Adventure game developer Revolution Software is perhaps best known for the Broken Sword series. But before that there was Beneath a Steel Sky, a post-apocalyptic adventure game with a distinctly British sense of humour. Released in 1994, the game tells the story of wa𓂃steland drifter Robert Foster and his robot pal, Joey, trying to escape from a towering dystopian metropolis called Union City.

"We set Revolution up in the fine city of Hull," says co-founder, and now studio head, Charles Cecil. "Two of the other founders and programmers—Dave Sykes and Tony Warriner—were based there, and we had no money w𒐪hatsoever. Our first office was a tiny room above a fruit shop. It was winter, and it was f⛎reezing, so the first piece of company equipment we bought was a gas heater.

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"The problem was, it wasn't a very good one, and it gave out terrible fumes. So we either had to have the heater on, in which case we had to open the window, which made it even colder. Or we just sat and shivered. And that was the beginning of Revolution."

After the success of the studio's first project, Lure of the Temptress, Revolution was ready to make its next game. The original idea for Beneath a Steel Sky was a response to some of the adventure games being created by Sierra at the time—particularly King's Quest. "God, they took themselves so seriously," says Cecil. "It was thou this and thee that. So what we wanted to do was create something that juဣxtaposed serious with fun."

When production began, there were only four people at Revolution. Along with Cecil there was Noirin Carmody, who had been in chཧarge of the Sierra brand at Activision; Tony Warriner, who worked with Cecil at a company called Artic Computing; and Warriner’s friend, Dave Sykes, who wrote code for an aeronautical software company. "Beneath a Steel Sky was funded by Virgin, so we were able to move to a bigger office in Hull—this time above a fruit machine arcade," Cecil remembers. "It was still a bit grim, but at least it had central heating.

"The arcade was dark and smokey and full of women with pushchairs pumping money into the fruit machines. It had a really greasy cafe too, which did the most amazing bacon sandwiches. Thick, thick bits of bacon and really doughy bread rolls dripping with butter. We'd buy them and take them up to the studio.

"We managed to collect a really talented group of people to help make the game. There was a tester I knew at Activision called Dave Cummins, who wrote beautifully. There was a particularly dull adventure game we were publishing, which he had written a test report for—and his writing was infinitely better than whoever had written the game. He was being wasted, so I recruited him. Sadly he's since passed away, but he was a huge part of our early games."

Virgin agreed to fund Beneath a Steel Sky "substantially", which inspired Cecil to get in touch with someone he'd met at a previous job. "When I was at Activision, I talked to Dave Gibbons about licencing the rights to Watchmen," he says. "We were all huge Watchmen fans. Dave didn't own the rights, but we kept in touch and it just struck me that he would make the most wonderful partner."

Dave Gibbons is a veteran comics artist and writer who has worked for DC, Dark Horse, and Marvel, and collaborated with the likes of Frank Miller and Alan Moore—most famously on his and Moore's influential, subversive Watchmen series. "I contacted him in the early stages of Beneath a Steel Sky's development," says Cecil. "And I was delighted when he agreed to work on the project. It was quite a coup."

"I don't quite know how Charles got my contact details," says Gibbons. "But he'd seen Watchmen and was quite impressed by it, and thought my ability to create worlds and characters would come in useful for a game. He wanted to buy the rights to Watchmen for Activision, but I went along to see him anyway, having explained that the rights weren't mine to sell. They belonged to DC Comics. But we had a good chat and we got on, and he contacted me a few years later about developing the world, story, and characters for Beneath a Steel Sky.

"I was looking for something interesting to do after the success of Watchmen, and I've always loved the idea of collaboration. If you can work with friends, and you get each others' creative juices flowing, that's the best of all possible worlds. Having met Charles and subsequently his team, I thought, yeah, we could have some fun here."

Gibbons spoke wi🦄th Virgin to work out a deal, but before he even got the chance to tell them how much he wanted to be a part of the project, they madꦕe him a much bigger offer. "It was far in excess of what I was going to ask for," he says. "So it was a no brainer. I was working with people whose company I enjoyed, and whose creativity I was excited by, and I was being well paid for it."

The games industry was unknown territory for Gibbons when he started working with Revolution, but he had some experience with the medium through his son. "Around the time of Beneath a Steel Sky he would have been at a prime gaming age," he says. "He'd keep me up to date with what was going on in games, and to this day he's still involved in them. He's a qualified doctor, but he does a gaming podcast called . The only game I've ever played with any kind of skill is Tetris, which gives you an idea of my shallow immersion in them."

"Virgin asked us if we could drive down to Future Publishing in Bath, where some of the biggest games magazines were based," says Cecil. "On the way there, the head of marketing told Dave that Future was very important, and that he should do this, and this, and this. She had no idea who he was or about any of the work he'd done."

