Jane Jensen

Jane Jensen (born Jane Elizabeth Smith, January 28th, 1963 in Palmerton, Pennsylvania) is a North American game designer and author. She is best known for her work on the Gabriel Knight series.

Jensen's technical background began with a degree in Computer Science from Anderson University in Indiana. Later, she became an engineer for Hewlett-Packard, and was employed there for six years. Her career in interactive entertainment began at Sierra On-Line, Inc. in 1991. She worked as a writer on Police Quest III and EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus in the same year. In 1992, she co-designed King's Quest VI with Roberta Williams.

Jensen's first major project was Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993), followed by two sequels, all of which she designed and wrote. Jensen notably studied various aspects of occult sciences and mythology in order to add credibility and detail to the storylines of these games. She traveled to Germany in order to research local folklore, which was later incorporated into The Beast Within (1995). She acknowledges Stephen King and Anne Rice as her primary influences in writing.

In August 2006, at the Leipzig Game Convention, Jane Jensen announced her new game, Gray Matter, one in a planned series of games. Four years in the making, the game was eventually released in November 2010.

Jensen also wrote two novel adaptations of Gabriel Knight and two independent novels, Judgment Day (1999) and Dante's Equation (2003).

Jane Jensen currently owns a farm in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband Robert Holmes, who composed the music for the Gabriel Knight games. On April 5, 2012 the couple announced the establishment of the development studio Pinkerton Road.