Charles Cecil, Revolution Software founder and creator of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken Sword, isn’t sure if “point-and-click is relevant for 2023.” He’s banking that it still can be though, with a remake of the first game and a new sixth installment revealed at Gamescom last month. “Anybody that ass🐼umes [they are or aren’t relevant] is a bit of an idiot. Ultimately, all 💛that matters is whether the people that play games [think they are].”
For me, th💯e point-and-click genre brings up memories of growing up in the ‘90s. I spent endless hours pointing and clicking around different settings in frustration while my parents refused to let me call the premium number to find out how to solve whatever puzzle I was stuck on.
We’ve seen a resurgence in the genre in recent years. Last year, Return to Monkey Island revived another classic series, and an increase in successful new indies like Lucy Dreaming, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, and The Case of the Golden Idol. Broken Sword making a comeback right now feels natural.
Cecil says it only matters whether the p🔴eople who play point-and-clicks think they’re still relevant, and as a die-hard fan, I absolutely do. But the more important question is ‘how relevant is the genre to new players?’, and that’s what Cecil has been exploring.
“Everybody said that these adventures were dead,” Cecil tells me. “There's no interest in yesterday's genre. So the big question for Broken Sword is, is it just a genre? We've got our hardcore fans. We've got people who played the game. But for a new generation, we've got these youngsters—I had this one 14 year old who played [Broken Sword], and he said, 'My unfamiliarity with the genre left me feeling as though I was discovering video games for the first time. It was a pure joy to play.' To me, that was really important. This is a kid who is very much part of the generation after, and all these hardcore games he plays are $100 million games, but this was a genre he didn't even know existed.”
It’s not the first time Cecil has been told that point-and-click is dead. Sitting in a small booth at Gamescom, he has manꦫy stories and anecdotes of what Revolution Software had to fight to achieve over🌳 the years and the naysayers that hounded them along the way.
“When we finished Broken Sword 1, we were working with Virgin Interactive,” Cecil says. “In Europe, they were fantastic. I loved working with them. In America, [Virgin Interactive’s] president took me out for lunch and told me that adventures were dead. He didn't want to publish any more. That was after Broken Sword 1, which was hugely, hugely successful.
“The wise men as they were then, they go, ‘Oh, yes, point and click 𝄹is dead.’ Something else that was said to me was that PC was going to die as a game platform. Ultimately, all that re🎉ally matters is what gamers think.”
Cecil explains that back then, the team was blinkered by the system. Their games were commissioned by a publisher, the publisher sorted t♈he retailers, the retailers sold to the audience, and so Revolution Software was four steps away from knowing what anyone said. “We could only really believe what we heard from the publisher or what we read in the press. We had no other way.”
It’s strange yet captivating to hear all these stories of how Revolution Software defied the odds. I look back and think of the series as hugely successful, especially with the first titles, and I never considered the challen🅰ges the team faced in getting there. It’s hard to believe that Broken Sword could easily have never happened, with the f🐬irst game seemingly only being published because Cecil asked for a favour from a friend.
Invited by Phil Harrison to check out Sony’s then-new console the PS1, at the time referred to as the PSX, Cecil went to London, saw the dinosaur tech demo most of us are now familiar with, and then made his move. “I pitched Broken Sword, and they weren't very excited. Then I went to Virgin Interactive, and they went, ‘This will not work on PlayStation, at all’. So I went back to Sony, and I kind of had a relationship with Phil, so I convinced them to just give it a go. Just in case. Nobody was excited.”
“Nine out of ten from the Official PlayStation Magazine with five or six pages, extensive coverage in Germany, France, and the UK,” Cecil tel𒊎ls me proudly about Broken Sword’s post launch success. “In those days, the official PlayStation Magazine had a circulation of 600,000. We had a captive audience that went to a million and a half people. The game sold hundreds of thousandꦰs of copies.”
As 💝I think back, that was likely how I first heard of Broken Sword, too. Games media didn’t exist then like today, and we lived by that magazine. We’d collect the demo discs and read through the glossy pages about all the latest games. I recall tearing♔ out pages and presenting them to my parents to say, ‘get me this game for my birthday.’
💫“When the Official PlayStation Magazine did a survey of the best PlayStation games ever—this was around 2000—Broken Sword 2 was at number five,” Cec♏il tells me. “We were ahead of some of the Tomb Raiders. It was phenomenal. Broken Sword 1 was at number ten, I think. We were in the top ten best PlayStation games ever, two games in that.”
Despite the success of the first two Broken Sword titles, Revolution Software became virtually bankrupt as the publishing model was stacked against developers in the early 2000s. The third and fourth Broken Sword games released weren&r𓄧squo;t as successful, and the team were not as happy making them.
“We were working with the publisher THQ, and the publishing agreement was just dreadful for developers,” Cecil says about the 3D Broken Sword titles. “For Broken Sword 3, we worked for THQ. We'd been paid in dollars—yes, we should have hedged against the dollar—the dollar plunged, and we had to borrow £200,000 to finish the game. THQ earned $10 million. They made a $5 million profit. It just was bad business. But developers were in a really weak position. So Broken Sword 4 was [made] under much more duress. It was so stressful.” It got to the point where if they didn’t get Broken Sword Out soon, Cecil would “go bankrupt.”
The reason Broken Sword 3 was 3D was because no one would have let them do it in 2D, saying, “The success of PlayStation drove everybody to think that everything should be visceral 3D aimed at young men, and the diversitওy that existed before that just went. The whole marketing and everything was about visceral 3D to young men.”
