06 / wfmag.ccInterviewAttract Mode
Revisiting a
vision of the
future 25 years
later, in Beyond
a Steel SkyTHINGS
quarter of a century later
and the future has changed
significantly – what was once
predicted by the science
fiction documents of the
time, like the movies A.P.E.X. and Abraxas,
Guardian of the Universe, now seems
quaint. Beyond a Steel Sky is, therefore,
taking a different tack. The return of this
particular work of dystopian adventure
game fiction arrives once again from the
hands and brains of Revolution Software,
headed up by Charles Cecil, and artist
Dave Gibbons, who you’ll remember from
the original Beneath a Steel Sky, as well as
something called ‘Watchmen’.
This is no ‘greatest hits’ package, or
a studio returning to the well one too
many times – Beyond a Steel Sky is a big,
bold new adventure from Revolution.
It mixes traditional adventure game
mechanics of combining rubber chickens
with things to win (not an accurate
example), with a fully 3D engine and
in-depth hacking minigames, which allow
you to do some low-level programming.
In short, this is far more than just a cynical
rebirth of a 25-year-old series.
We spoke at length with Cecil for his
thoughts and feelings on Beyond, Beneath,
and plenty more.Why did it take so long to come back to
the Steel Sky universe?
Cecil: I first met Dave Gibbons when I
was head of development at Activision
in the late 1980s. I wanted to ask him
about whether we could get the rights
to Watchmen, and it turned out that we
couldn’t. But we stayed in touch and
then wrote Beneath a Steel Sky together.
The game has quite a cult following, and
we actually planned to do another game, a
sequel, pretty soon afterwards. But a lot
of publishers decided that the adventure
was dead. Indeed, our publisher didn’t
want to commission, despite the success
of the first Broken Sword on PC and
PlayStation. The general comment from
publishers was that adventures were dead
and the PC was dead.
To an extent, it was because the retailers
were taking very, very few PC titles.
Those that did took pretty obvious ones.
Adventures were being very much
marginalised by the big [retailers]. So, wefound ourselves in a position where we
weren’t actually able to write adventures
for quite some time. The ideas that we
discussed with Dave went by the wayside.
We’ve kept in touch; Dave’s a friend.
We kept talking about new ideas, working
together. A couple of years ago it felt to me
like the time was right for several reasons.
First, we proved with Broken Sword 5
that by going directly to our community,
particularly for validation of our ideas, but
also for a Kickstarter as well, it opened up
extraordinary opportunities to be able to
benefit from the input that we got from
our community on every aspect of the
project. Then the other reason was, with
the success of Broken Sword 5, I was veryA
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