22 / wfmag.cc
How Revolution survived the British games industryInterface
garnered a positive reception from the gaming
press at the time.
Afterwards, fans would have to wait a while
for a third instalment. Cecil blames a number of
reasons for this, the biggest being the pressure
to move Broken Sword into 3D. Retailers at
the time were lobbying publishers to publish
more 3D games, but Cecil still didn’t believe the
technology had advanced to a point where a
Broken Sword in 3D was tenable. The release of
Sierra On-Line’s Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the
Sacred, Blood of the Damned only reaffirmed
his belief.
“[Gabriel Knight 3] came out using very,
very primitive 3D and it looked horrible,’ he
says. “And I’m making no criticism, but it did
look horrible and it wasn’t a great experience.
We had no choice but to sit it out, because
people didn’t want 2D and I didn’t want to
produce it in 3D at that time.”DARKER DAYS
In the meantime, Revolution started working
on three new projects: Gold and Glory: Road to
El Dorado (2000), a video game tie-in for the
DreamWorks’ film of the same name; In Cold
Blood (2000), an adventure game for Sony
Computer Entertainment swapping ancient
civilisations and religious conspiracies for secret
agents and espionage; and Good Cop, Bad Cop,
an action game where a player’s choices would
affect how the story would play out.While In Cold Blood was a moderate success
for the studio, and lives on today as a cult classic
among fans of a certain age, Gold and Glory:
Road to El Dorado received a number of terrible
reviews and Good Cop, Bad Cop would ultimately
struggle to secure funding, get cancelled, and
fade into obscurity.
Around this time, conversations began in
earnest on the topic of a new Broken Sword
game. Licensing RenderWare, Cecil was
finally capable of making a true 3D sequel to
Broken Sword. The result, Broken Sword: The
Sleeping Dragon, launched only a couple years
later, in 2003, for Xbox, PlayStation 2, and
Microsoft Windows.Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon received
mostly positive reviews from the press and sold
extremely well, but unfortunately the agreement
made between Revolution and its publisher
THQ meant that THQ earned a profit of several
million dollars from the game’s success, while
Revolution suffered a huge financial loss.
“We’d closed the studio,” says Cecil. “So we’d
gone from 30 to 40 people, and we’d made
everyone redundant. And it was a horrible thing
to do. We had no studio at all. THQ came to us
and said, ‘Broken Sword 3 was successful – we
want to do Broken Sword 4.’ I said, ‘We don’t have
a studio. Also, we need to change the deal.’”
Despite having no development team, the
remaining members of Revolution got to work
on the next Broken Sword. They drew in the
Sheffield studio Sumo Digital to do most of
the game’s production, while Revolution itself
focused squarely on the design.
Broken Sword: The Angel of Death followed
for PC in 2006 and attracted some decent
reviews, though it still didn’t sell well enough
to fix Revolution’s financial worries. “We were
insolvent,” admits Cecil. “I remember talking“We were insolvent. I remember telling my wife,
‘We’re going to have to bankrupt the company’” Goats are a common enemy
that players will meet when
trying to solve puzzles in
the Broken Sword games.