COLLECTED WORKS

CHARLES CECIL

From exploding lightbulbs to the Knights Templar – via Ron Howard and the Daleks

By Christian Donlan

Squint and Charles Cecil, the managing director of Revolution Software, looks a little like the young globetrotting reporter Tintin. There’s the same tuft of hair, the same open, cheerful face. And for the past four decades, Cecil has helped create games that often feel like Hergé-penned adventures: Inca Curse, Espionage Island, the Broken Sword series.

Beginning in the early ’80s, Cecil has built a reputation for combining obscure, ancient history with contemporary conspiracies; exotic locales with layered point-and-click puzzles. Broken Sword is probably the best-loved of all Cecil’s works – such is the series’ popularity that right now, some 28 years since it was originally released, a new 4K remaster of the second game, The Smoking Mirror, is in development. But when we meet with the veteran designer to reflect on his life’s work, what’s fascinating is the number of games he’s worked on that don’t fit his ostensible profile.

Lure Of The Temptress is a Tolkien-style medieval fantasy – albeit one that was originally lacking both a lure and a temptress (more on this later). Beneath A Steel Sky combines conventional sci-fi and cyberpunk, and World Cup Football, as you can probably guess, is a footie sim, created without any official player or league licences. Like Tintin (and, of course, Broken Sword’s George Stobbart), Cecil’s career has taken him both literally and metaphorically around the world.

Nevertheless, the adventure game genre remains his spiritual home. “Adventure games are a niche,” Cecil says. “We don’t sell as many as the shooters or the football games, but we have a very sizeable, wonderfully passionate community. People talk about the fact that they first discovered Broken Sword with their parents. Now they’re playing with their children. It is the most extraordinary privilege: three generations of passionate fans. My greatest hope is that in 20 years’ time there’ll be a fourth generation.”

But that’s the future. Before Charles Cecil even started to carve out his legacy, he was a university student, writing videogames in his spare time…