Founded in 1989, Yorkshire-based Revolution Software hit the ground running with Lure of the Temptress, an advanced 3D point-and-click adventure that utilised Revolution’s own Virtual Theatre engine. “We were reaching the end [on Lure of the Temptress], and it was the most intense time, testing and checking it,” remembers Charles Cecil, co-founder of Revolution alongside Tony Warriner, Noirin Carmody and David Sykes. “And the problem was, as a one-team, one-project company, we were having to start the next one at the same time.” Hence the development detox for Warriner and Cummins, despatched to a remote Cecil family cottage in North Wales. When the pair returned, they had a 12-page design for Revolution’s next game.
“I said, ‘Look, just go off to Wales for a week and come back with a complete design’,” grins Cecil, acknowledging the enormity of this simple sentence.
So, how did the creative process work? “I don’t know,” laughs Warriner. “It was one of those creative zones, where things sort of flow, where you don’t really know how you’ve done it or how you got into that mode.”
Before Warriner and Cummins set off for Wales, several ideas for Revolution’s next game had percolated around the office: a prime influence 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 is the game going to be?” The eventual game, sketched out 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 Aboriginals in an area known as ‘The Gap’, a wilderness between towering megacities. When security officers arrive from Union City and cause havoc, Foster is taken back to the city. After giving his guards the slip, he stands on a steel walkway, ready to explore the dystopian city and uncover the innate corruption and exploitation at the heart of this seemingly advanced society.