Broken Sword opens with a clown. He walks into a quiet Paris café, puts down an accordion and runs out, and the accordion explodes. The American tourist who survives the blast, George Stobbart, spends the rest of the game working out why, and the trail leads him to the Knights Templar, the medieval order of warrior monks. Edge reviewed it in October 1996 and gave it nine out of ten, calling it “the best graphic adventure to date”. For years, the magazine wrote, British developers had been trying to catch up with LucasArts; “with Broken Sword the tables have at last been turned.” The game cost Revolution Software about £1 million, sold more than a million copies by Cecil’s account, and started a series that Revolution was still making three decades later.
Fast facts
- Full title: Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars; Circle of Blood in North America.
- Developer: Revolution Software, York. Designed and directed by Charles Cecil.
- Publishers: Virgin Interactive Entertainment on the PC; Sony on the PlayStation.
- Released: 1996 for the PC and Macintosh, and the PlayStation; the Game Boy Advance in 2002.
- Price: £40 on the PC, according to Edge.
- Cost: about £1 million.
- Music: Barrington Pheloung, composer of the Inspector Morse theme.
A Templar mystery
Cecil has told two stories about where the idea came from. To Edge in 2004 he said that Sean Brennan, who had backed Revolution at Mirrorsoft and brought its games to Virgin, suggested the Templars over dinner after reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. To Retro Gamer in 2006 he named The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the book that also fed Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code years later. In both accounts the attraction was the same: “an intriguing conspiracy that resonates to the present day”, as he put it to Edge, with “lost treasure”, chivalry and barbarity. He flew to Paris to walk the catacombs and collect references.
He wanted a drama with jokes in it, not a comedy. “The most successful adventure games at the time were centred on humour, like Monkey Island,” he told Retro Gamer, “but I wanted to depart from that.” The player follows George to Ireland, Syria and Spain, and works with Nico Collard, a French journalist. Cecil made George American and Nico French to appeal to both American and European buyers, though “in the end, the game did particularly well in Europe, especially Germany”. George was voiced by the American actor Rolf Saxon, who kept the part through the next three games.
The puzzles were meant to follow the plot. “They’re all completely logical to the plot, so no ludicrous brain-teasers,” Cecil told Edge before release. “I’ve never forgiven Monkey Island for using the compass on the key.” Conversations worked through a row of “subject icons”, pictures of the people and objects George could ask about, not lines of dialogue chosen from a list. Cecil said he chose them because the humour was drier than LucasArts’ and he did not want to give the player the joke in advance.
Cartoon animators
Revolution wanted the game to look like a feature cartoon, not a computer game. Cecil went to Ballyfermot College in Dublin to look for animation graduates and found one of its lecturers, Eoghan Cahill, who had painted backgrounds for the Don Bluth studio. Cahill drew test backgrounds, Revolution coloured them in Photoshop, and “we decided to go for the hand-drawn cartoon look”, Cecil told Edge in 2004. The cut-scenes were animated by outside studios, Red Rover and later Fil Cartoons in Manila, and Revolution’s own animators drew the characters in the game. Cecil claimed in 1996 that the game held “tens of thousands of sprites” and more animation than “a feature-length Disney cartoon”.
The music was just as ambitious. Barrington Pheloung wrote more than three hours of it, Edge reported, split into over 400 cues that could be cross-faded with one another, so that walking down the same alley twice need not sound the same. “The music is full of clues,” he said. “Sometimes, these are total red herrings, but sometimes they’re genuinely helpful.” The score filled more than 400 A4 cue sheets, “pasted all round the walls of my studio”.
Reviews
Edge praised the “smooth control interface and satisfying scriptwork”, the high-resolution backgrounds and characters that were “what must be the most lively game sprites ever”, and found it “a triumph of inventive, witty scripting and near faultless presentation”. It was less sure about the comedy in “what is essentially a detective-cum-action scenario”, and noted that the game refined the usual conventions rather than breaking them.
Computer and Video Games reviewed the PlayStation version in December 1996 and found it “as enjoyable to look at as it is to play”, with puzzles logical enough that players were not left trying every object on everything. Elsewhere in the same issue the magazine went further: “Broken Sword is actually superior on PlayStation.”
