Studio Profile
One of the UK’s most resilient studios reflects on its 30-year adventure
One of the UK’s most resilient studios, Revolution Software, reflects on its 30-year journey
This,” Charles Cecil gestures with a sweep of his hand, “is The Shambles.” Happily, he’s not delivering a withering assessment of the studio he’s been running for close to three decades. Rather, he’s referring to the York street that runs down one side of Revolution Software’s offices – and which is thought to have been the inspiration for Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. The buildings here are centuries old, the eldest dating as far back as the 1300s. Inevitably, some of them are a little uneven; Cecil is grateful to the previous owners for having flattened out the floors, though there’s one room, he says, that leans so obviously to one side as to make you feel slightly seasick when you enter. We decline his invitation.
It’s a fairly modest office, although it offers some picturesque views. Cecil’s office window, in fact, is perfect for people-watching: for a man with a flair for writing memorable characters, there’s plenty of potential inspiration here. And the location is fitting for a studio that finally finds itself on an even keel. Next year marks Revolution’s 30th anniversary – if not, strictly speaking, its 30th consecutive year in full operation. It has closed and reopened more than once in those three decades, but never – “Never!” Cecil repeats, wagging his finger for extra emphasis – gone bankrupt. Still, it has retained plenty of staff: roughly half of its current team have, at one point or another, been ex-Revolution, including art director Sucha Singh and technical lead Andrew Boskett.
“Scaling up and down is in our DNA,” Cecil explains, relaying the story of 2004’s Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. The third game in the adventure series earned $16 million at retail, with around $6 million going to publisher THQ. But the plunging dollar meant that Revolution itself took a loss of £200,000, which the studio carried forward for a decade. “We closed the studio, because we were in a very weak position,” he continues. “We laid off Sucha, who’s now back. We laid off Andy, who’s now back. We work very hard to do the right thing [by our employees] – we would have gone bankrupt if we hadn’t. And this flexibility is how we’ve survived for 30 years.”
Revolution has employees across Europe who work from home, but the York office has a healthy blend of youth and experience. That balance of old and new is quite fitting, given the contrast between the olde-worlde setting and the 1GB fibre-optic cable that runs outside the office window. Three members of the studio’s scripting team – Cecil still handles the bulk of the writing, freely admitting that he guards his games’ stories jealously – were graduates from the University Of York’s interactive media course. It’s no great surprise to learn that Cecil himself had a substantial part in designing that course. There’s a cosmopolitan feel to the team, with two Norwegians, a technical artist who works from Rome, and a chief technology officer based in the Netherlands. And, indeed, while the core
LAUNCHING IN DECEMBER, BEYOND A STEEL SKY WILL BE ONE OF THE FLAGSHIP TITLES FOR APPLE ARCADE
game design is kept in-house, other elements of Revolution’s games are outsourced. Cecil guides us to a room with a rudimentary motion-capture setup (the first time we’ve seen a Kinect 2 in quite a while) where placeholder animations are recorded as the foundations for professional capture at Oxford’s Audiomotion.
We get a glimpse of some of those rough animations in an early build of Beyond A Steel Sky, a follow-up to the studio’s 1994 adventure Beneath A Steel Sky, which remains one of the studio’s best-loved games, perhaps second only to the original Broken Sword. Cecil insists it’s too different from the first to call it a sequel. “When we were writing adventures back then, people loved frustrating puzzles. I remember one guy saying, ‘I go to bed, and I dream about what the solution is. And when I wake up in the morning, I try it, and it works.’” He laughs quietly. “And that’s not what people want. It’s not what people have wanted for years.” Here, the puzzles are more grounded and logical, their
solutions gradually becoming clear through conversations and thorough exploration.
A shift to Unreal Engine 4, meanwhile, marks a change from the bespoke engine the studio has used in the past. When Revolution released its first game, 1992’s Lure Of The Temptress, it was known as ‘virtual theatre’, a thengroundbreaking approach that gave non-player characters their own routines and motivations, affording them a physical presence within the world while allowing them to walk around independently of the player’s actions. Beyond A Steel Sky, Cecil explains, is a modernisation of that original concept, with the player having more influence over the behaviour of NPCs. The technology, it seems, has finally caught up with the idea. “People at the time were blown away by virtual theatre – they thought this was the beginning of something amazing,” he says. “And it could have been except that from a gameplay perspective, it had no real application. But I always felt that it had and so this is why I’m excited to bring it back.”
