• Log In | Sign Up

  • News
  • Reviews
  • Top Games
  • Search
  • New Releases
  • Daily Deals
  • Forums

25 Years with Charles Cecil - Part 2 (1997-2015) interview - page 4

In the first part of my Skype conversation with Charles Cecil, Revolution's acclaimed co-founder talked about his own formative years as a designer, as well as the company's rise from struggling upstart barely able to make ends meet to one of the most renowned adventure game developers of all time. But there are plenty more stories left to tell, as Charles takes us through the rocky years that followed and the remarkable comeback that got the little British studio to 25 years. Here's hoping there are 25 more to come.
 


Ingmar Böke: Now I’d like to move on to the sequel, The Smoking Mirror, which followed in 1997, so there was a rather short time frame in between. What comes to mind when you remember the production of the second Broken Sword game?

Charles Cecil: Well, it was absolutely extraordinary. The [first] game had been a huge success. So we pitched a sequel to Virgin, and they replied that they weren’t interested. Their claim was that point-and-clicks were dying so fast that there would be no demand for it in 1997. And this seemed like absolute lunacy. Sean and Martin Spiess were very much on our side; Simon Jeffrey – who later went to run LucasArts – was at Virgin, he was on our side. But the Americans, in particular, were very anti the idea of a new Broken Sword. Which was also kind of ironic, because they were in the process of writing Toonstruck, and had spent millions and millions on it – a game that went on to receive mediocre reviews. The President at Virgin US told me very proudly that one of the reasons that he made such great decisions for the company was that he’d never played a video game. And it was him that was really against the idea of commissioning a sequel. Anyway, thankfully the Europeans convinced him that actually there should be a sequel, but then they said it had to be written within a year. So we had very, very little time, relatively. We had actually started designing it, but we had to write it really, really fast. Broken Sword 2 got great reviews and people really enjoy it, but it does feel a little bit rushed compared to Broken Sword 1, I would say.

Ingmar: I remember one personal story about Broken Sword 2. I had a friend who didn’t own a PC, he only played games on the PlayStation. And sometimes I tried to show him adventure games, and he was totally bored by them. But then at some point he brought his PlayStation to my place, and he showed me Broken Sword 2. And he told me, “I have this new game, you’ve got to try it.” I was totally surprised that he was showing me an adventure game on the PlayStation, because he hated adventure games.

Charles: How brilliant.

Ingmar: But all of a sudden he really tried an adventure game, and he realized, “Whoa, this is amazing!” Do he was the one who was telling me how great the game was, and it was encouraging to hear that from someone who was only playing console games who thought he hated adventure games. So it was interesting to see that PlayStation effect.

Charles: Yes, a lot of people who played the game, who remember the game fondly, actually played it first on PlayStation. I think we were very lucky that Sony chose to publish it, because it broadened the brand enormously. Sony were wonderful to work with at the time, I have to say, because they were a very, very small team.

Image #1
Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror

I remember for Broken Sword 1, we really wanted it to be released for Christmas. And the Marketing Director had agreed. Then he sent me a fax – because this was before emails – very irritated, and wrote, “The release date has been moved to January.” So I phoned him up and said, “Why are you doing that?” He said, “’Cause I’ve heard that it’s way behind schedule.” And I said to him, “Can I come and see you now?” He said, “Yes, yes, but it’s not going to make any difference.” So I got on a train down to London, went to see him, walked into his office, and he said, “Look, I’m really unhappy. We’ve got all this marketing lined up. It’s not going to make Christmas and you’ve wasted a lot of our time.” And I said, “Can I use your phone?” So I phoned their QA in Liverpool, and I talked to the QA manager. And the QA manager said, “We’ve received a new build this morning. It’s actually really good. We think you’re going to make Christmas.” So I passed the phone over, and they had a short conversation. The Marketing Director looked at me and said, “OK, it’s back in for Christmas again.” And that was the way it worked back in those days. It was absolutely fantastic.

Ingmar: Yeah, times have changed.

Charles: Yes, they certainly have.

Ingmar: Let’s move on to the next project now, that’s also in the 25 Year Anniversary box. Chronologically, that would be In Cold Blood, from 2000.

Charles: Yes. In Cold Blood was a project that we wrote with Sony. The retail model meant that there were only a limited number of games that could make it onto the shelves; maybe three, four hundred. PlayStation as a brand had been incredibly successful, and they’d really edged the PC out. So the PC was a really marginal format at that time. And people talked about the adventure being dead – and PC being dead.

