In November 1991 The One sent a writer to Hull to meet a seven-person company that believed it could build a better adventure game than the Americans. Revolution Software’s plan was a system it called Virtual Theatre, in which the people of an adventure game went about their own business, walking to the forge, the pub and home again, whether or not the player was there to see it. Instead of a game where “you’re the key” and everything reacts to you, the team told the magazine, this would be one “where you’re just another person”. That system carried Revolution through Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky, and its successors carried the Broken Sword series. More than thirty years on, the company is still in business in York.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1990, by Charles Cecil, Tony Warriner, David Sykes and Noirin Carmody. It was incorporated in March 1990 as Turnvale Limited, the name of the town in Lure of the Temptress, and became Revolution Software Limited that December.
- Base: Hull at first; York by 1996, where it remains.
- Technology: Virtual Theatre, written by Warriner and Sykes.
- Games: Lure of the Temptress (1992), Beneath a Steel Sky (1994), Broken Sword (1996) and its sequels, In Cold Blood (2000), Beyond a Steel Sky (2020).
Hull, and a seven-person team
Revolution was Cecil’s company after a decade elsewhere: he had written text adventures for Hull’s Artic Computing, run development at US Gold, and managed Activision’s European development. As Activision’s American parent, then called Mediagenic, fell into financial trouble, its collapse, he told Edge, “gave me the chance to set up Revolution, with our own money”. Companies House records the company’s incorporation on 23 March 1990 as Turnvale Limited, and the change of name to Revolution Software Limited on 6 December.
The One listed the team in 1991: Cecil and Dave Cummins, both previously of Activision; Tony Warriner and David Sykes, the programmers who wrote Virtual Theatre; Noirin Carmody, the commercial director, previously of Sierra; and the artists Adam Tween and Stephen Oades. Cecil explained that at Activision, which then distributed Sierra’s games in Europe, he had noticed that Sierra’s engine “really hadn’t changed much over five years. I felt that we could do a lot better.” The team spent about eight months talking through what it wanted before writing the system to do it.
The first publisher was to be Mirrorsoft, whose Sean Brennan had offered to publish Cecil’s ideas. Cecil told Wireframe that on the day of the pitch the car carrying Revolution’s new 386 PC was broken into, and the thief took only the radio. After the presentation, “I finished and there was silence… somebody started clapping. Then everybody started clapping.” Mirrorsoft collapsed with Robert Maxwell’s businesses at the end of 1991, and Virgin Games took on the game.
Virtual Theatre and Lure of the Temptress
Virgin released Lure of the Temptress in 1992 for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC; PC Review listed it at £35.99. The hero, Diermot, wakes in a cell in a village overrun by the orc-like Skorl, and escapes with a servant, Ratpouch, who will carry out a chain of orders: up to five in The One’s preview, “one to a string of six” in PC Review’s review of the finished game. Virtual Theatre gave every character a route and a timetable, and “autorouting” let them walk around obstacles, such as a box the player had dropped in their path. PC Review found that “just strolling around the town of Turnvale… you really get the sense that everyone is leading their own little lives and that you are merely a passing visitor”. According to Retro Gamer, the game took two years and cost between £20,000 and £30,000.
Beneath a Steel Sky
At Activision, Cecil had approached Dave Gibbons, the artist of Watchmen, about a game of the comic. That came to nothing, but the two kept in touch, and Gibbons designed Beneath a Steel Sky. Edge reported in 1993 that the game had 75 main screens, drawn by Gibbons and painted by Les Pace, and that Gibbons also drew an introductory comic book telling the hero Robert Foster’s back story. Cecil remembered him taking the train north: “we were this tiny little company working in this grotty little office above a bacon butty arcade and he’d get the train to London, get off at Doncaster, and take this bone-rattler to Hull.”
The game, set in a polluted future Australia where the rich live underground, came out in 1994 for the Amiga and PC, with a CD version adding speech. Amiga Format gave it 94% and CU Amiga 95%. Before its release Cecil had told Edge that Virtual Theatre was “without any doubt the best” adventure technology, better than Lucasfilm’s.
Broken Sword
By July 1996 Edge was visiting Revolution’s office in York to see Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, a high-resolution cartoon adventure about the Knights Templar with an American tourist, George Stobbart, and a French journalist, Nico Collard. It cost about £1 million, a figure Cecil gave both at the time and ten years later. The music was by Barrington Pheloung, the composer of the Inspector Morse theme. Virgin published it in 1996 for the PC; Wireframe reported that the PlayStation version was published by Sony because Virgin did not think a 2D game would sell on the console. In North America it was called Circle of Blood. Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, set around Maya and Aztec culture, followed in 1997.
Revolution then made In Cold Blood (2000), a spy thriller for Sony, and Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado (2000), a tie-in with the DreamWorks film. When it took Broken Sword into 3D for The Sleeping Dragon (2003), published by THQ for the PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox, Cecil announced that “the point-and-click adventure game is dead, long live the adventure game!”
Closing the studio, and after
Wireframe reported that The Sleeping Dragon sold well, but it did not save the studio. “We’d closed the studio,” Cecil told Wireframe. “So we’d gone from 30 to 40 people, and we’d made everyone redundant.” Edge reported in April 2006 that “after 16 years and seven games, Revolution has closed its doors”, with Broken Sword: The Angel of Death (2006) being made by Sumo Digital in Sheffield to Revolution’s design, for THQ.
