Beneath a Steel Sky | Code Like It's 198x

The usual science-fiction city puts the rich at the top of the towers and the poor in the dark at the bottom. Beneath a Steel Sky turned that round. In Union City the factories sit on top of the spires, pouring their smoke into the sky, and the wealthy live at ground level, shaded and clean beneath the smog. Dave Gibbons, the artist of Watchmen, said that inversion was one of the things that drew him to the project: “it makes equal sense the way we have it, too.” Revolution Software’s second adventure came out on the Amiga and PC at the start of 1994, filled 15 Amiga floppy disks, and scored in the 90s across the Amiga press. Nine years later Revolution let it be given away, and it has been free ever since.

Fast facts

Developer: Revolution Software, then based in Hull, run by Charles Cecil.
Publisher: Virgin Games.
Art: Dave Gibbons.
Released: early 1994 for the Amiga (£34.99) and PC (£39.99), after a planned October 1993 date slipped. A CD-ROM version with speech followed on the PC and the Amiga CD32 in 1994.
Engine: Virtual Theatre, Revolution’s system for characters with lives of their own, first used in Lure of the Temptress.
Freeware: since August 2003, through the ScummVM project.
Later versions: Beneath a Steel Sky: Remastered for the iPhone (2009); sequel Beyond a Steel Sky (2020).

Gibbons and Revolution

Cecil had met Gibbons in the late 1980s, while he was head of development at Activision, to ask about a game of Watchmen. “It turned out that we couldn’t,” Cecil told Wireframe in 2019. “But we stayed in touch and then wrote Beneath a Steel Sky together.” Cecil told Amiga Computing that Revolution spent a year designing the game with Gibbons before any programming began.

Edge reported in November 1993 that the game had 75 main screens, all drawn by Gibbons and painted by Les Pace before being retouched on an Apple Macintosh. Amiga Power described Revolution painting each of Gibbons’ drawings and scanning them in, “resulting in a level of detail and texture that puts the game more into the realms of comic book land than computer games”. Gibbons also drew a comic that came in the box and told the story up to the moment the game begins. Dave Cummins, Revolution’s writer, wrote the dialogue, as he did for the company’s other adventures.

Foster, Joey and Union City

The comic opens in the Gap, a desert wasteland outside the city, where Robert Foster has grown up among outcasts. Armed men from the city arrive, shoot his robot Joey, drag Foster into a helicopter and bomb the settlement. The helicopter crashes on a rooftop in Union City, and the game starts with Foster running from security guards through a factory high above the ground. Everything above him is industry and everything below is privilege, and the city is watched over by LINC, its central computer. The player spends the game working out why Foster was taken, and who keeps stepping in to help him.

Joey survives as a circuit board in Foster’s pocket. Slot him into any robot shell the city offers and he comes back to life in a new body. Amiga Power noted that he could get into places Foster could not and “come up with some genuinely funny one-liners”. Windows let the player spy into other locations, a trick Amiga Format recognised from Lure of the Temptress. Part of the game takes place inside LINC’s cyberspace, where files are objects and security programs are eyes.

Virtual Theatre 2

Revolution rewrote its Virtual Theatre engine for the game. Virgin’s producer, Dan Marchant, told Computer Gaming World that the combination of “Virtual Theatre 2” and Gibbons’ comic-book art gave “an adventure with a completely new style and level of interactivity”. Amiga Power noticed the difference in the people: guards stopped for cigarette breaks, dogs scratched themselves, and receptionists answered the phone. Some puzzles ran in real time, with Foster having to get into a room and act before its owner came back. Characters also changed how they answered as the player got to know them, instead of repeating the same line however many times they were asked.

Cecil was never modest about the system. “Virtual Theatre is without any doubt the best technology,” he told Edge before release. “It is better than Lucasfilm; it is better than anybody.”

Fifteen disks

The Amiga version came on 15 floppy disks. Amiga Power counted about a hundred locations, against the 40 or so of a typical point-and-click game, and warned that each disk access took 20 seconds unless the game was installed on a hard drive. Revolution had grouped the rooms so that the player only had to swap disks when moving from one section of six or seven locations to the next. Amiga Power’s reviewer, Cam Winstanley, recommended treating the game like a film and avoiding the solutions: “Steel Sky is an example of what an adventure game should be like – funny, enthralling and convincing.”

The Amiga press agreed. The One gave it 93%, Amiga Format 94% and a Format Gold award, and CU Amiga 95%, calling it “simply one of the best adventures ever released on the Amiga”. PC Gamer gave the PC version 91% in December 1993. It was less impressed with the CD-ROM version that followed in 1994, which added spoken dialogue but kept the old music and left some dramatic moments in silence. By then the reviewer also thought the jokes undercut the story: the dialogue was “too camp and the characters too comical” for the serious science fiction Revolution was aiming at. The CD version also came out on Commodore’s Amiga CD32, where Amiga CD32 Gamer welcomed the end of “horrific disk swapping”. Edge later reported that Revolution first tackled recorded voices on the CD32 version, before the fully spoken Broken Sword.