Image #2
In Cold Blood

We’d worked very well with Sony on Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2, and a great moment came when the official PlayStation magazine, which had a circulation of 600,000 a month, ran a poll of their readers’ favourite games, and Broken Sword 2 came in at number five. We were ahead of monstrously big, wonderful games. It was extraordinary, and Broken Sword 1 was… I don’t know, eleven or twelve or roundabout there. So we had two games in the top fifteen, and I think we’d beaten Resident Evil, we’d beaten many huge games. So we had a very good relationship with Sony, but they wanted us to write something more edgy, of course, something that was suited to that controller. But they still wanted a strong narrative. So we pitched them a game that was partly adventure, partly action, and that was what was going to turn into In Cold Blood.

Ingmar: As you said, it was quite different compared to what you did before. If you look back at In Cold Blood, which elements do you think worked particularly well and which elements do you think perhaps didn’t work that well?

Charles: We have the most appalling opening, where we force the player to learn to crouch, otherwise they get killed. Very naïve, very stupid. I feel really embarrassed that we actually designed the start that way. But I think the adventure side worked well. A lot of people love the adventure. We really should have toned down the fighting, and made the fighting more of a reward rather than a challenge. I think the control system was alright, but I think we could have done better. But I think the adventure itself was pretty good. And some of the rooms were very beautiful; certainly given the limitations of the hardware at that particular time. Quite long loading times though. Generally, I think people who wanted to see the game’s promise were really excited. Many others were pretty negative. It was a game that people either really liked or hated.

Ingmar: Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon followed in 2003, and is also well known for adding new elements to the series. How did your experience from In Cold Blood influence Broken Sword 3, in terms of new elements put in? Some action, some stealth, and…

Charles: Broken Sword 3… first of all, we used totally new technology. We used a system called Renderware for 3D rendering. It was pretty expensive to license Renderware, although cheaper than writing your own. Now, with Unreal and Unity, the model is so much easier and cheaper. Or indeed, Amazon’s new system Lumberyard, which is totally free. So things have changed profoundly.

Image #3
Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon

But I think what worked well in Broken Sword 3, was the… sorry, I’ll take a step back. Broken Sword 3 was written when console was absolutely dominant at retail. PC was dying. And because the game was aimed at console, I thought that it should be 3D. And so the puzzles should embrace opportunities made available by 3D. I designed a box puzzle, where, at the start, you have to move a box to balance an aircraft. And then I came up with another one, where you move a box over a pressure pad - not particularly original. But that box is also needed to climb onto to reach a ledge. So far, so good. The mistake came when I asked the level designers to take the box puzzle and scale, and make it more and more difficult. And we ended up putting the box puzzles in the game at points where the player would expect the pace to be racing. So generally the box puzzles were widely disliked. Although I have heard a couple of people say they really enjoyed them, but the vast majority of the people didn’t.

Then also I think another mistake was to put in stealth scenes – it’s very difficult in an adventure to really convey when the character can believably be seen by the antagonists and when they should be in the clear, and I’m not sure we did that particularly well. But broadly the game was well received. I remember Edge gave it 9 out of 10, and it got a wide range of pretty good scores.

Ingmar: The next game was another Broken Sword adventure, The Angel of Death, in 2006. As I understand it, the development story of this game really differs a lot from all the other Broken Swords, and everything you did before. Can you give us an idea of that whole creative process?

Charles: Yeah, well, Broken Sword 3 had been commercially very successful for the publisher, THQ. But the way the business model worked in those days was that the developer was paid 7% of the retail price: but against that 7% was deducted the cost of development, the cost of manufacturing, and a contribution to localization and QA. Which was pretty outrageous, really, because that effectively meant that 93% was going to the retailers and the publishers. Which ultimately meant that it was virtually impossible for a developer to ever recoup and earn a royalty. On Broken Sword 3 we’d gone over budget, and hadn’t asked THQ for any more money but had got a bank overdraft of over £200,000. THQ earned $10 million in revenues. Taking off the 2 million they paid us – plus the million for the cost of goods and let’s say another million for all the other things – they made 5 to 6 million dollars. We lost £200,000.

The financial position meant that at the end of Broken Sword 3, we’d had to cut back to a core shell of about 3 or 4 people, because otherwise we wouldn’t have survived. It was very sad.

Image #4
Broken Sword: The Angel of Death

And THQ came to us and said, “Broken Sword 3 has been very profitable. We would like you to write another Broken Sword.” And we said, “Yeah, we will, but we have to recoup some of this money.” So the nice guys at THQ’s UK office agreed to much more favourable terms, and we started work in good faith. And then the American side of the company sacked all those UK guys, put their own puppets in there, and those puppets refused to accept the new terms. They insisted that we go back to the old terms. And we had no choice.

