![]() ![]() So Dave drew the backgrounds in pencil, and an artist called Les Pace would paint them, we would scan them in and then animate those pixels.” What we wanted to do was to create this interactive comic book feel. ![]() And we’d actually, incredibly, serendipitously, managed to recruit people locally who were extraordinary sprite artists. And that allowed him to create sprites himself. “That was the beginnings of Revolution.”Īnd so in their snug new office, and with one of the greatest comic book artists of his generation contented by a bacon butty, the team went to work on Beneath a Steel Sky. The office above the arcade was actually a huge upgrade on their previous place, which was freezing cold, with a gas heater that gave out fumes, so you had to balance freezing with choking. “Revolution, at that point, was absolutely penniless,” Cecil stresses. Just one of the reasons for its cult status was the involvement of Dave Gibbons, who in the post- Watchmen early nineties, was among the most feted comic book creators in the world, having already built a fanbase as one the most prolific artists in the early days of 2000AD.Ĭecil and Gibbons had met when Cecil was at Activision and was trying to hunt down the game rights to Watchmen, Gibbon’s didn’t have them but the two got on and years later decided to collaborate. And since then Beneath has become a cult classic, enjoyed by waves of fans since, who stumbled upon it in varying ways, more on that later. The game was a commercial and critical hit in the heyday of adventure games, with Revolution’s title being every bit the equal of Lucasarts’ and Sierra’s efforts – no mean feat. While Revolution had earlier games, and is of course best known for its Broken Sword series, it is 1994’s Beneath a Steel Sky that starts a perfect story arc, not only of this tale, but of the huge changes in games publishing across the last two decades. We look at the new title, the journey its predecessor took to cult classic status, and how (appropriately) after almost giving up on the genre in frustration, Revolution found a solution in an unexpected place.īENEATH A STEEL SKY Charles Cecil (left) and Dave Gibbons working on Beneath a Steel Sky. Patches will, no doubt, quickly fix the issues, at which point Beyond a Steel Sky will join its stablemates as a modern classic.Now, 25 years after Beneath a Steel Sky, Revolution and Gibbons have once again collaborated, with the release of Beyond a Steel Sky. ![]() ![]() A handful of bugs, including one that breaks the game and forces you to retreat to earlier saves, threatens the delicate relationship of trust that exists between player and designer, as each time you get stuck, you question whether the fault lies with your reasoning or simply a glitch. Unfortunately the game has a few logic issues of its own. Soon, Foster acquires a device that enables him to hack into everything from automated bridges to drinks machines and rewrite their internal logic to, for example, dispense free cans of soda, adding a technical dimension to the puzzle wrangling. The incessant challenge could be offputting were it not for the quality of the writing, which is thoroughly witty and engaging throughout. As players of Revolution’s classic Broken Sword series might expect, this is a world of nested puzzles each breakthrough is always met by some new, arcane resistance. ![]()
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