The History Of: Beneath A Steel Sky
ROBERT FOSTER IS BACK IN A NEW ADVENTURE BUT WHAT HAS CHANGED AND HOW DIFFERENT IS BEYOND A STEEL SKY GOING TO BE TO BENEATH A STEEL SKY? RETRO GAMER LOOKS AT THE EVOLUTION OF REVOLUTION SOFTWARE’S MUCH-LOVED DYSTOPIAN STORY
Charles Cecil talks us through the impact of his dystopian classic and his plans for its long overdue sequel
When Charles Cecil was seeking inspiration for his second point-and-click adventure, Beneath A Steel Sky, he decided to simply look at the world around him. “I was very much a child of the Soviet era and I found George Orwell’s 1984 to be a great reference for the way a state may want to control you,” he explains. “In the previous decade, Margaret Thatcher had said society didn’t exist any more and people had become very rich and very selfish. I wanted to reflect back that society.”
It was 1992 and Charles’ development studio, Revolution Software, had just released its debut, Lure Of The Temptress, a medieval mooch around the town of Turnvale with the aim of defeating an evil sorceress. Rather than set Beneath A Steel Sky in the past, however, the developer looked ahead. In doing so, it sought to follow the patch trodden by dystopian movies, including Mad Max and Blade Runner, in depicting a scary, oppressive future.
Charles was enthusiastic about those films and he wasn’t alone, either. Fellow fan Dave Cummins, who had designed Lure Of The
Temptress, was also excited at the prospect of working on a gritty and thought-provoking cyberpunk adventure and they shared a desire to convey a stark message – or a warning, even – to anyone who bought into their world. “The idea of conveying messages from today is something that really interests me,” Charles says. And in Dave he found a perfect partner.
“I’d met Dave at Activision where he’d worked for me as a game tester and I remember him so beautifully writing a test report about an adventure,” Charles recalls. “It was quite clear that he was a better writer than the adventure writers themselves, so when I founded Revolution, I invited him to come and join us in Hull. Those early games were very much the juxtaposition of me wanting to write dramatic stories and him being cynical.”
This drove Beneath A Steel Sky – “That defining characteristic of wanting to be dramatic and slightly ludicrous,” as its creator puts it. “Since then, we’ve found that people who played the game can remember exactly what happens at the beginning and at the end and most of what happens in between. It’s become a profoundly important game.”
Today, Charles is working on a long-awaited sequel, hoping to give the title’s enduring fanbase an opportunity to form further memories. Called Beyond A Steel Sky, it is being developed for the PC, consoles and IOS (via Apple Arcade), and it will see Robert Foster return to Union City, some 26 years after gamers were first tasked with helping him escape.
“We’re picking up ten years later when a child is kidnapped, forcing Foster to follow some tracks that take him back to the metropolis,” Charles says. “His buddy, Joey, had been left in charge when he left a decade earlier and it now feels like a wonderful place. Everybody is happy, everybody has as much as they can consume and everybody has nice thoughts. It’s seemingly an absolute utopia. But Joey is not there anymore and Foster is surprised. He cannot reconcile that the city would have anything to do with the kidnapping and that’s the premise of where we’re now heading.”
Such a premise is faithful to the original game which, for those who have never played it, is set in an imagined Australia, putting players in the shoes of Robert Foster – so called because, after becoming the sole survivor of a helicopter crash, he was found by indigenous locals in the outback (or the Gap as the game called it) next to an empty can of lager.
Taught how to survive and imbued with enough technical skill to develop his talking robot pal Joey, Robert subsequently suffers the horror of seeing his tribal family killed by an army sent from Union City thanks to an order from a powerful computer called LINC, an acronym for Logical Inter-neural Connection. Kidnapped and transported to the metropolis by another chopper, he’s subject to a second crash which leaves him stranded in the city’s upper level. Robert is able to escape and, with security guards in pursuit, the scene is set.