The company carried on as a small core working with freelancers; Edge described it in 2012 as a four-person company. After The Angel of Death, Cecil told Wireframe, “We were insolvent”, and he was preparing to wind the company up when Apple called to ask whether Revolution would bring its games to the iPhone. Director’s cut editions of the first Broken Sword followed for the Wii, DS and smartphones, and the iPhone editions of the first two games passed five million downloads.
In August 2012 Revolution asked Kickstarter backers for $400,000 to make Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse, a return to 2D. Retro Gamer reported that the campaign raised “far in excess” of that. Wireframe later put the total at over $850,000 from 15,000 backers, and public tallies of the Kickstarter and PayPal pledges together come to about $820,000. The game came out in two episodes across 2013 and 2014. Revolution then returned to the city of Beneath a Steel Sky: Beyond a Steel Sky, again with Dave Gibbons, was announced at an Apple event in 2019 and came out in June 2020 on Apple Arcade, then on PC. Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged, a remastered version of the first game, followed on 19 September 2024. Companies House lists the company as active, with Cecil and Carmody as its directors.
Freeware and released code
In August 2003 Revolution allowed Beneath a Steel Sky to be given away. The ScummVM project, which recreates the engines of old adventure games, had obtained the game’s original assembly-language source from Revolution with Tony Warriner’s help, rewritten its interpreter from it, and released the CD and floppy versions as free downloads with ScummVM 0.5.0. The licence in the download lets anyone give the game away, include it in a collection or on a cover disc, and modify it, but not sell the game itself; the game data remain Revolution’s copyright. The original source code went to the ScummVM developers; the published code is ScummVM’s reimplementation, not Revolution’s assembly source. Lure of the Temptress is also offered free on ScummVM’s website.
Sources
- The One, November 1991, pp. 48–49, “Staging a Revolution”: the Hull team, Virtual Theatre, autorouting, Ratpouch’s five-order limit and Cecil on Sierra.
- PC Review issue 10, August 1992, review of Lure of the Temptress (Virgin, £35.99; Virtual Theatre; Turnvale; Ratpouch’s “one to a string of six” orders).
- Edge issue 2, November 1993, pp. 29–30: Beneath a Steel Sky preview (75 main screens drawn by Dave Gibbons and painted by Les Pace; the comic book; “Virtual Theatre is without any doubt the best”; Revolution in Hull).
- Amiga Format issue 60, June 1994, p. 152: Beneath a Steel Sky “reviewed AF57, 94 per cent”.
- CU Amiga, April 1994, p. 13: advertisement quoting CU Amiga’s 95% for Beneath a Steel Sky.
- Edge issue 34, July 1996, interview with Charles Cecil at Revolution’s York office: Lure released by Virgin in 1992 and Revolution “born from the ashes of Mirrorsoft”; founding the company “with our own money”; Broken Sword’s £1 million cost and Barrington Pheloung’s music.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 115, November 2002, p. 8: The Sleeping Dragon and “The point-and-click adventure game is dead”.
- Edge issue 161, April 2006, “One-man Revolution” interview: the studio’s closure, Sumo and THQ.
- David Crookes, “The Making of Broken Sword”, Retro Gamer issue 31, 2006, pp. 60–63: Lure’s two years and £20,000–30,000; Virgin as publisher; Broken Sword’s £1 million cost; Circle of Blood.
- Edge issue 238, March 2012, pp. 128–129: the four founders; Gibbons and Watchmen; director’s cuts; iPhone downloads; four-person company.
- Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012, p. 7: the Broken Sword 5 Kickstarter and its $400,000 goal.
- Jack Yarwood, “How Revolution survived the British games industry”, Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, pp. 18–23: Sean Brennan and the Mirrorsoft pitch; the office in Hull; Broken Sword on the PlayStation; Broken Sword II’s Maya and Aztec setting; In Cold Blood and Gold and Glory; The Sleeping Dragon and the studio’s closure; insolvency and Apple; the Kickstarter; Beyond a Steel Sky.
- Wireframe issue 11, April 2019, p. 14: Beyond a Steel Sky newly announced; Wireframe issue 15 (above), p. 23: announced at an Apple keynote as part of Apple Arcade.
- Companies House, Revolution Software Limited, company 02484526: overview (incorporation, former name, status) and list of officers (web). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02484526
- ScummVM, “ScummVM 0.5.0, Beneath a Steel Sky, and a BROKEN caps lock KEY”, 2 August 2003 (web, secondary), and the readme and licence in the ScummVM Beneath a Steel Sky download (dated 1 August 2003). https://www.scummvm.org/en/news/20030802/ and https://sourceforge.net/projects/scummvm/files/extras/Beneath%20a%20Steel%20Sky/
- ScummVM, “Games” download page (web): Beneath a Steel Sky and Lure of the Temptress as freeware. https://www.scummvm.org/games/
- Wikipedia, “Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse” (web, secondary): Kickstarter launch on 23 August 2012 and pledge totals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Sword_5:_The_Serpent%27s_Curse
- Gematsu, “Beyond a Steel Sky launches June 26 for Apple Arcade, in July for PC”, June 2020 (web, secondary). https://www.gematsu.com/2020/06/beyond-a-steel-sky-launches-june-26-for-apple-arcade-in-july-for-pc
- Noisy Pixel, “Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged finally gets release date”, 2024 (web, secondary). https://noisypixel.net/broken-sword-shadow-of-the-templars-reforged-september-release-date/