"She told me that if the game was liked and we got good reviews, that would be better than any marketing we could do," Gibbons adds. "People are really guided by these reviews, so we've got to make a good impression on these people."

"So we walk in, and suddenly everyone pulls out a copy of Watchmen and asks him to sign it," says Cecil. "This was when Virgin realised that Dave wasn't just a great artist and collaborator, but would bring a lot of credibility to the project too."

"We went to lunch and I told the journalists all my comic anecdotes, because they were all big comic fans," says Gibbons. "They asked if I'd met this person, or what it was like working with Alan Moore, that sort of thing. They were eating out of the palm of my hand, and the marketing manager from Virgin was impressed."

This led to Virgin asking Gibbons to sit in a Virgin Megastore in the centre of London, by a huge stack of Beneath a Steel Sky boxes, to sign copies of the game. But no one turned up. "The marketing manager's boss arrived, expecting to see a huge crowd," says Gibbons. "After about 15 minutes, it was getting embarrassing for everyone, and both she and her boss made their excuses and left.

"I had to sit there for another hour, in the middle of this store with people walking past and glancing at me. Then, five minutes towards the end, this German guy with a shopping trolley full of videos and games stopped and looked at me and said [in a German accent] 'What are you doing?' I told him I was an artist and I worked on the game, and if he wanted a copy, I'd be happy to sign it for him. He said 'Okay, sure.' And that was it. I only signed one item in an hour and a half! It was quite a good thing for my ego, actually. Usually there are huge crowds, but having nobody was quite strange."

"Fuelled by those bacon sandwiches, Dave would design the characters and turn them into sprites, under the guidance of animator Steve Oades, who was an absolute genius," says Cecil. "Then we thought it would be great to get him to actually draw the game's backgrounds in pencil. Faxes went back and forth from London. He would draw these beautiful layouts, which an artist called Les Pace painted. Then we'd scan them in and Steve and a few other people would animate the pixels."

"The idea of remote working was a lot different back then," says Gibbons. "The most impressive communications technology we had was a fax machine. So I'd sketch characters and backgrounds and fax them up to Charles. They'd suggest changes and I'd make the edits, then I'd bundle up the art, which I did on typing paper, and send it to Les for colouring. He made my pencil drawings come alive.

"I used to visit the studio in Hull about once a month over the course of a year. This involved getting to the station up at my end in London, getting to King's Cross, getting on the train to Doncaster, then getting one of these really rickety little shuttle trains to Hull.

"It was a weird place. It was a slot machine arcade that sold food, that I remember being full of lots of mothers and babies. It was obviously a popular place to meet up. Revolution was above it, in an old-fashioned, wood-paneled office suite. Hull was famไous for having its own independent telephone system, and this office was hooked up to that. It had a real 1940s feel to it. Very aus📖tere.

"Charles and I would sit up there eating these lovely bacon baps we'd bought downstairs, and talk about the story and go over the designs." It's on these visits where Steve Oades would show Gibbons how to turn his characters into in-game sprites, and he found this new way of creating art both challenging and inspiring.

"I've always found that you become creative when you've got restrictions," he says. "You only had 32 colours and a handful of pixels to work with. I learned a lot of these now arcane and primitive skills, but I enjoyed collaborating with these guys a lot. Even the trip up to Hull felt like a bit of an adventure, once in a while."

Gibbons also wrote and illustrated a short comic, which was bundled in with the game. It wasn't essential to enjoying it, but filled in some of Foster's backstory. "I produced that completely by myself and it gave players a good look at the characters," says Gibbons. "In the game Foster is this blocky collection of pixels, but in the comic we had some detailed drawings of him, and you could carry that image in your head. I think it did a good job of setting the scene."

The idea of an established, respected creative from another medium working on a video game was rare at the time, and I ask Gibbons what it feels like being one of the first examples of that. "I've always had an interest in technological things," he says. "I'm always very happy at the place where art and science meet, so it did feel good to be at the cutting edge with Beneath a Steel Sky. But the skills were ultimately very similar—making sure the art supports the story and having the ability to draw and write in a very economical way."

25 years later, Revolution continued the story of Joey and Robert Foster in a sequel, . This is available now on PC, and is coming to Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation in November. Once again, Gibbons is heavily involved in its story and design, and it's loaded with fun callbacks to the original. "I'm really looking forward to seeing people's reactions to the console versions," he says. "I've enjoyed working on both games, and as to whether we'll ever make a third, I don't know. That's up to people other than me. But it's great sitting here, all these years later, being able to talk so positively about how it all turned out."

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