Founded in 1989, Revolution Software got its start with Lure of the Temptress, an advanced 3D point-and-click adventure that utilized Revolution’s proprietary Virtual Theater engine. “We reached the end (of Lure of the Temptress) and it was the most intense time to test and control it,” recalls Charles Cecil, co-founder of Revolution alongside Tony Warriner, Noirin Carmody and David Sykes. “And the problem was that as a company with one team and one project we had to start the next one at the same time.” Hence the developmental detox for Warriner and Cummins, sent to a remote family cottage in Cecil in North Wales. When the pair returned, they had a twelve-page draft for Revolution’s next game.
“I said, ‘Look, just go to Wales for a week and come back with a complete design,’” grins Cecil, recognizing the greatness of this simple sentence.
How did the creative process go? “I don’t know,” Warriner laughs. “It was one of those creative zones, where things kind of flow together, where you don’t really know how you did it or how you got into that mode.”
Before Warriner and Cummins left for Wales, several ideas for Revolution’s next game had been floating around the office: one of the main influences was Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, and that it should be set in Australia. “So we had that design, that concept of Australia and the cities in the desert,” Warriner continues. “But it was like, what’s the game going to be?” The final game, sketched in North Wales, would become one of the most revered point-and-click games of all time.
In Beneath a Steel Sky, the player is Robert Foster, an orphan raised by a tribe of Aboriginal people in an area known as ‘The Gap’, a wilderness between towering megacities. When security officers from Union City arrive and wreak havoc, Foster is brought back to town. After giving his guards a chance, he stands on a steel walkway, ready to explore the dystopian city and expose the innate corruption and exploitation at the heart of this seemingly advanced society.
Under the direction of Charles Cecil, Beneath a Steel Sky – currently known as Underworld – continued production, using an improved and updated version of Lure’s Virtual Theater engine. In terms of player interactivity and user interface, however, the most significant change was Revolution’s shift away from the traditional point-and-click trend of clicking on named phrases or commands.
“I think there was a famous meeting very early on with a producer at Virgin called Simon Jeffrey,” Warriner recalls. “And to his credit, he said, ‘Get rid of all that crap. Just click left and right.’ And we said, ‘You’re right!'” Instead of selecting the correct action from a list of verbs and commands, the player simply clicks the mouse to display the commands.
“These listed choices are wasting the player’s time because only one or two will work,” Cecil notes. “By offering only two actions – interacting and watching – we greatly reduced the number of permutations. But then we were criticized that the game was too easy. That’s kind of a price you have to pay.” The interface, further refined for Revolution’s next hit, Broken Sword, is today a template for the point-and-click genre.
For the story and visual tones of Steel Sky, Revolution was keen to move away from the light-hearted approach of the genre’s leader, LucasArts. “I mean, Monkey Island was a great game,” Warriner explains, “but we thought the humor was too much. That’s why we always tried to have a dark, gritty and believable central theme, with our own dry humor on top of that. ” Cecil nods in agreement. “We wanted to have much more believable puzzles for people to solve, because they were true to the context, character motivation and environment of the time. We wanted it to be different.”
Steel Sky’s stunning visuals were also a world away from LucasArts’ bright and vibrant games, inspired as they were by Brazil and, consequently, the book that inspired George Orwell’s 1984 Gilliam film. essential facet here was artist Dave Gibbons, who Cecil had worked with while at Activision when the publisher was trying to develop a video game version of the alt-superhero graphic novel Watchmen. Cecil continues the story: “Dave was pretty clear that he didn’t actually own the rights (to Watchmen); I think DC owned them, but I can’t remember why it never moved forward. It was a shame because it did could have been a good license.”
