The Death of Adventure Games: The Cat Mustache Was Never the Issue Here

Everything you probably know about the death of adventure games is wrong

By Dia Lacina | October 31, 2025 | 12:30pm

Photo by Alexis Ong, adapted by Dia Lacina and used by permission

Video Games Features adventure games

The Death of Adventure Games: The Cat Mustache Was Never the Issue Here

I’ll admit it: in 1999, I was skeptical of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. On the day I walked into my Babbage’s, for what would be the last time it (or any other store) was still a Babbage’s, I picked the box off the shelf and winced at the screenshots on the back. I didn’t trust it. My friends didn’t trust it. BlackLiq tried to sell me on a Dreamcast and Power Stone instead. But the power of Holy Blood, Holy Grail ran through me. I was primed for Jane Jensen delivering a taut and overly-researched thriller with Jesus and Vampires and pre-Dan Brown conspiracy. So, against the better judgment of my peers, I brought Gabriel Knight 3 home with me.

I heard Tim Curry’s voice. I wandered around an elaborate Direct3D fever dream of a French village. I tricked a man into giving me a motorcycle. And several days beyond the seven-day no-questions return window, thoroughly satisfied that I didn’t need to finish Day 1 or the rest of the game ever, I took the CD-ROM out of the drive. I put it back in the jewel case and box, and gave it to a friend who I haven’t heard from in 25 years.

It’s okay. I got a Dreamcast for Christmas.

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Years passed, and in that time games became a side piece. Ironically, games journalism became something other people told me about haphazardly. One of the student workers I hired to safeguard our computer lab from pornography and outside food and drinks really wanted to be a games journalist. I told him how I wanted to write for Nintendo Power as a child. He courted websites I’d find in our shared work browser history, some of them gone, the rest transformed, names that didn’t mean anything to me then that became colleagues, mentors, and friends now. I’d read some of them when I was covering his shift because I gave him time off to go to E3.

During all those years, a legend blossomed from one of those blogs. One seemingly as pervasive, and almost well-known as the Konami Code: The Cat Mustache and How Adventure Games Died.

To hear it from the AAA mind of a post-Y2K gamer, nothing in the world has ever been as disastrous as the Cat Mustache puzzle, or as doomed (and dooming) as Gabriel Knight 3’s arrival into this world. When other gamers tell me what they think killed adventure games, it plays out for me as cartoonishly as it sounds.

It was on a seasonally brisk, but below average Thursday morning in Madera county when the last adventure game ever walked out the front doors of the Yosemite Entertainment building and took its first strained gasp of outside air. 37 days before Christmas, Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned was born. A strangled and curious beast, kicking and writhing, an Eraserhead creation that only its creators could be proud of. Its existence is a miracle of a small team pulling the wool over the eyes of Corporate. A season of Halt & Catch Fire in miniature. Children everywhere melting down, still in their Christmas footie Pajamas as they are forced to confront logic so obtuse DOOM-centric gamers cannot hope to contend with it. They start bleeding out of their head holes. They fall over dead. Parents clutch their console gamer children who flew too close to the sun and beg God to give them back. Tipper Gore is screaming at Congress. Adventure games are lined up and shot. The secret good version of Escape from Monkey Island is hauled away to a gulag, never to be heard from again.

And back at the original Oakhurst headquarters of Sierra On-line. Gabriel Knight 3 collapses and dies after its first brave step. The last of its kind, a Sisyphean venture by some of the last ones to leave the building. It never stood a chance. Now was the time for real games, for real gamers.

All this, as far as I can tell (and am told), originates from two little blog posts. One from Cliff Hicks at CNET’s Gamecenter. The other a response to it by Erik Wolpaw from one of the titans of terrible infants of games blogging, Old Man Murray. From this combined, mean-spirited mass of text that barely amounts to 2,000 words, multiple generations of gamers accepted and handed-down a version of reality as gospel without ever thinking to question, test, or even fact check it.

I’m not going to link to the Old Man Murray article in question for three reasons:

It’s factually inaccurate and has caused more than enough strife for Jane Jensen over the years.
At an anemic sub-1,500 words, it’s barely a substantive critique. Most of the wordcount comes from a direct quote of the Gamespot guide. The rest is repeating what the guide says, but in a shitty tone to indicate a mocking superiority of the Gamecenter writer’s false claim to intellectual superiority, followed by an excoriation of Jane Jensen.
It’s truly mean-spirited in the way the Internet of the early 2000s thrived on and encouraged, and I will give Wolpaw the benefit of the doubt that in the last 25 years he’s grown deeply embarrassed by the thirtysomething who hit publish on that.

If you want to read it, you can find it easily enough. But the gist is: Wolpaw argues the cat mustache puzzle is really stupid, and adventure games killed themselves.

But, look, you’re here for the truth about the Cat Mustache.

Gabriel Knight 3 adventure games

When I finally returned to playing Gabriel Knight 3, as part of a Let’s Play with Em from Abnormal Mapping, I didn’t really remember the cat mustache puzzle. I knew it existed. I knew the general reason behind it (getting a Harley, because Gabe is too hyper-masculine for a scooter). I only knew I had solved it decades prior because I had a vivid memory of becoming bored trying (and failing) to tail the aforementioned rejected scooter. But the space the cat mustache puzzle occupied? Even the legend had mostly evaporated, replaced with a thumbprint indentation of “well the cat mustache puzzle is the worst thing ever.” So, you can imagine my surprise when the cat mustache puzzle turned out to be one of the most fun and riotous moments I’ve had playing an adventure game.

