 2014. IGN called it a must-play and Adventure Gamers called it a provocative experience that succeeds apart from a few questionable gameplay decisions and a lack of final polish. With the first cycle of CSG out the door, fans eagerly awaited future projects. And it would be eight years before anyone started speed running the game. - I guess I had been playing a bunch of Gabriel Knight 1. And as I was kind of coming to the end of my arc with that game, and I wanted to kind of take a break from it, I was like, I have a copy of 20th anniversary. And I see, I noticed that this does not have any runs on the board and it looks silly. - I feel like there's must be something in here that is like crazy broken. This game feels so strange. So I had my notes up from the normal version up on the side and then I expected basically just to go end to end. But much to my surprise... dismay, it is completely different. There's a bunch of changes is an easy way to put it. - What the heck is this? What am I looking at here? - There's a puzzle in this one where you don't just need like the $100 or whatever it is from Bruno selling the painting. You then have to go to the crypt and then you need to interact with certain like parts of the tomb or whatever it is. And then out of nowhere, a squirrel knocks over a vase that gives you 20 bucks. - It's a Pokemon card. Holographic charizard. - I don't know. It just seems a bit bizarre to me. Like things like that were really there. And of course there's a slider puzzle that's random, which in terms of the speed runs a bit maddening. (laughing) - Why? Why did this need to be added? - And what I expected to be maybe like a 30 minute, maybe an hour long speed run, kind of just kind of winging it ended up being like four and a half hours. - I think Jane sort of rightly felt a responsibility to somehow deliver sort of the old vibe and the things that people want to see in that game. And at the same time, you feel like, you know, you've got to somehow give something new or enhanced as well. And it's a really tricky line to walk because if you get too crazy, then all the people who want to have that old experience get pissed off. And if you stay just with the old experience and people are like, why should I bother? So it's an interesting challenge. During that initial playthrough that I had, as well as subsequent passes through the speedrun, I would notice there were moments where during a cutscene that was typically unskippable, and one that I'd probably be mashing the mouse or something to try to get through the dialogue quicker, every once in a while, Guy... I was going to say Guybrush, Gabriel would come out and start moving around the screen when he shouldn't have been. And I'm like, that's strange. One day I was doing a run and Miketheviewer had taken up an interest in the game, it seems, but I'm pretty sure he just in chat just said, "Have you tried just pushing the B key?" Um, I can try. I don't think so. And sure enough, the B key would bring up a little menu on the bottom and that's how you know that you now have control of Gabriel again. Hang on, you might have just... Mike, I think you just cracked open. You might have cracked this game open. Whoa, this is crazy. Now to be clear, when you double click to move somewhere, the game lets you skip the animation. That part is intentional. Mike let me know that he was playing the demo and just tried every key on the keyboard to see what happened. Less than two minutes after starting the demo for the first time, I stumbled onto the B key. I was hopeful I might find out something useful about the various weirdnesses the game was throwing at thewoofs, but certainly didn't expect it to be as simple as a single key press. Pressing the B key gives players control almost whenever they want it. So what could speedrunners do with this? According to Mike, "The big strength of the B key is being able to do multiple things at the same time. The cutscenes at the beginning of most days are a solid example. Often you can take care of all the necessary conversations with Grace, reading the newspaper, etc. while that required cutscene is playing." And it's so much more efficient for a speedrun to basically be able to do all the things you need to do in the room while the cutscene plays out. So we kind of take advantage of that all the time, the time, basically basically being able to move around where we're not really supposed to. "You can gain control earlier when you arrive at a new location or after a previous action. You can remove animations by bringing up some text during an action and skipping through it. You can get through the interrogation scenes faster by asking multiple questions at the same time. The list goes on and on." One of the special things about GK20 is in a glitchless run of that game, I don't think there's any RNG except for one scene where you need to make a groundskeeper go away. The B key absolutely introduces RNG everywhere. I can do the same B key glitch over and over and it'll happen in a special way each time. This was like a very on rails, kind of a fast walkthrough kind of game. And now Gabe is shooting off the rails, his body is contorting in weird and fascinating new ways. Oh yeah, so the game's animations have a tendency to bug out. And that's before you start breaking the game. Did he just throw me the gun? Okay, I don't want to give you the wrong impression. I played the game casually and it's not like the animation glitches happen all the time. That happened all the time and it was always great, great to see it. I'm Chris Jewsbury. I was a scripter and lead cinematics artist on Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Father's 20th anniversary edition, or GK20 for short. We never quite understood what was going on. We just had to like deal with it. It was something to do with the IK setup of the character and then playing a character and then playing a FK animation on top of that. So what are IK and FK? I don't know what those mean. Sorry, inverse kinematic and forward kinematic. Inverse kinematic is where Inverse kinematic is where you're animating a target. So if I'm doing my hand, right, I animate the hand to where I want it to go, okay? And then the arm follows it. That's inverse. For forward kinematic, you animate the joints in the arm to get the hand where you want to go. