Broken Sword Legend Speaks

JamesO writes to tell us that VideoGamer.com recently had a chance to sit down and talk to Charles Cecil, managing director of Revolution Software and father of Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series. "when the opportunity to interview the gaming legend presented itself at the launch of Raise the Game, a £450,000 campaign which aims to drive growth and innovation in the UK games industry, we jumped head first at the chance. Read on for news on the next Broken Sword, the possibility of a movie and the state of UK games development. Brace yourself, he pulls no punches ..."

Comments

Re:umm

[eddy]

Using that metric, neither are the C64 and the Amiga?

I think I just nailed you with that one sir.

As for the games, the first two were great! The rest seems to have sucked though. I played the demo of the third was almost bored to tears, and completely ignored the fourth due to that.

Re:umm

[electricbern]

Using that metric, neither are the C64 and the Amiga?

That's because the US does not use metric.

Before you call them legendary

[elrous0]

Can anyone explain what these games even ARE? Am I the only one who has never even heard of them?

Re:Before you call them legendary

[Anonymous Coward]

Brits assume anything that's popular in the UK is popular everywhere.

No. We just recognise that nowhere else matters.

Re:Before you call them legendary

[Syrente]

It was a critically aclaimed Point-and-Click adventure - one of the last before the genre croaked its terrible dying curse. Y'know the one, it's the reason Halo is popular.

In all fairness you should try playing it... if you liked the Monkey Island series then you'll like Broken Sword. The main character is also a proper American, too. The clever kind. We Brits don't feel the need to portray every American as dumb at every possible opportunity, you know. (insert suspicious eye movement here)

Re:Before you call them legendary

[Jason Earl]

apt-get install beneath-a-steel-sky

Re:Before you call them legendary

[servognome]

Americans thing they are right with things being popular everywhere else, but they wrong about that.

Then why is Coca-Cola the 2nd most recognized word in the world, a McDonald's found in over 100 countries, and Baywatch got viewed by 1.1 Billion people a week.... didn't say it was the good stuff that was popular everywhere else.

Re:Before you call them legendary

[tao]

scummvm has had support for Sam'n'Max for ages. Easiest way to play it is to copy all the files onto your computer and point scummvm at them (start scummvm, select "Add game...", point it at the directory where the samnmax.000 file is located (if I'm not all mistaken, all the files you really need are samnmax.000, samnmax.001, samnmax.c26, and monster.sou). Good luck!

Beneath a Steel Sky is Free

[BarneyL]

For those who have never played it Beneath a Steel Sky runs on just about anything through ScummVM.
Even better it is now freeware and you can legally download it from the same site for nothing. Go get it.

Pouring millions into game development?

[MiceHead]

Charles Cecil: I think [games are] too expensive. And, while I'll be very unpopular for saying that because the industry is based on it, I think there's going to be seismic shifts. People will only pay for the landmark releases and the hundred million pounds or dollars, you can only afford a few. You look on IMDB and you look at films, I was looking at a film, I'm a BAFTA judge, that costs $50 million to produce and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. It didn't even hit a million dollars at the Box Office. Now film can do that. How it can do that I just do not understand. How can you knowingly produce a film that costs $50 million, earn less than a million dollars at Box Office and then do the same thing again and again?

I'm going to jump onto the bandwagon and agree that this isn't tenable, and it's because we're ridiculously inefficient about content generation. A Gamasutra article from 2001 posits the following imaginary visual arts breakdown for a project with a budget of $1.1m:
.

ART AND GAME DESIGN (24 months)
Producer 10000 x 24 = 240000
Deisgner 3000 x 24 = 96000
3D Artist 3500 x 24 = 84000
Level Designer 3500 x 24 = 84000
Animator 1500 x 24 = 36000
2D Artist 1500 x 24 = 36000

That's over half the game's development budget to create textures, models, and levels, most of which the player will see only once. As it is, the industry's hits subsidize the misses. I think we'll be forced to look for ways to make individual artists more powerful in the next 5 years.

Re:First?

[dougisfunny]

NO CARRIER