However, the work was not in vain: Cecil remembered Gibbons when it came to Beneath a Steel Sky. “Dave had a really good name and it felt like there was an opportunity to have him not only endorse the game, but also contribute. We sent him an Amiga because he was so excited to get into characters designs in DPaint.” Ultimately, Gibbons would also design much of Steel Sky’s emotional backdrop and the game’s overall design. Plus of course the comic that comes in the game’s big black box. “I think maybe the Australian setting comes from Dave,” thinks Cecil, “where the richest and most privileged live high up, where the air is cleaner.” Revolution even tried to lure the player away from Australia, using London names such as St James (a real Sydney tube station). “The whole Australia thing was meant to be downplayed, but then Dave drew kangaroos in the comic book, which kind of gave it away!” laughs Warriner.
As Beneath a Steel Sky grew, Warriner and Sykes continued developing the Amiga and porting their work to the PC. “It wasn’t a big piece of programming by today’s standards,” says Warriner. “It would take me two weeks to recreate that engine today, with modern platforms, libraries and so on.” Les Pace and Steve Ince helped bring Gibbons’s photos to the screen; James Long joined Warriner and Sykes in coding; Steve Oades directed the animation; and Tony Williams and Dave Cummins wrote the script and composed the game’s futuristic music, with the latter also developing Steel Sky’s futuristic storyline.
“It was quite a small team,” says Warriner, “and everyone was quite talented at their own particular thing, even though we were all very different types of people, so bickering was inevitable.” Working from the Revolution office in Hull, the team breathed Steel Sky as the developers and their game poured into the pubs and bars at the weekend. “It was seven days a week, late nights and a lot of pressure,” Warriner recalls. ‘And no money. But there was a lot of creative stuff going on.”
In stark contrast to many video games today (and in the 1990s), there were no spreadsheets, focus groups, or publisher involvement. “Steel Sky just got cut out,” Cecil smiles. “It was like, let’s make this game, and every day it would progress towards completion. It ended up being so much more than the sum of its parts. It’s a game with a soul.” As Cecil goes on to reveal, Revolution’s strong relationship with publisher Virgin helped immensely, and was sorely tested towards the end of Steel Sky’s development. “Virgin was very supportive, and yes, we kept running out of money. But the company found creative ways to fund it a little more.”
One of these methods was to commission an Amiga CD32 version of Beneath a Steel Sky, adding voices to the existing game. At this point Cecil tells a story of recalcitrant Shakespearean actors, fond of drinking at lunch and, er, other recreational activities that involved adjusting their accents from morning to afternoon. “We struggled through this, and it was absolutely horrible,” Cecil laughs. “And in the end we were saved by Konami. The company had licensed the game to the US and said, ‘We’re terribly sorry, we can’t understand a word these people are saying!'” The situation allowed Revolution to be jettisoned what it had already recorded and start over from scratch.
Beneath a Steel Sky was released in early 1994 on the Commodore Amiga and later on the PC to critical acclaim. “Just like with Lure, we really innovated and came up with new ideas,” says Cecil. “People seemed to forgive their weaknesses if you did that, because things were changing so quickly. At the time, we had no direct relationship with our audience; we sold the game to the publisher, who sold it to the retailers, who sold it to the public. We just had to wait with bated breath – luckily the reception was fantastic, which put us on an all-time high.”
Subsequent sales of Steel Sky forged Revolution’s relationship with Virgin, leading to a three-game deal with the publisher, paving the way for the incredible success of the Broken Sword series. “(Beneath a Steel Sky) was a pivotal game for Revolution,” Cecil muses. “Adventure gaming scholars recognize it for the design changes, and for many it’s a groundbreaking game. And you know, one of the great privileges of writing adventure games is the people who say these games change their lives in the same way way have changed.” But in many ways an adventure game can be even more powerful, and it’s a great compliment when we hear people say they’ve been deeply affected by Beneath a Steel Sky.”
Today, Beneath a Steel Sky is rightly recognized as a defining game of its genre, the legacy of which is further detailed in Tony Warriner’s excellent book, Revolution: The Quest for Game Development Greatness. “Part of the reason I wrote that book was to try to understand how we did it,” he explains, “to try to get a handle on that feeling and maybe reproduce it somehow. Because it was hard. And there was a lot of pressure. But creatively, it was great.”
