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

[electricbern]

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

That's because the US does not use metric.

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.

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.

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: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:First?

[dougisfunny]

NO CARRIER