The PlayStation version
Virgin published the PC game, but not the PlayStation one. According to Wireframe, Virgin “thought 2D games wouldn’t sell on console”, so Sony Computer Entertainment published it, and the game reached “an entirely different audience” with “some incredible sales on the platform”. It was in the British top 20 across all formats in early 1997, at number 12 in the chart printed by Computer and Video Games in March.
Cecil remembered it differently. In 2006 he told Retro Gamer that the PlayStation version was his “one big regret”. “No one thought that it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version,” he said. Without a mouse, the magazine noted, control was difficult. “In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.” Retro Gamer itself called the game “a phenomenal success on the PC” but its PlayStation debut “less successful”.
Sales, and Circle of Blood
Cecil told Edge in 2004 that the game sold more than a million copies, mostly in Europe. In North America Virgin renamed it Circle of Blood, a decision Cecil still could not explain eight years later. “The name was wholly inappropriate, and sent completely the wrong signals about what type of game it was,” he said. “It didn’t help it commercially.”
The series
Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, set around Maya and Aztec culture, followed in 1997. The Sleeping Dragon (2003) moved the series into 3D for THQ, and The Angel of Death (2006) was built by Sumo Digital to Revolution’s design after Revolution had closed its studio. The Revolution Software entry tells that story. A Game Boy Advance version of the first game, converted by Revolution and published by BAM! Entertainment, came out in 2002, and director’s cut editions followed on the Wii, DS and phones.
In 2012 Revolution raised the money for Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse on Kickstarter, a return to 2D; it came out in two episodes in 2013 and 2014. Shadow of the Templars: Reforged, a remastered version of the first game, came out on 19 September 2024. A sixth game, Parzival’s Stone, was announced at Gamescom in 2023; Cecil said in May 2024 that it would not be out that year, and its store page still gave no release date in September 2026.
Sources
- Edge issue 34, July 1996, interview with Charles Cecil: the £1 million cost; “tens of thousands of sprites”; more animation than “a feature-length Disney cartoon”; logical puzzles and the Monkey Island compass; Pheloung’s interactive music.
- Computer and Video Games issue 177, August 1996: PlayStation preview (over £1,000,000 spent).
- Edge issue 37, October 1996, pp. 82–83: review (PC/Mac CD-ROM, £40; nine out of ten; LucasArts and “the tables have at last been turned”; subject icons; “the best graphic adventure to date”).
- Edge issue 38, November 1996: Barrington Pheloung on the score (three hours of music, over 400 cues, the cue sheets, “full of clues”).
- Computer and Video Games issue 180, November 1996: release schedule (PlayStation, Sony, 16 October).
- Computer and Video Games issue 181, December 1996: PlayStation review, and “Broken Sword is actually superior on PlayStation” in the review of Blazing Dragons.
- Computer Gaming World issue 148, November 1996: Circle of Blood advertisement, “Published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Inc.”
- Computer and Video Games issue 184, March 1997: UK multi-format top 20 (Broken Sword, PlayStation, number 12).
- Nintendo Power Advance issue 4, 2002: Game Boy Advance version (spring 2002; BAM! Entertainment; developed by Revolution).
- “The making of… Broken Sword”, Edge issue 137, June 2004, from p. 114: Sean Brennan and Foucault’s Pendulum; Eoghan Cahill, Red Rover and Fil Cartoons; subject icons; over a million copies, mostly in Europe; Circle of Blood.
- David Crookes, “The Making of Broken Sword”, Retro Gamer issue 31, 2006, pp. 60–63: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail; the research trip; George, Nico and Germany; Rolf Saxon; the opening scene; the PlayStation version and the “one big regret”; the Game Boy Advance version.
- Jack Yarwood, “How Revolution survived the British games industry”, Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, p. 21: Sony as PlayStation publisher, Virgin’s view of 2D games on console, “incredible sales”; Broken Sword II in 1997.
- “Broken Sword – Parzival’s Stone has been delayed”, Well Played, 6 May 2024 (web, secondary): announced at Gamescom 2023; Cecil on the delay. https://www.well-played.com.au/broken-sword-parzivals-stone-has-been-delayed/
- Broken Sword – Parzival’s Stone on Steam, Revolution Software (web): release date “To be announced”, September 2026. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2546810/Broken_Sword__Parzivals_Stone/
- The Revolution Software and Charles Cecil entries give the sources for the later games, the Kickstarter and Reforged.