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SEQUEL: An New Album of game themes from Robert Holmes

Following his prior album of piano game themes “A Simple Refrain”, The new album SEQUEL will be a collection of fully produced dramatic game themes created and produced in the style of music from Gabriel Knight and Gray Matter games. These new themes will carry all of the dark emotional depth, sweeping melody, and layered textures of the past games, with the intention of manifesting music that would be right at home in a GK sequel. Created utilizing both some of the original instruments from past games, and some of the best new technology and electronic synthesis and sampling tools. The album will be a new and fully realized extension of the wonderful dramatic cannon of these beloved games.

As with past soundtracks,  the tunes will address all the usual emotional corners of a game universe: main theme’s, action pieces, emotional romantic pieces, tension elements, character themes, and the occasional humorous relief. They are then fully produced adding synthesis and electronic textures and orchestral arrangements. This is all followed by about 6,321 passes at mixing…

The process then completes with professional Mastering by multi Grammy winning Mastering Guru Gavin Lurssen ( https://lurssenmastering.com ), who has put the final polish on albums for a Who’s Who of music legends, as well as The Scarlet Furies and Robert’s production of Renewal for The Brothers Four. The result will be a digital and vinyl experience worthy of the musical and gaming legacy of Jane Jensen’s wonderful games.

About Robert Holmes

Robert Holmes worked in the studio and postproduction communities in Hollywood before joining computer gaming giant Sierra On-Line as a Producer and Composer. While there, his work included several games, including the award-winning Gabriel Knight: Sins of The Fathers, Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within and Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of The Sacred, Blood of The Damned. Additional notable game scores have included Jane Jensen’s Gray Matter, Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure, Moebius: Empire Rising and Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition. Other performance and production activities have included work as a writer, member, or Producer for The Brothers Four, Sting, and The Scarlet Furies.  Performance and studio work includes legends Steve Lukather, Leon Russell, Rusty Anderson, Jim Messina, Peter Asher, and The Zombies.

In 2014, Robert and his wife Game Designer Jane Jensen completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for their game production studio Pinkerton Road, resulting in the creation and delivery of three games: Gabriel Knight Sins of The Fathers Anniversary Edition, Moebius Empire Rising, and Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure.

“Robert Holmes wove an epic tapestry for his soundtrack to the Gabriel Knight series, combining themes of setting and character with operatic themes that transcend even these.  Jane Jensen’s games are supernatural mysteries with colorful characters, but are also more: Each is a sweeping, emotionally charged battle for the protagonist’s soul. Robert’s score captures the breathtaking scope and spiritual dimension of these battles, from the New Orleans bayou to the deep woods and historic castles of Bavaria. And of course, there is that dazzling set piece of the series, the lost opera of Wagner, that only a composer of tremendous ability could pull off. It is impossible to imagine these games achieving the same emotional impact, the same depth, without the haunting music that gave them life.”

–Ilana C. Myer, author of Last Song Before Night

We Need You!

We invite you to join in the effort to create and produce this new collection. We can’t do it without your support. Over the years the loyalty and passion of the fans for these games and the music that is a part of them has been so wonderful. Fans from all over the world continue to reflect their enjoyment of the past work. Join us in working together to create the next addition to the musical family!  Any level you can participate or contribute is deeply appreciated! You can also make a huge difference by posting this campaign to your social feeds and networks and helping get the word out!

Goals

Main goal

Our main goal is to reach $35,000. We will also have several stretch goals beyond this that we hope to reach to further enrich the results. As discussed below in the detail regarding associated costs, these goals represent funds needed to support the time for Composing and production, upgrades and additions to needed studio software and hardware, professional mastering, and Digital, CD, and Vinyl record versions production. If we fail to meet or surpass this goal, we will get nothing and will be unable to proceed with the project.

Stretch Goals

We hope to surpass our basic goal and add even more cool stuff to the life of this project! These include:

• Music video of main theme
   
• Sheet Music
   
• Additional Covers
   
• Signed GK memorabilia
   

Related Costs

Production and delivery for a project like this can get very costly very quickly. Some of the costs we are planning on in our budget include:

• Studio software and hardware upgrades
   
• Composing and recording time
   
• Mixing
   
• Professional Mastering (Lurssen Mastering)
   
• Album artwork production
   
• Digital distribution costs
   
• CD Duplication
   
• Vinyl album Production
   
• PR Support
   
• Video Support and Production (Stretch goal)
   
• Shipping and fulfillment
   

Spread The Word!

We can’t stress enough how valuable a role you can play by helping to spread the word of the campaign!! Post it in all your social abodes and send it to any GK or Gray Matter fans you might know. Stand naked in your yard and shout about it at 3AM! Anything you can do to help build awareness out there is huge! We have only 45 days to make this campaign a success. If we fail to make the goal the album will not be possible. Please join us in making this happen! Thank you!!