Wireframe put the game’s cost at about £80,000 in 2019 money. Cecil’s answer: “I do laugh at the idea of £80,000”, compared with what Revolution’s games cost now.

Free since 2003

On 2 August 2003 the ScummVM project, which rewrites the engines of old adventure games so they run on modern systems, announced that “Revolution Software Ltd. have decided to allow us to make Beneath a Steel Sky freeware”. Revolution had given the project the game’s original assembly-language source code. ScummVM wrote its own engine from that source and released it in ScummVM 0.5.0, with the CD version (70MB, with speech) and the floppy version (8MB) as free downloads. What was published was ScummVM’s new code, not Revolution’s original source. Computer Gaming World pointed its readers to the download that December, and Edge later named the game alongside Another World as games “benevolently declared freeware by their copyright holders”. The game is still free, on ScummVM’s site and on GOG.com.

In 2009 Revolution published Beneath a Steel Sky: Remastered for the iPhone. Gibbons turned his comic-strip cut-scenes into animated sequences, and the new version added hints, better sound and touch controls that highlighted the objects a player could use.

Beyond a Steel Sky

Revolution planned a sequel soon after the first game, but publishers had decided that adventures were dead, Cecil told Wireframe. It took until 2020 for Revolution and Gibbons to return to Union City. Beyond a Steel Sky came out in June 2020 on Apple Arcade and then on PC, a fully 3D game with Foster as its hero again. For the story of Revolution and its other games, see Revolution Software.

Sources

Edge issue 2, November 1993, pp. 29–30: preview (release planned for late October; 75 main screens drawn by Dave Gibbons and painted by Les Pace; the comic; Revolution in Hull; “Virtual Theatre is without any doubt the best technology”).
The One issue 62, November 1993: review of the Amiga version, with Dave Cummins’ writing; The One issue 65, February 1994, coverdisk feature recalling the review’s 93%.
Amiga Computing issue 68, Christmas 1993, news: Gibbons and Revolution; the rewritten Virtual Theatre engine; over 100 locations; Cecil on a year of design before programming.
Computer Gaming World issue 114, January 1994: preview (Dan Marchant on “Virtual Theatre 2”).
Cam Winstanley, review, Amiga Power issue 33, January 1994, p. 44: £34.99; the comic and the Gap; Joey; painted and scanned art; about a hundred locations on 15 disks; 20-second disk access.
Edge issue 5, February 1994: release schedule.
Amiga Format issue 57, March 1994, p. 47: review (spying through windows, “like Lure of the Temptress”); Amiga Format issue 60, June 1994: “reviewed AF57, 94 per cent”.
CU Amiga, April 1994: Virgin advertisement quoting The One (93%), CU Amiga (95%, “Simply one of the best adventures ever released on the Amiga”) and Amiga Format (94%, Format Gold); the rich “lie underground, shielded from all pollution”.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 8, July 1994: Beneath a Steel Sky at £39.99, reviewed in the December issue at 91%.
PC Gamer (UK) issue 9, August 1994, p. 86: review of the CD-ROM version, recalling the floppy version’s 91% in the magazine’s first issue.
Amiga CD32 Gamer issue 7, December 1994, p. 20: review of the CD32 version.
Computer Gaming World issue 233, December 2003: the freeware download at the ScummVM site.
Edge issue 137, June 2004, retrospective on Broken Sword: Dave Cummins as Revolution’s script writer; voice recording on the CD32 version of Beneath a Steel Sky.
Edge issue 153, September 2005: “benevolently declared freeware”.
Interview with Charles Cecil, Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, pp. 6–9: meeting Gibbons over Watchmen; the sequel that publishers would not commission; the £80,000 cost.
“Union City”, Wireframe issue 40, June 2020, p. 48: the inverted city and Gibbons’ comment.
ScummVM, “ScummVM 0.5.0, Beneath a Steel Sky, and a BROKEN caps lock KEY”, 2 August 2003 (web, secondary). https://www.scummvm.org/en/news/20030802/
ScummVM, “Games” download page (web): freeware CD and floppy versions. https://www.scummvm.org/games/
GOG.com, Beneath a Steel Sky store page (web): free download running on ScummVM. https://www.gog.com/en/game/beneath_a_steel_sky
ComicMix, “Dave Gibbons animates ‘Beneath A Steel Sky: Remastered’ for the iPhone”, 29 October 2009 (web, secondary). https://www.comicmix.com/2009/10/29/dave-gibbons-animates-beneath-a-steel-sky-remastered-for-the-iphone/
Joel Brodie, “Beneath a Steel Sky Remastered Review”, Gamezebo, 31 December 2009 (web, secondary). https://www.gamezebo.com/reviews/beneath-a-steel-sky-remastered-review/
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