ABSTRACT
Long before Tom Hanks played the role of Harvard professor Robert Lang-don in the screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code—indeed, well before Brown’s novel was even published—the hero of a critically acclaimed video game series had already stumbled upon the secret bloodline of Jesus. In the 1990s, Sierra On-Line game designer Jane Jensen forged a path for new-millennium fiction with a trilogy of paranormal detective mysteries that incorporated the theory, popularized in the 1980s by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, that the Holy Grail (Sangreal) is Mary Magdalene, who, as the wife of Jesus, became the vessel that carried the ‘Sang Réal,’ or royal blood—a holy bloodline that includes the Merovingian kings and their modern-day descendants. 1 Sierra’s Gabriel Knight series reinterpreted the Grail legend and revived the figure of the Arthurian knight in the guise of its unlikely hero—a lowbrow rogue, inveterate womanizer, third-rate novelist, and amateur sleuth. Although it is not advertised as such, Gabriel’s story is a profoundly medieval narrative, yet at the same time it adapts tradition and legend in a way that is particularly suited to its cultural moment. Indeed, the Gabriel Knight series is best understood as a late-twentieth-century chivalric romance about a knight who becomes worthy—through ritual, battle, and illumination—of completing the Grail quest.
