Charles Cecil’s first games were text adventures for the ZX81, sold by mail order from Hull while he was still a student. Ten years later his own company, Revolution Software, was making point-and-click adventures in which the villagers kept to their own daily routines whether or not the player was watching. Its Broken Sword (1996) sent an American tourist after the Knights Templar years before The Da Vinci Code did the same. Cecil went on making adventures after most publishers had stopped commissioning them, and when the money ran out he found it again, first through Apple and then through Kickstarter.
Fast facts
- Born: August 1962. He spent his early childhood in the Congo and went to Bedales School in Hampshire.
- First games: Inca Curse, Ship of Doom and Espionage Island, text adventures for Artic Computing.
- Before Revolution: Paragon Programming, then head of development at US Gold, then Activision’s European development studio.
- Company: co-founder and managing director of Revolution Software, founded in 1990.
- Best-known games: Lure of the Temptress (1992), Beneath a Steel Sky (1994), the Broken Sword series (1996 onwards).
- Honour: MBE, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of June 2011, for services to the computer games industry.
Congo, Bedales and Ford
Cecil told Edge in 2012 that his father had taken a job in the newly independent Republic of the Congo, and that when Charles was 18 months old a Congolese soldier pointed a gun at his head after the boy hit him with a stone; the family’s gardener talked the soldier down. His pregnant mother fled the country with him, and the family lived for a time in Nigeria before settling in Britain. Edge suggested the experience lay behind the globe-trotting of his later games. “I’m sure some of that time affected me,” Cecil said, though he traced the Paris of Broken Sword to visits in the late 1960s to an uncle, a Portuguese communist who had fought against Franco.
He met computers at Bedales School. When he left school in 1980, he told Edge in 1996, Ford sponsored him to study engineering; Retro Gamer names the course as mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester. Through Ford he met Richard Turner, who had just set up Artic Computing.
Artic Computing
Turner persuaded Cecil to write games for Artic, and Cecil wrote three of its early text adventures. An Artic advertisement in Your Computer in October 1982, giving the company’s address in James Reckitt Avenue, Hull, sold them by letter: Planet of Death (Adventure A) at £5, Inca Curse (Adventure B) at £6, Ship of Doom (Adventure C) at £7 and Espionage Island (Adventure D) at £5. Cecil later admitted to Wireframe that Inca Curse borrowed “perhaps too liberally” from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In 1996 he remembered the early business as effortless. “We used to ring up WH Smiths and say, ‘How many do you want to buy?’ and then we’d call up the duplicators and tell them how many we had sold, and they’d make that many. No overheads.” The Spectrum brought bigger sales, but a television advertising campaign, he said, “was a complete disaster”, and larger publishers such as Ocean and US Gold arrived “with a lot of money and a lot of professional marketing”. “In 1986 we decided to call it a day.”
Artic had one last deal. US Gold held the licence for the 1986 World Cup and had no game, so its Tim Chaney and Geoff Brown went, in Chaney’s words, “to Charles Cecil at Artic” to reuse Artic’s two-year-old World Cup Football. It came out as World Cup Carnival and was savaged by the press. “I was really uneasy about this, but we were effectively bankrupt,” Cecil told Wireframe. “So I’m quite ashamed to say we took the money.”
Paragon, US Gold and Activision
After Artic, Cecil set up Paragon Programming, based in Wandsworth in London, which converted games for US Gold and other publishers; he recalled its first job as Infiltrator in 1986, taken from Chris Gray’s Commodore 64 original to the Spectrum and Atari. Two Artic programmers, Donald Campbell and John Prince, joined him, but as northerners they “didn’t really feel part of Paragon”, Campbell said, and in 1987 they left to form Tiertex. Then Chaney invited him to join US Gold as head of development. “I imagined I was going to rule over a massive great department and it turned out it was me and Steve Fitton, and Dave Partington part time,” he said.
Development, he told Edge, “wasn’t seen as particularly important then. Sales and marketing were of far greater concern.” Activision offered him a job running development in Europe, in the studio that also produced Electric Dreams games; among its projects was Hunter, “a really nice 3D game” for the ST and Amiga. At Activision he also tried to license Watchmen for a game, and met its artist, Dave Gibbons. The licence came to nothing, but the contact did not. Activision’s American parent, then called Mediagenic, had lost nearly $20 million the previous year, ACE reported in October 1990. In Cecil’s account, the failure of the American office “gave me the chance to set up Revolution, with our own money”.
Revolution Software
Cecil founded Revolution in 1990 with the programmers Tony Warriner and David Sykes, and later Noirin Carmody. The company’s story is told in the Revolution Software entry. Cecil’s part in it was as designer and managing director: he designed and wrote, or co-wrote, its adventures, and he chose their settings from places he had visited. For Broken Sword he read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and walked the Paris catacombs. “It’s important to get references like this and I’ve done it with all of the games I have written,” he told Retro Gamer.
His aims were plain in a 1996 interview with Edge: “To write games that play really well, and support them with high production values. Completely the opposite of the interactive movie.” He and his lead writer, Dave Cummins, went on a film-writing course, and the Broken Sword script was read by a senior BBC scriptwriter. He had little patience with puzzles that broke their own logic: “I’ve never forgiven Monkey Island for using the compass on the key.”