With Broken Sword 4, we partnered with a local company, who are very well renowned for their technology in particular, called Sumo Digital. Sumo ran the production and took care of the budgets, and scheduling. And I worked on the high-level design.

Now, every other game I’ve written, I’ve been in charge both of the design and the production. Broken Sword 4 was developed using what’s called a Waterfall project management approach, and that’s where you define everything in advance. Which is really not a great approach. Because you are told to finish and lock the story at this point, finish and lock the design at this point, and you’re then given absolutely no scope to change it. Whereas clearly the whole point about any creative endeavour is that there should be the flexibility to improve it throughout development. So Broken Sword 4 was very stifled by that particular approach. The game released in 2006, and some people really enjoyed it, but generally it wasn’t as well received as our previous Broken Sword games.

Ingmar: In 2009 you moved on with a remake of Broken Sword 1 with the Director’s Cut. It seems that  was incredibly successful, selling a lot of copies, and it was obviously a very good choice to go that way. Can you tell me a little bit about how the whole thing came along?

Charles: Well, a lot of people had said how the DS would be ideal for a point-and-click adventure. And then I saw a petition: “We demand that Revolution write Broken Sword on the Nintendo DS.” So I put together a proposal, and we pitched it to Ubisoft. And I have to say Ubisoft were fantastic to work with. And they decided to commission the game, which was fantastic. We had no money, so they had to fund it. But they didn’t demand rights beyond the DS and the Wii version, which gave us the option to exploit the game ourselves across other platforms. So come 2009, we were approached by Apple, who asked us to consider writing our adventures for the iPhone. And we were very excited, very flattered that Apple should do that. But in some ways we were lucky, because we’d put a lot of work into making the game work with a stylus on the DS, so we were kind of halfway there already.

Image #5
Broken Sword Director's Cut

We really wanted to beat LucasArts’ Monkey Island onto the iPhone. And we did. While we put most of our very limited budget into the UI and just ported the graphics across as they were, LucasArts focused on graphics and very little on UI. So our UI was a lot better than theirs. And ultimately, Broken Sword 1: Director’s Cut got a Metacritic score on iPhone of 91%, which was considerably higher than Monkey Island. I think we were a lot smarter in the way that we approached that particular version.

Ingmar: So when you approached Broken Sword 2 Remastered, which was released in 2010, in what ways did your experience from the first remake have an impact on the second?

Charles: Oh, we used the same system, with some enhancements. Actually we have been pretty lucky with the ports. We began with Beneath a Steel Sky for iPhone. At that point the iPhone resolution was pretty low, and the resolution of the original Beneath a Steel Sky assets was about the same. Then the iPhone resolution increased, and it fitted Broken Sword 1 perfectly. And then it increased again, and we did some tweaks for Broken Sword 2 to increase the resolution dynamically. Then of course for Broken Sword 5, we were able to draw it in 1080p. So each time we’ve published an adventure, we’ve found that the resolution is ideal for the game at that particular time.

Image #6
Broken Sword II Remastered

So yeah, Broken Sword 2 did have some enhancements. A big difference was that Broken Sword 1: Director’s Cut had been based on the re-implemented version of Broken Sword 1 for Nintendo GBA, and there were an enormous number of bugs that we had to fix because that version had been very, very buggy, I’m embarrassed to admit. We weren’t responsible for the QA [in that version]; our publisher BAM were responsible for testing it, and then Nintendo obviously for giving it the final approval. And that meant that when Ubi got hold of Director’s Cut, they have an absolutely awesome QA, and the QA ripped it to bits and found huge numbers of bugs, which took us a long, long time to fix. With Broken Sword 2, we had the advantage of using the original PC data, which was actually a lot cleaner, and it made the game a lot quicker to write. But fundamentally, we used the UI that had come across from Broken Sword 1.

In 2010 we were invited by Apple to participate in a promotion called ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’, in which the developer sets the game to free for a day. And I was worried because in doing so I thought that there would be this latent demand, that [people] would get it for free who would otherwise have paid for it. But we did the promotion, because when Apple asks you to do this sort of thing, you don’t say no. We had two-and-a-half million downloads in one day, which was absolutely spectacular. We put the price back up to full price the next day, and the sales were six times what they’d been the day before. Broken Sword 2 had just released, and Broken Sword 2 sales went shooting up, and it had greatly increased sales as well. And for me that was absolutely fascinating, because it showed that everything we’d learned about physical marketing might as well go out of the window, particularly with such large numbers. We had huge support from Apple, and the game did very well, and it gave us a lot of confidence. It took us from the brink of bankruptcy, which is where we were in 2007, and meant that we not only could pay off our overdrafts, but we could move forward. And we decided in late 2011 that we were going to start working on a new Broken Sword game, Broken Sword 5.

