SCI: GK1: Subtitle when picking up second robe has incorrect word (original bug)

[Thunderforge]

When picking up a second robe in the Hounfour, room 7, Gabriel says

A robe for prosperity.

But the subtitle says

A robe for prosterity.

"Prosterity" is not a word that exists in English. It should be "prosperity".

This is a bug in the original game, as can be seen on ​this Let's Play timestamp running in DOSBox.

Reproduction Steps

1. Load the attached save game
   • Day 10 has started
   • Gabriel is in the Hounfour, room 7
   • Gabriel has picked up one robe
2. Using the "Pick Up" action, select the second robe on the rack to the left of Gabriel

As above, the subtitle does not match the spoken word, and the word in the subtitle is not a real word.

Tested on

• Gabriel Knight 1 via Steam, Windows version
• ScummVM 2.9.1 for macOS

[Thunderforge]

Subtitle showing nonexistent word

[Thunderforge]

Savegame before picking up robe

[sluicebox]

Great catch! This typo is surprisingly interesting.

I don't think we should do anything about this, for a couple reasons:

1. Boring reason: We don't fix message typos like this in the SCI engine. There is so much text across all the games and versions; these typos are common. The message bugs we fix are where the wrong message is used when the right one is available, or assigned to the wrong actor (talker). Those are coding mistakes that our patching engines handle efficiently. I shudder to think of the precedent we'd set if we started fixing text typos -- I'd never open the bug tracker again.

2. Fun reason: Prosperity may not be the intended word! We really don't want to change things when the intent is ambiguous. For better or worse, it's the game.

prosterity is not a word, but was the intended word prosperity... or posterity? I think posterity makes much more sense, and both plausibly explain the typo.

Tim Curry clearly said prosperity, but that doesn't mean he was right. Sierra's recording process produced some comical mistakes. We know that Tim Curry was given a print out with the typo; Sierra used their Message Editor to print each actor's lines straight from game resources, filtered by Talker. He either didn't notice and said the word he thought he read or he asked the director for clarification. The director may or may not have known the author's intent; both words are plausible. If the director did clarify, you would expect to see the typo fixed since they noticed it. I think Tim just said the word he saw and no one noticed the typo. We know of much larger mistakes that survived this process.

What about Sierra's translations?

German: "Eine Robe für den Wohlstand." -- prosperity
Spanish: "Un traje para la prosperidad." -- prosperity
French: "Une robe pour la postérité." -- posterity!!!

I like the way the French think!

Tim and two translators voted one way, another translator (and me!) voted the other. Who knows what the original author meant? You've discovered a fun accidental mystery, and I think we have to leave it that way for others to find. If anyone has Book 2 of Jane Jensen's game bible, the answer might be in there.

[eriktorbjorn]

If anyone has Book 2 of Jane Jensen's game bible, the answer might be in there.

I do have that book actually, but I haven't played the game in many years. Is this the relevant part? Either way, it doesn't spell out the exact line.

I tried looking at a playthrough of the remake, but it looks like the two robes are picked up as one there.

[Thunderforge]

Thanks for checking @eriktorbjorn. That is indeed the right section of the script. Pity it doesn't provide clarification.

So I guess the question is: even if we could determine the "correct" word, would we fix it?

This is the only mistake that I saw in the whole game and it is something every player will see since it's a required puzzle, so I would prefer it be fixed. But I don't know much about the technical situation surrounding it.