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the legs are generally driven by inverse kinematics so that they always know where the ground is. know where the ground is. But then the rest of the animations are forward because that's just easier to export the animations and then put it into Unity that way. So you never quite figured out why the head goes crazy. We didn't understand why it happened. We just knew how to mitigate the problem. As useful as the B key was, it was too powerful. It was so simple to pull off. It was just pressing one button on your keyboard. Where it gets tricky is that the game hates when you do that. I mean, it was kind of like a whiplash thing where it was like we got too much control. The game's broken up into 10 days, and each of those days only progresses after a certain trigger, where something internally is saying, "Okay, you did all of your tasks for the day." When you introduce the B key into that, you start doing your laundry list of items to meet for the day, but you're always breaking out of them as soon as you think you've accomplished them. If you did something too early or you did something a little too much of the B key, you're going to find out five, 10 minutes down the line that you have soft-locked yourself, at which point, RIP run, got to try again. Because you can sequence break everything, it's very easy to skip the progression triggers and get soft-locked. The only way to figure out what could be skipped and what couldn't was trial and error. The way I have been describing it is like you're in a room and there's no lights on, you can't see anything, and it's you walking around like this, trying to find where the wall is, and then you hit the wall and then you're trying to go along things, follow the wall, and then you realize it's a much bigger room than what it is. That was kinda what like speedrunning this game is like still today. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we're soft-locked. That stinks. Okay. The success rate or the finish rate of any of the runs took a nosedive. I think of every 20 runs I do, I maybe finished two of them. Any completed run of GK20, fast or slow, is a miracle when the B key is involved. I first played GK20 when it came out, 2014, I think, had a good time with it. Then I think I set it down and forgot about it for nine years or so. I remember a lot of people talking about it being buggy back then. I actually had a very smooth time with it. I really liked the backgrounds. I liked the voice work. Probably my hottest take about that is I think the voice work is just generally better. I cherish Tim Curry's scenery chewing Gabriel with all my heart, but it is patently absurd. What can I say? I refuse to be bound by rules. One of the other runners, thewoofs or maybe it was Mike, pointed out that the characters kind of look like Sims, and I can't unsee that anymore. But I overall had a positive impression of it. Lemming was present for thewoofs' initial four-hour run. It looked deeply unpleasant, to be honest. I can't tell if he was having a good time or not. So I was thinking, "Oh, that's brutal. This was clearly not something that we can speedrun in all seriousness." Then a week or two later, I caught another one of the streams and he was still playing. I was like, "That's weird. Why is he sticking with it? Does he just want to get a good time for a good time's sake?" That is when I queue up the stream and suddenly something is different. Nothing about that game is operating like it should. I love mess. My favorite thing about speedrun is when we find glitches, very clearly unintended dev actions. This was such a rare treat for a point and click. That's what attracted me to it. Immediately, maybe detour for some other projects to learn what on earth is going on here. I think after the B key was discovered, it took me a lot of attempts to even get a run finished. Because you're constantly breaking the game. The entire run is just doing something the game doesn't want you to do. And there's a penalty for that. Despite the challenges, on December 12th, 2022, Leming would earn a world record of one hour and 37 minutes. The B key was great, of course, but the one thing it couldn't skip was the cutscenes in between days. B doesn't do anything here. But on December 13th, 2022, Miketheviewer found a way. You could skip it as long as requesting research from Grace was a required action on that day. Save the research for the last thing that you do. After you request it, use the B key and then press the M key to go to the map. It's now the next day and you can go right back to the bookstore. This saved minutes. Mike also found a way to skip part of an additional end of day cutscene by saving the game and immediately reloading that save. You still have to watch the second part of this cutscene, but the game was falling apart even more. Mike had earned a new world record of one hour, 19 minutes and 25 seconds. Lemming hit back the very next day with a 01:08:11. The one hour barrier was tantalizingly cl... Oh, yeah, Mike broke it the next day. But the day after that, Mike found something even cooler. Remember how you can only skip the poems if the day ends with Grace's research? If you do all the necessary things to end a day and are not inside of St. George's books, you get a "It's getting late. Gabriel decides to go home for the day." the next time you go to the map screen and the day automatically ends. At that moment, the game already made an autosave, which puts you at the beginning of the next day when you load it. You can only load autosaves either after you get a