This backstory was lavishly explained in a comic book drawn by revered artist Dave Gibbons. It proved to be more effective than a wordy manual and set up Robert Foster’s motivation and purpose. “Foster was driven by the question, ‘Why me?’” says Charles, of the character’s determination to discover why he was abducted. It was then a case of getting the player to explore a city in which the rich and powerful live underground away from pollution and in which the oppressed masses lead their lives in the exposed skyscrapers.
“It was important to lay down the story right from the start because that’s what point-and-click adventures are about,” says
Charles. “So that came first, with the plot written down on two or three pages. We then looked to identify dramatic gameplay moments that would form the story and created a section overview for each part. After that, we designed the puzzles and that was an iterative process as well because we’d look at the inventory items brought forward from previous sections and try and find uses for them.”
The process took two years and cost Revolution £40,000 (a sum equivalent to twice that in today’s money). It was a small investment compared to contemporary games – and certainly in comparison to the big-budget Beyond A Steel Sky – but the returns were great for the handful of developers who managed to produce a title that was some six times larger than Lure Of The Temptress.
“We certainly spent a lot less time on the narrative and script than we would today, mainly because there was a lot less dialogue,” Charles muses. “And you know, people look back at Beneath A Steel Sky with great affection which is incredibly flattering but if you listen to the voices, if you listen to the story and what the characters say, it is a lot cruder than what an adventure player would expect these days.”
For many, this is undoubtedly part of the charm since the whip-smart interactions and the quirky British humour (and double-entendres) of this whimsical jaunt help to bring Union City to life. Set against the atmospheric backgrounds created by Dave Gibbons, who also made huge contributions to the story, it is a world that players can buy into as they made their way over the four levels, exploring the factory, city, park and underworld. You will encounter many uninterested, bureaucratic or apathetic individuals who are quite aware of their world’s social hierarchy.
“Dave would draw the background layouts in pencil and these would be painted by an artist called Les Pace before being scanned in on an Apple Macintosh,” says Charles, who laughs at the memory of data moving from one computer to another via a 3.25-inch disk hurled like a frisbee from one end of the office to the other. “Back in those days we actually had a very experienced team in terms of pixel animation. Stephen Oades, in particular, who was a local Hull lad, was just brilliant at pixel art and Dave Gibbons would become very excited, comparing the work to jewellery, saying you could change the colour of a pixel very slightly and it would have an effect on what the eye is being told.”
Revolution gave Dave a copy of Deluxe
Paint on the Amiga and he ended up designing the characters, too. This not only nailed the look of Robert and Joey but other key roles including officer Stephen Reich, rebel Anita, barmy plastic surgeon Dr Burke who is after Robert’s testicles, the old dear Danielle Piermont and pipe-making factory supervisor Gilbert Lamb whose coat is allegedly “made from the last ten beavers in the world”.
Gilbert’s Yorkshire accent became typical of the game’s northern flavour. Originally, however, the game was to be voiced by actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company but, during a break in recording, they’d popped off to the pub and, upon their return… “They didn’t sound anything like that had done in the morning,” says Charles. “It was quite extraordinary and I knew no better because it was the first time I’d recorded any actors. We had to scrap it all and start again.”
Many of the characters were inspired by people Charles had met in vehicle production factories in Britain and France when he was a management trainee for Ford. The pipe factory existed because a UK manufacturer had been in the news for innocently creating tubes earmarked for Saddam Hussein’s ‘supergun’. In some ways, however, Charles says such additions were evidence of a scattered approach. “Ideas could be taken and picked haphazardly and some made no sense at all.”
“BACK IN THOSE DAYS WE ACTUALLY HAD A VERY EXPERIENCED TEAM IN TERMS OF PIXEL ANIMATION. STEPHEN OADES, IN PARTICULAR, WHO WAS A LOCAL HULL LAD, WAS JUST BRILLIANT AT PIXEL ART ”
CHARLES CECIL