It’s strange to think ♉about this, as to me, Broken Sword will always be a PlayStation title. Cecil also acknowledges his love of Sony and everything it did for them, so it’s bizarre to think there was this general consensus of what gamers wanted that held back developers — a consensus that didn’t necessarily align with what many gamers actually wanted.
I ask Cecil whet𒅌her he would ever consider remaking Broken Sword 3 and 4 in🅠 the original style or, more specifically, the 2.5D style the series has adopted. After immediately lamenting the box puzzles he hates, he tells me that these games will always be in 3D, and to entirely redo them would be too much.
“At the moment, we're really focused on [Broken Sword] 1, 6, and possibly 2,” he says. “But if that works out, I would love to rework Broken Sword 4. A lot of people say they really like it, but the control systems aren't very good. It was done under duress. Some bits are good, I think that it's weak enough for me to say, ‘Give me the freedom to say it's the same story, but just address the weak puzzles, address elements of it, and come up with what Broken Sword 4 should have been.’ I would love to, with the benefit 20 years later, look at what this game really is.”
Cecil also lamen🌠ts the inclusion of George fighting a dragon, “If I were to go back to that, I think I would do it as a dream. I’d still have it, of course. You’d have this wonderful situation to remake it, but let’s render it a different way, so when George wakes up, he doesn’t know whether it’s tru🅰e or not.”
Revolution Software did not give up after the stumble of the 3D titles. Broken Sword 1 was ported to Game Boy Advance, then re-released as the Director’s Cut with new content for Nintendo Wii and DS in 2009. Yet it was a later port that♎ truly helped the team reinvent itself for a new audience.
“Apple contacted us and said, ‘We think the games would work well on this new platform called the iPhone’,” Cecil says. “We'd heard all about iPhones. They were much too expensive for us to buy, but you know, we were huge Apple fans. We did a very good job and got 91 percent on Metacritic. We put our heart and soul into it.”
This time, the team took a more hands-on approach. Cecil went to the flagship Apple store in Regent Street and spoke to the manager about a potential launch. That was how Revolution Software found themselves planning a Broken Sword event sandwicꦚhed between a Robbie Williams launch and the cast of The Vampire Diaries coming into the store.
Cecil says the team had “no money,” but the store was able to host it free of charge to promote the phones. “We had two weeks to get everything together. Our composer was a guy called Barrington Pheloung, a wonderful composer, and we got Dave Gibbons along because he’d done a comic book, and he was going to sign comic books. I was like, ‘This is o🍒ur one opportunity to reinvent ourselves and the brand.’ But will anybody come? When the big day came, hundreds of people were queuing along Regent Street. It was just brilliant. There were too many people. It was just an absolutely joyful event”
That’s what Cecil wants to achieve again with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken Sword - Shado🍌w of the Templars: R🧸eforged and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Broken Sword - Parzival's Stone. “Another relations🎃hip for Broken Sword, for Revolution, and the genre as a whole, in the same way as when we came to Apple, and we reinvented Broken Sword for the iPhone and the touchscreen.”
Revolution Software’s story didn’t pause with the Apple launch, though. In 2012, the team used Kickstarter to fund Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse. “We were really, really poor. Broken Sword came out and did really well on the iPhone. We earned a few hundred thousand pounds, and that allowed us to then do Broken Sword 2 without slave labour. That money then funded prototyping for Broken Sword 5, but we had no money. I think people realised there was a complete sincerity [to the Kickstarter]. Other people are going, ‘Oh, fund us otherwise, it won't happen’. And we're going, 'Fund us, or it really won't happen.' I absolutely loved the relationship with our community.”
Cecil says he owes a huge debt of gratitude to their Kickstarter backers, not only for funding the game but for helping the team shape it, too. When the community gave feedback about things they didn’t like during development, such as how George looked, the team fixed it. “People went, 'Oh, my god, people are listening to us.' And I was going, 'Oh my God, we've got people who really care passionately, who are giving us information.' And there's this sort of virtuous circle."
Cecil admits Broken Sword 5 is “quite defensive and just a standard point and click”, but with Parzival's Stone, as well as being point-and-click, the team wants it to be more adventurous while including what people love. “That is the absolute central tenant. We must not alienate what people want.”
Revolution Software’s monetary reserves left over from Kickstarter and Apple are all being pumped into Reforged and continuing into Parzival's Stone. Cecil is confident that Reforged will be successful, especially as it’s never launched on modern consoles before, and that will help fund the rest of Parzival's Stone.
“If Broken Sword 1 bombs, we're kind of in trouble,” he says. “But it won't. We'll learn a lot. We'll make sure that the user experience is absolutely polished. We'll bring that across to 2, we'll bring that across to 6, and maybe even the other games as well.”
I’m eagerly awaiting Reforged and Parzival’s Stone, but that’s not all I’m excited about. The Broken Sword film has been an idea cooking for some time, and when I ask Cecil about this, he tells me they’re still working with a company on it. Cecil hopes that the success of Reforged, Parzival’s Stone, and potentially a Broken Sword 2 remaster could build the momentum needed to c🍸reate a tipping point, saying, “The success of the games would be the one that will take it from a maybe to a definitely.”
One thing’s f൲or certain: Revolution Softwℱare and Broken Sword’s story has not ended. This renaissance will reinvigorate the series and appeal to old fans and new players alike. It’s the perfect opportunity for me to replay and reacquaint myself with an old favourite, but for the new generation, like my young son, it’s a whole new experience.