By the end of the 1990s he could see the 2D adventure fading. In a PC Zone feature at Christmas 1998 he said that “the point-and-click adventure evolved to best exploit the technology that existed at the time”, that other genres had since advanced faster, and that adventure fans, though “fiercely loyal”, were “declining in numbers and this has made publishers nervous about commissioning this type of game”. Announcing the 3D Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon in 2002, he put it more briefly: “The point-and-click adventure game is dead, long live the adventure game!” He later explained that he had meant the genre in its old form, not the interface, and he brought pointing and clicking back for Broken Sword: The Angel of Death (2006). He also watched the rest of the industry with interest: in April 2000 he told Edge that the acting in Sega’s Shenmue was of high quality, “but it cost $40m dollars to produce”.
Going it alone, and coming back
After The Sleeping Dragon Revolution closed its studio and made its staff redundant. Cecil described the result to Edge in April 2006 as a Hollywood-style arrangement: he owned the Broken Sword rights, contracted the publisher, THQ, and worked with the Sheffield studio Sumo Digital and freelancers, spending about half his time at Sumo’s offices. He had worked in the same way on the early design of The Da Vinci Code game, and he was a director of Game Republic, a network of game companies in Yorkshire.
He told Wireframe in 2019 that Revolution came close to being wound up after The Angel of Death: “We were insolvent. I remember telling my wife, ‘We’re going to have to bankrupt the company.’” A call from Apple, asking whether Revolution would bring its games to the iPhone, changed that; by 2012 the iPhone editions of the first two Broken Sword games had been downloaded more than five million times, according to Edge. He also helped create the BBC’s Doctor Who adventure games. In 2012 Revolution raised the money for Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse on Kickstarter. “Kickstarter is crucial for developers like us,” Cecil told Retro Gamer. “Until a couple of years ago, the publishing model was totally broken for independent developers and we could not afford to operate.”
In June 2011 he was appointed MBE for services to the computer games industry. “I have had the privilege, and good fortune, to have been creating computer games since the inception of this extraordinary industry,” he said. He went on to make Beyond a Steel Sky (2020) with Dave Gibbons, a sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky, and Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged (2024), a remastered version of the first Broken Sword.
Sources
- Your Computer, October 1982, p. 81: Artic Computing advertisement (Planet of Death, Inca Curse, Ship of Doom, Espionage Island, their prices and “Adventure” letters; Hull address).
- The History of US Gold (Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, Fusion Retro Books, 2015), modern book of recollections: pp. 59–60 (Tim Chaney and Cecil on World Cup Carnival), p. 81 (Cecil on Paragon Programming, Infiltrator and joining US Gold), p. 87 (Cecil had left US Gold for Activision by 1989), pp. 128–129 (Donald Campbell on Paragon and Tiertex).
- The One, November 1991, p. 48: Cecil and Dave Cummins “both previously of Activision”; Revolution’s staff in Hull.
- Edge issue 2, November 1993, pp. 29–30: Cecil as managing director of Revolution in Hull.
- Edge issue 34, July 1996, interview with Cecil: leaving school in 1980 with Ford sponsorship; Artic, its adventures and its end in 1986; US Gold and Activision; Hunter; founding Revolution “with our own money”; his aims, the film-writing course and the Monkey Island compass.
- ACE issue 37, October 1990, news: Mediagenic’s losses.
- PC Zone issue 71, Christmas 1998, p. 33: Cecil on the decline of the 2D adventure.
- Edge issue 83, April 2000, “Telling Tales” interview with Cecil: Shenmue’s cost.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 115, November 2002, p. 8: “The point-and-click adventure game is dead, long live the adventure game!”
- Edge issue 161, April 2006, “One-man Revolution” interview: Revolution’s studio closed; working with THQ, Sumo and freelancers; The Da Vinci Code; Game Republic.
- David Crookes, “The Making of Broken Sword”, Retro Gamer issue 31, 2006, pp. 60–63: his text adventures while studying mechanical engineering at Manchester; Paragon, US Gold and Activision; research for Broken Sword; point-and-click and The Angel of Death.
- Edge issue 238, March 2012, pp. 128–129, “Charles Cecil” profile: the Congo, Nigeria and Paris; Bedales; Ford and Richard Turner; his Artic adventures; Revolution’s founders; Gibbons and Watchmen; five million iPhone downloads; the Doctor Who games. (The profile calls his 2011 honour an OBE; the London Gazette list, as reported below, made him an MBE.)
- Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012, p. 7: Cecil on Kickstarter.
- Jack Yarwood, “How Revolution survived the British games industry”, Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, pp. 18–23: Turner and Artic, Inca Curse, World Cup Carnival, US Gold, the near-insolvency and Apple.
- “MBE for Charles Cecil”, MCV, 11 June 2011 (web, secondary): the Queen’s Birthday Honours and his statement. https://mcvuk.com/development-news/mbe-for-charles-cecil/
- “Charles Cecil Awarded MBE”, Game Republic (web, secondary). https://gamerepublic.net/news/cecil-mbe/
- Companies House, Revolution Software Limited, list of officers (web): his month and year of birth. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02484526/officers
- 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): release on 19 September 2024. https://noisypixel.net/broken-sword-shadow-of-the-templars-reforged-september-release-date/