Not long ago, I spotted plans from Sierra to put a bit of a new spin on an old classic. Specifically, there were plans afoot to revive the Gabriel Knight series by making a 20th anniversary special remake of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father. Beyond that, however, there was also a new Gabriel Knight story set to arrive in PDF form, free for the downloading, and that got me wondering. What about some of the other games out there that haven't been heard from of late? What if it's time to start dipping into the long-ago past—or even the not so long ago past—for some modern-era gaming fun?

The reports suggest that the Gabriel Knight revival isn't stopping there, though, as there's at least some desire from Gabriel Knight's creator, Jane Jensen, to keep going with the franchise, aided and abetted by her new studio, Pinkerton Road. That's an exciting prospect for old fans, and it would seem as though there were plenty of other great properties ready for just such a bump up.

Personally, I'd love to see a bit more from the Carnevil universe. Anyone who remembers Carnevil—and if you don't, take a couple minutes to check it out on YouTube—remembers the fun of taking on Von Tokkentakker, his bizarre rhyming minion Umlaut, and the horrors of the Carnevil amusement park from the Haunted House to Rickety Town. The ending of Carnevil was open-ended at best, so building on the region's lore shouldn't be tough. Imagine a Silent Hill style excursion into a Greely Valley packed with Carnevil monsters, and you'll get the idea.

But we can go beyond this; there hasn't been anything new out of the Monkey Island series since 2009, and that took almost a decade from the release prior to it. What about the crew behind Sam & Max? That series all but stopped in 2010, cameos in poker games aside. The House of the Dead series pretty much halted with Overkill back in 2009, and there are a host of others to talk about here. Most of us can probably name a game we played way back in the old days of the 1990s and beyond, and wonder, hey...how come no one's ever done anything with that?

Indeed, some games made something of a comeback since the old days; we're just now seeing another Killer Instinct release after the game pretty much shut down back in 1996, and Capcom's Capcom Arcade Cabinet on Xbox 360 made some serious headway with Capcom's salad days. But even this just goes to show that there's quite a bit of fodder available in the old days of gaming to go around, and pulling some of the classics back into play—whether just going for nostalgia value or showing off the character base to a whole new generation of players—has some great potential to make some rapid sales and provide development budgets for a whole new line of titles.