Launching in December, the game will be one of the flagship titles for Apple Arcade, and it’s thanks in no small part to the Cupertino giant that Revolution is in the position to make it. If The Sleeping Dragon put the developer in a precarious position, 2006 successor The Angel Of Death left it very much on the brink. Cecil clearly enjoyed his role as a consultant on the likes of The Da Vinci Code and Doctor Who: The Adventure Games in the years that followed. “It was wonderful,” he says. “But all that was to pay off the overdraft.”
Then, in 2009, Cecil took a call from Apple’s developer relations team. “It was a
nice guy called Paul Burford,” he recalls. “At the time Apple was clearly worried that its platform, which was otherwise doing quite well for games, was just full of shit. And it was.” Working from home, Cecil pulled together a small team to work on porting Beneath A Steel Sky, which launched in October that year. As fate would have it, the game’s original resolution was the perfect match for that of the firstgeneration iPhone. “So it basically looked a million dollars,” Cecil grins. The following year, Revolution ported the Director’s Cut version of its biggest hit, Broken Sword: Shadow Of The Templars, whose native resolution once again proved an ideal fit for the newer secondgeneration displays. By now, the developer found itself in something of an arms race with LucasArts, which was also bringing its own classic adventures to iOS. “I was very keen to get there first, without wishing to be in any way competitive,” Cecil says. “Clearly, they put all their efforts into redoing the graphics, which was a disaster. And because we had very little money, we put it all into the UI, which was actually much smarter. Now The Secret Of Monkey Island is a great game, no question. But the iPhone version was…” He pauses, half smiling, half grimacing. “Well, it wasn’t great.”
Cecil might insist there were no thoughts of competition, though he notes his game’s superior Metacritic score with glee. Still, he’s happy to acknowledge a small debt to one former LucasArts alumnus, whose own success helped inform Revolution’s next move. The successful Kickstarter campaign for Tim Schafer’s Broken Age inspired Cecil to try the crowdfunding platform for a fifth Broken Sword. “It became clear we were in a very similar position. And that while we wouldn’t make the level of revenues that he would, we were in a good position to do it.” With the help of video producer Chris John Brooke, the game raised $850,000, thanks to 16,000 backers. Early in 2014, Apple invited Revolution to its Regent Street store for a launch event of sorts – slotting them in between Robbie Williams and The Vampire Diaries, as Cecil tells us. “There was this incredible party atmosphere, because so many fans came along,” he says. “People were queuing out of the door. There was just this extraordinary energy and joy that we hadn’t felt for a long time.”
Here was a reinvigorating reminder of just how big and passionate Revolution’s audience was. With five Broken Swords under its belt, the studio was ready to move on – and, more importantly, it knew its player base was ready for something different, too. So, having kept in touch with Dave Gibbons, Cecil felt the time was right to return to the universe of Beneath A Steel Sky. For a generation of players, this was a big deal – partly thanks to a decision he made nearly two decades before. When Bill Gates removed DOS support from Windows 98 onwards, there was no way for new PC owners to play the game, nor Lure Of The Temptress. When Ludvig Strigeus and Vincent Hamm developed the ScummVM emulator to play classic DOS adventures, Revolution handed over the source code. “Why not?” Cecil says. “We had nothing to lose. Our feeling was that because the game without ScummVM was of no value to us, we should give it away for free.” As a result, millions more people played Beneath A Steel Sky. “It was one of the top Linux games, and so that created this real cult following.” He laughs. “I wish I could say it was due to foresight, but it wasn’t.”
Regardless, it says much for its enduring appeal that Apple made such a fuss of its successor coming to Apple Arcade – and it has put its money where its mouth is. “It’s a fantastic way of allowing people that wouldn’t normally pay for premium games to experience adventure games, which have the potential to reach a really wide audience,” Cecil says; indeed, he suggests this could well continue the adventure game’s recent renaissance. “This genre is clearly an amazing place to be. Because Her Story is undoubtedly an adventure. Clearly, What
“WHAT’S SO JOYFUL NOW IS THAT WE CAN MAKE OUR OWN DECISIONS BASED ON THE KNOWLEDGE THAT WE HAVE”
Remains Of Edith Finch is an adventure. Then you’ve got Return Of The Obra Dinn – there’s a very diverse range. And that’s all because developers can self-publish, because never in a million years would publishers ever have funded any of those games.”
While Revolution is ready to move forward in one respect, in another it’s not planning to go anywhere. After two years in the same office, the studio finally seems to be putting down more permanent roots. It’s been a tumultuous ride for Revolution, but Cecil acknowledges that it’s finally time for a bit of calm and continuity. “What is so joyful now is that we can make our own decisions based on the knowledge that we have. It all makes so much more sense. There’s more passion, we have more control. And the games are better.”