American video game designer and author
Jane Jensen (born Jane Elizabeth Smith; January 28, 1963 in Palmerton, Pennsylvania) is an American video game designer and author. She is mostly known as the creator of the Gabriel Knight series of adventure games, and also co-founded Oberon Media and Pinkerton Road video game development companies. Jensen also writes under the name Eli Easton.
Early life
Jane Jensen was born Jane Elizabeth Smith, the youngest of seven children. She received a BA in computer science from Anderson University in Indiana and worked as a systems programmer for Hewlett-Packard.[2]
Career
Her love of both computers and creative writing eventually led her to the computer gaming industry and Sierra OnLine where she worked as a writer on Police Quest III: The Kindred and EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus.[2] After co-designing King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow with veteran game designer Roberta Williams, Jensen designed her first solo game: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, which was released in 1993. The dark, supernatural mystery was a departure for Sierra but the game was enthusiastically received, with the strength of Jensen's writing, along with the game's horror and gothic sensibilities coming in for particular praise from the gaming press[3] and earning the Computer Gaming World's "Adventure Game of the Year" award.[4]
Jensen followed up Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers with two sequels: The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery in 1995 and Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned in 1999. Somewhat unusually for an adventure game series, each Gabriel Knight title was produced in an entirely different format to the others. Whereas the original was a traditional 2D animated game, the sequels were realised through full motion video and a custom built 3D engine, respectively.[5] Despite further acclaim for Jensen's design in both cases (The Beast Within too was Computer Gaming World's "Game of the Year"[4]), the large expenses associated with making the sequels, coupled with the declining marketability of adventure games (especially within Sierra) meant that a fourth in the series was not commissioned.[6]
In 1997, Jensen published a novelization of the first Gabriel Knight game. A second Gabriel Knight novelization followed in 1998. In 1999, Jensen published her first non-adapted novel, Millennium Rising (later retitled Judgment Day). Her fourth book, Dante's Equation was published in 2003 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Jensen has been involved in designing casual online games at Oberon Media, of which she is a co-founder.[7] Her work in the hidden object/light adventure category can partially be credited with moving casual games in the direction of full adventure games in puzzle and story sophistication. Some of her more notable recent games include Deadtime Stories (2009) and Dying for Daylight (2010). After leaving Oberon in 2011, she briefly worked at Zynga.
Jensen's next big adventure game Gray Matter was developed by Wizarbox and published by dtp entertainment in 2010.[8][9] The game, originally intended to be developed by Hungarian software house Tonuzaba, switched to another developer, French company Wizarbox in 2008: as a result, the tentative release was changed and shifted to 2010. Jensen was also a story consultant on Phoenix Online Studios' 2012 adventure game Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller.[10]
On April 5, 2012, Jensen and her husband Robert Holmes announced the formation of Pinkerton Road, a new game development studio to be headquartered on their Lancaster, Pennsylvania farm.[11] With this announcement, a Kickstarter campaign was launched to raise funds for the studio's first year of game development.[12] In 2014, Pinkerton released their first games, Moebius: Empire Rising and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition.
Since 2013, Jensen has written gay romance fiction under the pen name "Eli Easton".[13] The Lion and the Crow was written for the Goodreads M/M Romance event "Love has No Boundaries" in 2013, and later expanded and rereleased as a second edition in e-book and audiobook.[14][15]
Personal life
Jensen owned a farm in Pennsylvania where she lived with her husband, composer Robert Holmes, who composed the music for the Gabriel Knight series and Gray Matter.[16] They have since sold the farm and are currently living in the Puget Sound area of Washington state.[17]
