Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil on redefining and refining the graphic adventure game

Revolution is a studio name that evokes change and new ideas, and adventure videogame designer Charles Cecil has never stopped innovating. After cutting their teeth on Amiga titles Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky, his York-based team found commercial success in 1996 with Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, a globetrotting point-and-click that departed from the absurdism of the Monkey Islands of the day.

Broken Sword introduced the gaming world to laidback, dry-witted American tourist George Stobbart, and his investigative partner Nico Collard, a sharp-tongued, ice-cool French photojournalist. Thrown together by an act of terrorism at a Parisian café, the pair find themselves enmeshed in a vast conspiracy. Inspired by adventure films and comics, and boasting a breathing game world, in which characters went about their business irrespective of the player, Broken Sword found the sweet spot between humour and gravitas, and developed a cult following – fans suspect that among them may well have been The Da Vinci Code’s Dan Brown.

Now the original game has been sanded down, tweaked and upscaled for a fresh re-release: Broken Sword Reforged. A sixth installment, Parzival’s Stone, is in early development. I meet with the series’ creator in Naples, where Napoli Comicon are celebrating his contributions to digital storytelling. Much like George and Nico’s first encounter, my opportunity to interview Cecil is fortuitous. It’s delightful to find him abroad, out of place but in his element.

Blake Simons: You’ve returned to the original Broken Sword game to remaster it a couple of times now. What have you found when you’ve done so?

Charles Cecil: With the Reforged version, there was the opportunity to review how well the story flowed. There are things that had been worrying me for 30 years. For example, how did the Templars get to the church underneath Bannockburn before George and Nico? So what I’ve had the privilege to do with Broken Sword 1, and I hope to do for Broken Sword 2 also, is to retrospectively go over it and look for continuity errors from narrative and graphic perspectives, and fix them without changing any of the dialogue. It’s quite cathartic.

For example, a clown puts down an accordion on a stool – a bomb, which explodes. But when you get to the game itself, the scorch mark is from the middle of the room, and the stool itself is untouched. When you play a game, you’re looking for these inconsistencies – more so than in a film. Continuity errors might appear to be clues, and when the player realises that they’re actually just mistakes, they lose confidence in the world that’s been set up. So it’s important to get it right.

There were a couple of instances where I did want to change the game. There was a very stereotypical depiction of a carpet salesman. He’d come from Tintin, and Tintin was written in the 1940s, when these things weren’t taken so seriously. I met a really nice Syrian journalist a few years ago in the House of Commons. He said there are no games with Syrians in, and that he was so proud of Broken Sword. I said “But this thing worries me.” He said “Oh, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got lots of really wonderful characters.” Which we do, but it still worried me. So how brilliant. Just tiny tweaks.

Both at the time of the original release and now, games were seeking to emulate cinema. But Broken Sword recognised that games could be smarter than simply emulating a medium wholesale. You applied principles of film screenwriting in penning the game, you made a game engine that functions like a virtual immersive theatre, and you drew from lesser-discussed history and literary influences. Tell me about fusing these elements.

Thank you for such a generous introduction. Yes, there are extraordinary similarities between film and video games – but there’s a core constraint. In the mid-90s, I attended a lecture by [scriptwriting guru] Robert McKee, who I found very inspirational. He talked about the fact that your inciting incident – when you radically change the life of the protagonist – is what the rest of the story is about. 

I remember watching Manchester by the Sea (2016) a couple of years ago, which I loved, and have watched many times. The inciting incident of that film happens over a third of the way through. The acting is wonderful, and you’re built up to that. Because you have so much empathy, the writers skilfully put off the inciting incident and get away with it. When it happens, it’s an absolute gut punch. 

In a video game, you’re an active participant. You need to have empathy, but you also need to have enough motivation. That inciting incident generally needs to happen before the game starts, because the player has to be motivated, and they have to care enough about their character. It’s a substantial difference from film. It’s why we have cutscenes.

For Beneath a Steel Sky, we worked with comic book artist Dave Gibbons. He drew a beautiful eight-page comic book. And in those eight pages, which only took a few minutes to read, the skill of a top-of-their-game comic book artist meant that we could convey enough information – particularly since on formats like the Amiga, all you’re seeing is a few pixels. That comic book creates the empathy, the sense of urgency, the motivation for the player. By the time we did Broken Sword, there was more opportunity. Resolution was bigger. Instead of 32 colours, we could have as many colours as we wanted. So the constraint didn’t exist in the same way.

There’s also the opportunity to give the player more information than the protagonist, or vice versa – the dramatic irony. You have to do it very carefully, because, unlike a film, you have a more associational relationship with your character. On one hand, it gives us the opportunity to write a story that is conveyed through exploration, through solving puzzles – and it can be incredibly powerful for it. When people talk about the games they’ve played, they remember so much of the story. If it had been a film, they would have remembered the general ambience.

But we have these constraints, and that’s one of the reasons why so many characters are cliché. If you have a starship trooper soldier that talks in a deep American voice, you know exactly what he’s going to be – you’ve had your introduction to what you as a player will be doing, and you empathise or you don’t. Likewise, all those wizards. Everybody knows from Lord of the Rings what a wizard does.

It’s striking how believably adult Broken Sword’s characters are. That level of maturity in videogame storytelling remains rare. What made you take that gamble? The first Broken Sword game was an immediate success, but was there ever concern that maybe the market wasn’t looking for this?

The script writer, Dave Cummins, and I fought like cat and dog. I wanted it to be humorous, yes, but I didn’t want it to be slapstick. I would write the stories and design the puzzles, and he would write the ludicrous characters. I think when he wrote Beneath a Steel Sky, there was too much slapstick, and with Broken Sword, I think he was about right. Part of our problem is that Virgin, our publisher at the time, wanted gritty violence – they didn’t want adventure games. So they were always trying to push us to write more serious games without that level of humour. We wrote a game called In Cold Blood, which was much more serious. It didn’t have that humour, and it didn’t have Dave Cummins writing it. So the answer is absolutely yes.

It’s wonderful to come to Italy. I’m rather proud that a game created in England is so successful. We were lucky that Virgin took localisation incredibly seriously, which most publishers at the time didn’t. It was pointed out by my host here that they used famous film voices. He said it was wonderful, because it felt like adventure games were being taken seriously. And in Germany, for Nico, they used the voice of Scully from The X-Files, [Franziska Pigulla].

Each Broken Sword instalment has adopted a different visual approach. I’m intrigued by the ‘Super 2D’ aesthetic of the upcoming Broken Sword 6. You’ve worked with 2D frames, you’ve worked with 3D areas. Do you feel that you’ve now pinpointed the best of both worlds with this new style?

I personally think ‘Super 2D’ is very beautiful. It feels like 2D, but as you move around, it moves in a completely dynamic way. We need to crack the way the characters look. We’re also working to make sure that the player feels that they have more agency over the story. I think it’s important in this day and age that rather than just telling a story, that the player feels that they have some sort of ownership and agency about how it develops – which is hard when you’re doing a linear narrative.

We’re not prepared to completely change. We have fabulous, loyal, wonderful fans, and we’re not going to alienate them by coming up with something that they don’t feel conforms to what they expect and want. We have a lovely community, and we’re very lucky in that regard. There are lots of toxic communities, especially in video games. I’m still absolutely horrified by what happened with GamerGate. It was a dark time in the games industry. Our community is diverse, it would be ludicrous to be misogynistic. Probably 50% of our fans are women. It’s a very nice place to be.

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: Reforged is out now.