game over or after you close the game. So we close the game, restart it and continue from checkpoint. Mike also found at the end of day seven, if you skip the last cutscene and then mash M and B, you'll skip the day eight opening cutscene. Mike's input viewer was growing and the times kept falling. By this point, he had harnessed even more of the B key's powers. Text skipping literally advances the time inside the game. Whenever you click through text lines, it's like you're pressing the fast forward button on your VCR for a second. There are some weird quirks to this. For example, you can't just play the same line of text over and over. And some lines don't work at all in the first place. But most of the time, you just want to be constantly inspecting random objects or interact with them in other ways, just to have the narrator say a line that you can skip, you can skip, thus thus speeding up time and animations. On top of that, if you activate this fast forward effect while you're leaving a location and the game is fading to black, the game gets stuck in fast forward mode. Usually things get back to normal as soon as the character or the narrator says something, but sometimes some of the fast forward effect bleeds over into a cutscene that is playing at the next location you go to. At last, on Christmas Day, Mike posted a 44:32. He was done with the game for the time being. Unfortunately, Pinkerton Road Studios' grand plans would not be fully realized. In April 2016, they announced the following in their forums. Currently, Pinkerton Road does not have any game projects in development, nor are any on the horizon. Our original Kickstarter games, Mobius: Empire Rising, and the Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary Edition did not earn enough sales to make continued game development practical even on our modest scale. To complete those games, we ended up investing a really sizable amount of our own money. That kind of went out the window. One of the things within a good development cycle is you go back and you do a post-mortem and say, "Okay, how viable is this as a model?" And when we went back and looked at that, we just thought, we can't do that again. We're happy to do more games, but it would have to be funded by somebody else. Gabriel Knight, the 20th Anniversary Edition, was the last game from Pinkerton Road. But it wouldn't be the last that we'd hear from Jane and Robert. In the spring of 2023, Lemming would submit a game to GDQ's Awfully Silly hotfix show. I submitted King's Quest Mask of Eternity, which had been featured at a GDQ a few years prior [Chuck Grody sighting!], so I thought there might be an interest there. Separate of that, I did submit GK20 to SGDQ, but I figured it wouldn't get in due to the game's length, the obscurity of the title, and I was right. But the host for Awfully Clicky Hotfix must have at least seen that submission because he actually reached out to me and said, "Hey, would you like to run GK24 GK20 for awfully silly?" I was like, yeah, absolutely. I would love to do that. That was a great day. That really made my weekend. I got this visual aid and I have the spare gaming keyboard here. I just want to show you exactly what I'll be doing. It's very advanced, so pay attention. [click] That's it. The B key. For reasons unclear to us, if you press the B key, the game will break. B for break. Is it a debug code? Is it something more supernatural and harrowing, much like the scenes of the game? We don't know... But I really appreciate what thewoofs and Mike brought to this game. I would never have touched this if not for the work they put into it, so I'm glad that we got to feature them as well. Oh, whoops, that was a mistake. I think I can fix this. I think I can fix it. Lemming's run went great, and it turns out someone very special was watching. How did it feel to watch the game be speedrun? Oh, I was really glad to see somebody just playing it in the first place. It's great seeing other people enjoying it, no matter how they're playing the darn thing. I was interested when it started that the estimate was like three times shorter than my glitchless PB. So I'm glad that the powers of that B, ha, made the run possible as it is. Chris joined the Speedy Adventures Discord to say that the run made his week, and he answered the burning question we'd all been asking. Why is the B key so busted? Why is the B key so busted? So the So the million dollar question, why does pressing the B key give control back to the player? Each of our animation sequences, if they're not set to a background sequence, these are things like that control animations of background characters, they will increment a busy counter. If it's larger than zero, then the game says, okay, we're currently doing something, the player player should not have control of their should not have control of their cursor, the inventory, all that stuff. And then when the sequence is over, it decrements it. And then as long as busy is zero or less, then the game says, okay, you can play the game now, click away, right? But right next to the button that lets you you turn on the FPS counter, turn on the FPS counter, yes, the game has an FPS counter, by the way, is B. And that calls the the function to reset function to reset the busy counter to zero. So you hit B, and the game's like, oh, I must not be busy anymore. Let me just turn the cursor back on and give you the inventory. And who cares if all the animation is still playing? Now you can click around. So that was put in there for debug purposes? I don't think so. Because I certainly never used it. I did talk to Richard Flores, who was executive producer. And his best guess it was probably put in for Jane, because she would have much less tolerance for going through all of the things. But we don't really know if it was actually intended for that at this point. And we don't know if anybody actually used it. So it's just sort of there for some reason. Even more mysterious. This