On the afternoon of the first day in Gabriel Knight 3, Gabe is faced with a problem: he needs to rent a motorcycle, and they’ve all been rented. Specifically, a boss of a Harley has been reserved for his best friend Mosley (a gross New Orleans detective on a treasure hunting vacation). Gabe wants it. Gabe doesn’t think Mosley should have it. What’s a guy to do? Identity theft.

Now it’s really easy to do big fraud in little France, and I’m going to tell you how, and you won’t even have to sit through a two-hour YouTube video to find out the secrets. All you need is some packing tape, a spray bottle, a black magic marker, and some maple syrup in one of those little disposable packets. Okay, so you’ll also need a cat (to donate fur) and a passport (of the person you want to impersonate). Maybe a handful of candies (to keep that person in the lobby occupied while you’re in their room), stealing their ID and gold jacket.

Now what you’re going to do is put a piece of tape on a hole in a fence, find a cat, spray it with the water bottle, and when the cat runs under the tape, voilà! You have cat fur! Tres bien! You’re going to stick this on your lip with maple syrup now. Don’t worry, you’ll be magnifique.

Except, mais non! Mosley does not have a mustache! Luckily you borrowed a marker from the hotel receptionist to simply deface his passport and draw one in. Tie it all together with your stolen blazer and a red cap from a lost and found to hide that beautiful golden hair, and eh ben dis donc! Drive that motorcycle all over the Languedoc now, handsome, because a fraudster is you!

Yes, the cat mustache puzzle is silly. No, it doesn’t make narrative sense. But the logic is pretty easy to follow, and you’ll bump into all the pieces simply exploring, and lest we forget, this is a game in a genre about exploring places. Besides, in the beloved The Beast Within a puzzle solution involves hiding a cuckoo clock in a potted plant in a private German hunting club for sex pervert eugenicists. To say nothing of putting a fucking whole live pigeon in your overcoat, so what the fuck are we really expecting in terms of “Realism in Video Games” here?

Now the unfortunate truth is that Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned does have some pretty significant problems. There’s a barbed compulsory heterosexuality throughout the entire game, culminating in one of the worst narrative decisions that no one asked for, and isn’t even paid off in exploring it as a bad decision. Yes, I’m talking about Gabe and Grace sleeping together. A particularly painful blow especially after The Beast Within gave us the doomed homoerotic boys-will-be-Übermenschen romance of The Baron and Gabe while Grace and Gerde had a toxic, territorial yuri battle of wills over a worthless man they both hated. The closest Gabriel Knight 3 comes to these heights is the queer-as-fuck, eugenics-minded, blood-obsessed, occultist vintner played by John de Lancie (who is the only person in the entire cast with any enthusiasm). He shows up at the tail end, has one big scene establishing himself as the most interesting thing in the game, and then blips out of existence in the finale like a crispy fart. Gabriel Knight 3 has problems on nearly every level, and that’s to be expected, because by all accounts, it shouldn’t even exist.

In 1996, Sierra On-Line accepted an offer of $1.06 billion from CUC International. This was a disaster that led to a period of tremendous hoovering up studios, followed by implosion, sell-offs, and layoffs after catastrophic accounting fraud was uncovered. It’s a tremendous story in its own right.

But it was in that environment that Jane Jensen had to corral a team, and hold them together, to try and eek out the last Gabriel Knight game they knew they would ever get to make—largely by pulling multiple fast ones on the C-suite, and then crunching their way to the finish line on an enormous and new-to-them undertaking. And while this may be hubristic and foolish, and a colossal case of mismanagement at all levels, this is not that far divorced from the current operations of the games industry at all.

Blaming the failures of Gabriel Knight 3 on the cat mustache is such a particularly lousy and undeserving end for a game whose history is a gallows walk from the time production got underway. And laying the death of adventure games at the feet of Jane Jensen is cheap and trashy, even if this is far from the work we know she’s capable of.

If not Jane Jensen with Gabriel Knight 3 in the Sierra Nevada foothills, then who did kill adventure games?

No one, dawg. That’s the thing they never tell you about. Whenever someone says something died or was killed, odds are they’re either intensely salty and feeling they’re underserved (see also: fandoms), or they want to get your traffic.

No one killed adventure games because they simply never died. Two years after Old Man Murray and Gamecenter declared adventure games dead, Microids exploded onto Gamestop shelves with Syberia. Countless other European studios followed suit. Other genres looked at Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue as the game of the future and started borrowing adventure game ideas for their genres. Sure, we never got Space Quest 7 or Full Throttle 2, but we have whole ecosystems of adventure games, from the extreme throwbacks to the ultra-modern, and everywhere in between. And I promise you, as a very intelligent adventure gamer, they all have puzzles that would piss off Cliff Hicks and Erik Wolpaw in the year 2000.

Genres rise and fall from prominence. Beloved studios get bought, liquidated, transmogrified, and shuttered. It’s a shitty function of the fact that big games take a lot of money to make, and the people who control that money do not give a shit about games or other people. Adventure games didn’t die, Sierra On-line was assassinated by corporate greed, and its talented developers were sent packing. Look around, this has not changed one bit, it’s probably even a lot worse now.

As for who’s to blame for the Cat Mustache Puzzle? Well, since the publication of the Old Man Murray piece, it’s turned out that Jensen had nothing to do with it. Whatever her set-piece puzzle was for Day 1, it was too complicated, too expensive, and not realizable in the time and resources they had. But they needed something. And producer Steven Hill had a solution. Apparently everyone on the team hated the puzzle. Maybe I even hated it at the time, but now it might be one of my favorite adventure game puzzles ever. The world needs a whole lot more whimsy after all.

Dia Lacina is a game critic who can’t shut her mouth on Bluesky, and loves to talk her way through games on YouTube and Patreon, sometimes with friends.