A Quick Thank You to the team

Last but not least, I want to thank the amazing team of folks who have given of their time and talents to help make this possible. I couldn’t do it without them!

Roberta Vaughan
Rudy Marchant
Ilana Teitelbaum
Branden Tobin
George Napier
Raleigh Holmes
Bruce Brenneise
Stephen Emond
Steve Coupe

Note – It’s fine he doesn’t thank me, Larry Laffer, who undoubtedly can get all the babes here to come check out the Kickstarter and check out the fine, smooth tunes that Robert Holmes can create!

Starting November 15 we launch our new Kickstarter to fund the production of SEQUEL, a new album of Gabriel Knight style game themes from Composer Robert Holmes! Join us to help make this project happen and create wonderful rewards like vinyl albums, included covers by fans, and signed GK and Gray Matter memorabilia from the archives of Robert Holmes and Jane Jensen!

We Need your Help to Make This Happen!
Help spread the word by posting and sharing!
Find out all the latest at:

Hey everyone! First off, we very much realize that this update is really late in coming. After releasing the update earlier in the year, the plan was for this update to essentially be the “official releasing of the game update”.  Unfortunately the save / load system has continued to slow things down.  We continued to hold off on this update in hopes that things would get finished. 

A few things I want to make clear. We really appreciate all of you and your patience. We realize some of you are very upset and are chomping at the bits ready for this game to be released. We hear you and you have every right to feel the way you do. All we can say is that this game is going to come out. Not releasing this game is not an option. Please realize we are SO close to the finish line here. All of us have dedicated so much energy, blood, sweat, tears, and not to mention family time to get this game done. There have just been a lot of set backs in this project beyond anyone’s control. This is not about making excuses, just stating some facts. Regardless, SpaceVenture is absolutely going to get released!

SO WHAT HAS BEEN THE FOCUS THE LAST FEW MONTHS?

The majority of our focus has been on the save/load system, which has gone through a major overhaul. To clarify on the problems with the save/load system, we had put the original system in place during the beginning of our progress on the game, and it worked okay during that time. During the first phase of SpaceVenture, we didn’t have anywhere near the amount of game mechanics as we ended up with when the game got to its final stages. Throughout this process, the save/load system got back-burnered due to us trying to finish the full game. Our thoughts were that it shouldn’t be too much trouble to bring the system up to date once we had all the mechanics in. Unfortunately this was very wrong. 

The approach we should have taken would have been to modify the save / load system along the way. This would have taken longer to get to the final stages of the game, but we would have not ran into the problems that we have now.

On top of the save / load system being worked on, there has been more polish put into the game as well. Our beta testers did a great job of documenting things that were wrong and team members not working on save / load components have been able to put some time on those items as well.

HOW WILL THE SAVE / LOAD SYSTEM OPERATE IN SPACEVENTURE NOW?

In a perfect world, we would love for the player to be able to just save anywhere, anytime they want and be able to restore and things go exactly back to the way they were. In a lot scenes in SpaceVenture, you will get just that.

There are going to be three things to understand about the system you will experience while playing SpaceVenture:

• Normal Saving and Loading: The game lets you save on a scene and you can just restore back to the way they were when you saved.
• In certain sequences saving will be disabled: During certain areas of the game, mostly when animation operations are occurring, there will be a red X that appears over the save icon. You will need to wait until a certain sequence finishes or complete some small task before you will be able to save. There are very few cases in the game where you will experience this.
• Saving in certain scenes will reset the scene upon reloading: On certain scenes due to the different mechanics occurring, the scene will reset upon reloading. This issue has been the biggest thing we’ve been trying to solve during the course of this year. Unfortunately there is just no easy answer to solving this problem for every single scene in the game. The good news is, this is just in a few areas of the game and understand that even when the scene resets upon load it will take very little time for you to complete tasks to get back to where you were before reloading. Also, you will know when this is going to occur because the game will warn you before saving.

SO WHATS HAPPENING NOW?

We are very close to having the save / load system working for the whole game but there are still some troublesome areas that we are fighting. These areas need to be 100% working with the system before we release the game.  

WHEN THE GAME IS RELEASED WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT?

The game will be released on Windows first. As you all probably remember, we are using Unity as the game engine so porting the game over to the other systems shouldn’t be a big problem, but we do expect there to be some issues that need to be worked out for that to happen. We also realize that you all may report bugs and we will try to release fixes for those as well. 

After all of that, we will be working on shipping rewards. Please do not message us your updated address information for rewards. We will eventually send out a survey that will allow you to put your updated information in there for us.

So that’s it folks. The next update WILL contain info about releasing the game and how it will be going out. Thank you all for your patience and hope you will find the game to be worth the wait when you get it.