sounds like something that Gabe should investigate. Yeah, what do you know about B? But yeah, we don't know. It's just sort of there. But don't worry, it's not going to get fixed. We think it's really cool. And yes, I did ask Robert Holmes if the B key rang any bells. You know, it doesn't. But I totally buy that reason. I mean, it would certainly not be the first time that the dev team would be asked to put something in for Jane so she wouldn't have to go through and do everything. But really, I have no idea. And, you know, I think it's cool that somebody found it. I mean, you know, that I think that was always one of the fun things about the old Sierra games was, you know, you never knew what a developer had buried somewhere that, you know, somebody was going to find someday. What is your reaction to the fact that people speed run games that you worked on? You know, I totally get it. I mean, especially with older games, it's like, you know, kind of a new fresh way to experience them. It actually is a lot similar to how I worked with the games because I am not a gamer. I don't play games. You know, I can honestly say I've never played all of these games front to back. So in a way, when I did, you know, sort of dive into any part of the games, this is exactly how I would do it. It was like, OK, you know, I'm going to speed through this. I want to see this room or this character or this action. And then I'm done. [LAUGHTER] Speaking of Robert, we're not quite done with his story yet. You know, we had been living on the East Coast in our farm there in Pinkerton Road, and we decided to move back here to the northwest. And so when we did, you know, I had to go through the headache of moving my studio and all my gear and resetting it up. And so as I was doing that here in the new house, I actually came across the old Kurzweil sampler that I used on the GK games. And I started playing it. And, you know, immediately as I was playing it, I started playing things that certainly could have been GK-ish. And I thought, you know, I still really like that kind of music. Circumstantially, neither Jane or I really know when or if we'll get a chance to make another game. So I just thought, well, you know, maybe I shouldn't wait for another game. In late 2021, Robert launched the Kickstarter campaign for Sequel, a new album of game themes that would be right at home in a Gabriel Knight sequel. The campaign was a great success. And in 2023, the journey continued with Son of Sequel, the sequel to Sequel. It's both been terrifying to sort of say, gee, you know, does anybody care about this music without the games? And at the same time, it's been great to have so many people and have both Kickstarters, you know, blow past their goal and do better than we were hoping, just because people were so supportive and responsive. Son of Sequel is still in production, but backers have already been promised some Gabriel Knight goodness. Backers will receive an all-new short story based within the Gabriel Knight universe written by Jane Jensen. And if that wasn't enough, Robert will also create a new version of the famous opera from The Beast Within, the second Gabriel Knight game. You know, Jane and I would both love to do some more GK or some more Grey Matter. And we're kind of really hopeful that in the long run with the changing of ownership of IPs, that might be possible at some point, and we totally would be into it. We just believe in sort of, you know, letting the universe know that we're game. If it happens, and we'll see what happens. And in the meantime, I've now written all of the music for Son of Sequel, and now I'm sort of starting the production process. And, you know, I'm very, you know, thankful that people still have an interest in the music and also that, you know, it seems to bring some legitimate happiness to some people. Like just last week, you know, somebody sent me the schedule for their wedding, you know, and they had three of my songs, you know, in their wedding. And you just think, oh, you know, it's so great to be a part of people's lives in a small way like that. In May of 2023, Miketheviewer returned. He had found a way to skip the poem cutscene on day one. Before you click on New Game, load up any location that has the map button activated. Right after you click on Yes to start a new game, during the fade out, spam clicks in the place where the map button is. No more poem cutscenes, period. Mike brought his time down to 41:57, then a 41:27 with horrible RNG. Remember how Lemming mentioned this groundskeeper? There's a part where he has to be off the screen. So you can either wait a long time, or leave and come back until you get lucky and he's not there to begin with. This strat is normally faster, but in Mike's case, on this run... 12 groundskeepers. But he kept pushing, and he found an additional time save. Holding down the Object Highlight button during conversations, with the help of B, seems to generally speed up text. The runs now looked insanely cluttered. What was once... was now... [MUSIC] The way that Mike plays that game is next level. He's just phenomenal in the way he does execution in that game. Beyond all the big skips, he's just a very clean runner when it comes to all the inventory management and everything. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] I got into speedrunning because I wanted to enjoy a series that I had played to the point of not really being able to enjoy it anymore. And speedrunning offered a new way to enjoy it. In GK20's case, it was a game I played. I liked it, but didn't feel too strongly about it. And speedrunning this game is its own unique joy. And I'm very happy I rediscovered the game this way. You know, I think Jane and I both feel, I mean, we're both really proud of that work. And we would both love to do more. And I think we feel anything that people are doing to experience, you know, the results of that work is cool. And, you know, more power to 'em. [MUSIC]