Ingmar: Yeah, and The Serpent’s Curse was obviously the first game you did that was funded in a totally different way.

Charles: It had to be. It had to be. Broken Sword 5 had to be funded in a different way, because we’d lost so much money on both Broken Sword 3 and Broken Sword 4 that it was just impossible to continue in the same way. THQ had gone bankrupt because, clearly, the model that they’d previously been very successful at exploiting collapsed overnight. And Double Fine had been very successful [with Kickstarter]; they’d raised more than $3 million for their adventure game. So we decided in early 2012 that we would aim to do the same thing.

Ingmar: So now that some time has passed, how do you look back at the whole experience?

Image #7
Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse

Charles: It felt totally different and new – but incredibly exciting. We had very few staff. We had Tony Warriner and Joost Peters (Joost had come to Revolution, as an intern, to work on Broken Sword 1 for the Pocket PC just as everybody was laid off). And there was me and Noirin, and that was it. But what we had was access to a bunch of people who had worked for Revolution previously, with whom we maintained a very good relationship. So very quickly we were able to pull a really great team together, of which was about 50% people who had worked previously for Revolution and others who came in and brought new ideas. The producer, Kelly Willoughby, was a great Broken Sword fan, and she’d actually written to me a number of years earlier, saying how she’d love to work on a Broken Sword game. So she was the ideal person to work as a producer. So we opened up an office in the centre of York, and we pulled together a team, some of whom were locals, some of whom worked remotely.

Ingmar: The Kickstarter experience was also something really different in terms of interaction with fans. It brought you very close to the community, and people were able to interact with you probably more than they ever did before, throughout this whole Kickstarter process. Do you think this is a possible approach for the next project perhaps?

Image #8
Charles and the Revolution team on the steps of York Castle (2002)

Charles: Well, there are two benefits to crowd funding. The first one is the money, which was vital. But actually every bit as valuable is the wonderful opportunity to deal directly with 15,000 of the game’s fans. Our community was wonderful. It is diverse. People get on with each other, and they become friends with each other. Like us they were excited by the journey, and they wanted to be part of that journey. We made a few mistakes, but broadly I’m fairly proud of the way that the whole Kickstarter project developed. And we’ve had an awful lot of people come back and say how much they enjoyed it, and how much they’d love to do it again. The ability to communicate with a community is incredibly valuable, and I would really want to do the same again.

Ingmar: OK, so that might be an opportunity for the future indeed. That’s interesting.

Charles: Absolutely, yes.

Ingmar: We’ve been talking for so long now, so just one final question. Now that we’ve talked about each game in Revolution’s 25th Anniversary set – and I know this is probably not that easy to answer – if you had to pick just one single game, which one is your personal all-time favorite, and for what reason?

Charles: Um… [long pause] Do I really have to just do one?

Ingmar: [laughs] I know it’s incredibly difficult.

Charles: I’m actually going to refuse to; I’m going to answer this like a politician.

Ingmar: Yes, okay.

Charles: I’m going to say I’m so very pleased with the engagement that we had with the community during the development of Broken Sword 5. I would also say Broken Sword 1, because it was the one that really propelled us into the big league. But then I’d also say Beneath a Steel Sky, because it was a real pleasure working with Dave Gibbons. And I’ve got to say Lure of the Temptress as well, ‘cause it was our first game and it was so well received, and it was just such a thrill to get back into development and get the reception that we did. Sorry, I’ve totally failed to answer your question.

Ingmar: No no no, that’s totally okay. I mean, after such a long career, perhaps it would be kind of sad if you were to say, “There’s only this one game that comes to my mind.” So actually it was a pretty good answer.

Charles: [laughs] Great, great, great.

Ingmar: So now all that’s left for me to do is to say thank you so much, Charles. Last night you flew back from San Francisco, but you still gave us so much of your time when you must be busy and feeling exhausted.

Charles: It has been a pleasure.

Ingmar: We also wish you all the best of luck with the Revolution 25th Anniversary Collection, and hopefully people will be inspired by this interview to buy the box.

Charles: Perfect. Thanks so much Ingmar. Lovely to speak to you.
 


Interview transcription by Pascal Tekaia.

 

continue reading below

Referenced Adventure Games

continue reading below
interview
Back to the top