It was 1997. On a sunny afternoon, near the end of the summer, two seemingly unrelated things happened in my house that, in hindsight, proved instead to be indivisibly connected. First, after a sleepless night, I finally finished A Gabriel Knight Mystery: The Beast Within. Secondly, convinced by a friend of his, my father subscribed to our first – extremely slow – internet connection.

Let’s focus for a moment on the first thing: I was so mesmerized by the end of the game that I played it four times in a row, just to absorb it all. Each and every time, when I heard the melody accompaning Gabriel and Grace’s final dialogue on the bridge over Neuschwanstein, I was reduced to the verge of tears: I spent countless summer nights with them, sharing their struggles and joys, and the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted more. So, later the same day, I fired up the newly-established connection and searched three simple words on AltaVista: Gabriel – Knight – Sierra.

The first displayed result was the Official Gabriel Knight Site, which – in an elegant crimson and gold layout – informed me that a sequel (what a relief!) was indeed in production. There, I also gathered some information about the first Gabriel Knight game, which I hadn’t had the chance to play yet. Without hesitation, I begged my father to buy it for me on his next trip to Milan and after a few weeks, there it was, in my hands. I installed it with trepidation and then, much to my discouragement, I found that it was completely in English, a language I wasn’t very good at back then (or even today, some can argue).

With the aid of an old, tattered English dictionary, I managed to play through the game but sometimes it was hard, no matter what: Jane Jensen’s descriptions, which today sound so poetic and rich, were almost incomprehensible to my younger self, so I decided to register on the Gabriel Knight board and seek help. I wrote a brief presentation post, explaining my problems, and the response from the community was outstanding: they welcomed me warmly and tried hard to help me, clarifying the hardest passages for me – like Gabriel’s dream of the Dragon, which wasn’t even subtitled – and giving me hints on how to proceed when I was stuck (the Voodoo Code puzzle can really be difficult, sure, but try it without understanding the majority of the words!).

When I finally finished the game, I posted my thoughts to share them with other fans and hear their opinions. Then, we patiently waited together for the release of Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, speculating over any tiny bit of info the developers gave us, and when it was released I remember how envious I was in having to wait another three months for the localization, and at the same time how happy I was reading on the boards how good the game proved to be.

Unfortunately for me, after those two years I lost touch with the community: academic commitments and strict deadlines greatly reduced my free time, so I had to put it aside. Then, almost a year ago, I discovered Adventure Gamers’ community and immediately felt at home: I almost forgot how great it is to have a passion and to share it with other kindred spirits. My fellow Adventure Gamers started to introduce me to the newer adventure games, but I never lost my fascination with the heyday of Sierra, and I began to wonder about that old board: would it still be up? Would I recognize anyone? So, motivated by the fun I was having on this forum, I set out to find what happened to my other beloved and too-long-abandoned community.

Not only did I find what I was looking for, but a few months ago I rejoined and instantly felt like time had never passed. The community I remembered and loved was still there, even without new games to wait for and play, sticking together just because it was good. Nonetheless, at least one important thing had changed from the past: the atmosphere.

As many people know, Sierra was acquired first by Cendant and then by Vivendi S. A., which later became known as Vivendi Universal. The new management didn’t seem to care at all for the requests of board members and fans of that certain genre they weren’t producing anymore; they stuffed all the boards in a generic “Classic Games” directory and made pretty clear that they weren’t supporting them anymore. Still, in spite of everything, the community persisted, continuing to keep alive the glories of those beloved series whose intellectual rights lay forgotten and dusty, and which are – again, despite every attempt to keep them dormant – still alive and kicking even nowadays. Jane Jensen – the “Last Dinosaur on the Block” as she called herself in an open letter to Sierra – was right when she said that those stories, those characters would never die.

This doesn’t mean, however, that one can’t try to kill them, and Vivendi tried hard to drive the final nail into the community’s coffin. In fact, after the recent corporate merger that created the colossus Activision Blizzard, it was made public that only a few forums would be transferred to the new server; that is, only the boards dedicated to the Sierra franchises that Activision Blizzard planned to continue producing. The other forums were to be taken down and discontinued: King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, Laura Bow…

As of today, these boards are no more. They have welcomed fans and adventurers from all around the world for more than a decade, and today they are closed.

One would think that after Chainsaw Monday, after all these years of neglect, the fans would finally give up. But that assumption would be wrong. Ever since news of the closure spread, fans have outdone themselves. They have stored old memorable threads, they have created mailing lists to keep everyone in touch, and moreover, have begun to work on a new project entirely of their own: a Gateway Community that will once again bring together all of Sierra’s most devoted fans, regardless of genre and game. Where a cleft once divided the community into smaller groups of members dedicated only to a particular game or series, now there is the chance to bring all of them back together and rebuild the huge, wonderful community that it used to be.

This new community will consist of a network of different boards, such as the Gabriel Knight 4 Campaign, the Quest for More Glory, the Sierra Help Pages, Sierra Chest and other dedicated sites. This new endeavour is not only a way to keep alive the memory of the series we continue to love and in which we continue to believe and hope for future developments, but it’s more importantly a way to keep together groups of people that have a passion in common and who, through that passion, have met and made friends with each other, if only on the net. My best wishes go to this new Gateway project, with the hope that – like the mythical Arabian Phoenix – from the ashes of the old forums an even broader community may rise. And if some day our beloved series do come back, we will be vindicated. In the meantime, it’s a pleasure to be a part of such a strong community.