25 Years with Charles Cecil – Part 2 (1997-2015)

[b]Ingmar[/b]: In 2009 you moved on with a remake of Broken Sword 1 with the Director’s Cut. It seems that  was incredibly successful, selling a lot of copies, and it was obviously a very good choice to go that way. Can you tell me a little bit about how the whole thing came along?

[b]Charles[/b]: Well, a lot of people had said how the DS would be ideal for a point-and-click adventure. And then I saw a petition: “We demand that Revolution write Broken Sword on the Nintendo DS.” So I put together a proposal, and we pitched it to Ubisoft. And I have to say Ubisoft were fantastic to work with. And they decided to commission the game, which was fantastic. We had no money, so they had to fund it. But they didn’t demand rights beyond the DS and the Wii version, which gave us the option to exploit the game ourselves across other platforms. So come 2009, we were approached by Apple, who asked us to consider writing our adventures for the iPhone. And we were very excited, very flattered that Apple should do that. But in some ways we were lucky, because we’d put a lot of work into making the game work with a stylus on the DS, so we were kind of halfway there already.

We really wanted to beat LucasArts’ Monkey Island onto the iPhone. And we did. While we put most of our very limited budget into the UI and just ported the graphics across as they were, LucasArts focused on graphics and very little on UI. So our UI was a lot better than theirs. And ultimately, Broken Sword 1: Director’s Cut got a Metacritic score on iPhone of 91%, which was considerably higher than Monkey Island. I think we were a lot smarter in the way that we approached that particular version.

[b]Ingmar[/b]: So when you approached Broken Sword 2 Remastered, which was released in 2010, in what ways did your experience from the first remake have an impact on the second?

[b]Charles[/b]: Oh, we used the same system, with some enhancements. Actually we have been pretty lucky with the ports. We began with Beneath a Steel Sky for iPhone. At that point the iPhone resolution was pretty low, and the resolution of the original Beneath a Steel Sky assets was about the same. Then the iPhone resolution increased, and it fitted Broken Sword 1 perfectly. And then it increased again, and we did some tweaks for Broken Sword 2 to increase the resolution dynamically. Then of course for Broken Sword 5, we were able to draw it in 1080p. So each time we’ve published an adventure, we’ve found that the resolution is ideal for the game at that particular time.

So yeah, Broken Sword 2 did have some enhancements. A big difference was that Broken Sword 1: Director’s Cut had been based on the re-implemented version of Broken Sword 1 for Nintendo GBA, and there were an enormous number of bugs that we had to fix because that version had been very, very buggy, I’m embarrassed to admit. We weren’t responsible for the QA [in that version]; our publisher BAM were responsible for testing it, and then Nintendo obviously for giving it the final approval. And that meant that when Ubi got hold of Director’s Cut, they have an absolutely awesome QA, and the QA ripped it to bits and found huge numbers of bugs, which took us a long, long time to fix. With Broken Sword 2, we had the advantage of using the original PC data, which was actually a lot cleaner, and it made the game a lot quicker to write. But fundamentally, we used the UI that had come across from Broken Sword 1.

In 2010 we were invited by Apple to participate in a promotion called ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’, in which the developer sets the game to free for a day. And I was worried because in doing so I thought that there would be this latent demand, that [people] would get it for free who would otherwise have paid for it. But we did the promotion, because when Apple asks you to do this sort of thing, you don’t say no. We had two-and-a-half million downloads in one day, which was absolutely spectacular. We put the price back up to full price the next day, and the sales were six times what they’d been the day before. Broken Sword 2 had just released, and Broken Sword 2 sales went shooting up, and it had greatly increased sales as well. And for me that was absolutely fascinating, because it showed that everything we’d learned about physical marketing might as well go out of the window, particularly with such large numbers. We had huge support from Apple, and the game did very well, and it gave us a lot of confidence. It took us from the brink of bankruptcy, which is where we were in 2007, and meant that we not only could pay off our overdrafts, but we could move forward. And we decided in late 2011 that we were going to start working on a new Broken Sword game, Broken Sword 5.