“AI was an expensive mistake”: Charles Cecil on innovation, insolvency, and Broken Sword

“It’s very interesting to see the huge amount of money that EA was paid by Kushner and the [Saudi Arabia] sovereign wealth fund,” says Charles Cecil, head of Revolution Software – the York-based developer behind the Broken Sword series.

“But that’s at one end, where huge amounts of corporate finance come in, and venture capital. We’re at the other end. We don’t have any investment, we don’t even have an overdraft. We rely very much, maybe naively, on appealing directly to our community.”

It’s a reminder that away from the multi-billion dollar deals in the big league, the majority of the games industry is simply making ends meet from one contract to the next. And Revolution has had more than its fair share of struggles on that front in the past – to the point where for a while in the 2000s, it existed in name only.

“We have been on the edge many, many times,” says Cecil, pointing in particular to the financial lows Revolution experienced under publisher THQ during the making of Broken Sword 3 and 4. “That was the point at which the publishing model was so extraordinarily imbalanced [in favour of the publisher]. For Broken Sword 3, we borrowed almost a quarter of a million pounds to finish the game. THQ told us that the game had been very, very successful for them, and they must have made at least $5 million.”

Revolution, however, hardly saw any of that money. “It effectively drove us to the point of insolvency,” says Cecil. “We kept naively thinking that we were going to recoup. We almost recouped, we were within a millimetre. But publisher accounting is the same as Hollywood accounting in that as you get close to recouping, they’re always going to find something else to put against it.”

The saviour of Revolution came in the form of the rise of self-publishing. By putting out its old point-and-click adventures on the iPhone – and keeping the proceeds for itself rather than relying on hoped-for royalties – the studio was able to get back on its feet in the late 2000s. Since then, Revolution has embraced the crowdfunding model whole-heartedly. Its latest Kickstarter project – for the “Reforged” edition of Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror, the second game in the series – is due to launch imminently.

But Cecil admits that Kickstarter monies are far from enough to cover the true cost of funding a game – instead, the company relies heavily on back catalogue sales, which Cecil says are “pretty decent” for Revolution’s older titles. “By big publisher standards, it’s not a decimal point, but for us, it’s really good.”

Revolution raised more than £618,000 on Kickstarter for Broken Sword: Reforged (before things like Kickstarter’s fees and the cost of physical rewards were deducted). But the game’s true cost was much higher.

“Part of the reason is we have 30,000 frames of animation,” explains Cecil. “Each animation takes a skilled animator about an hour to do, so you’re talking about 30,000 hours times 15 dollars or pounds or euros an hour. You don’t get much change from half a million quid for the sprites alone.”

In the end, Cecil says that Broken Sword: Reforged sold very well. “And it’s just as well it did, because the game went so horrendously over budget that if it hadn’t sold well, we would’ve been in deep trouble.”

The budget overrun was at least partly down to AI – or rather, the fact that AI wasn’t as big a time saver as Revolution thought it might be.

“Everybody had sent us AI-generated images of the screens and said ‘You’ve got to use AI,'” recalls Cecil, who says the idea was to upscale the original 1996 Broken Sword backgrounds to 4K using generative AI, and then human artists would add the finishing touches.

“But the result was not enormously satisfactory, because there wasn’t really enough detail,” says Cecil. “It just wasn’t appropriate for us.” Instead, Revolution ended up redrawing the backgrounds from scratch, using the original artwork as a reference.

“It took more time, but you got better results,” he says. “So for Broken Sword 2, we’ve just done that, we are not using any sort of form of AI as far as the backgrounds and as far as the character sprites [are concerned].”

Looking back now, was it an expensive mistake to go down the AI route?

“Yes,” says Cecil. “But if I’d known how expensive it was going to be to [make Broken Sword: Reforged], there is no way that we would’ve ever had the balls to actually do it.”

The illusory promise of AI efficiency did, at least, give Cecil the confidence to kick off the project – and the resulting backlash was not even, he feels, entirely negative.

“I made statements that were said in good faith at the time, and that caused a lot of controversy. And I think that actually if you are taking a game that is 30 years old and you are reforging it, you’re enhancing it, actually having a little bit of controversy is not a bad thing, because it makes it feel relevant, it makes it feel contemporary.”

As they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Human effort

For the Reforged edition of Broken Sword 2, Revolution is partly relying on a team of animators in the Philippines to redraw all the many frames of animation in high resolution. “We have a very talented team in the UK, and we have quite a big team in Manila, because they have such an extraordinary history of producing cartoons,” says Cecil.

Fil-Cartoons, a Philippines-based division of Hanna-Barbera, did some of the animation work on Broken Sword 2 in 1997. The company is long gone, but Cecil says Revolution has been working with a Filipino firm that employs several former Fil-Cartoons staff. “So we’ve been working with them, not exclusively, but it’s rather nice to be able to work with the same people again after 30 years.”

However, Cecil remarks that the days of “really cheap” outsourcing are long gone. “Certainly, 20 years ago, you could go to China or Vietnam or wherever, and you would find that the costs were insanely low compared to Europe,” he says, adding that nowadays, the difference in price is much smaller. But part of the reason why Revolution is outsourcing animation work to Manila is because there are so many classical animators available there. “Our big difficulty in the UK is that everybody now coming out of college learns 3D rather than 2D – and we need 2D, we need digital painters.”

Revolution is also restoring some lines of speech that were recorded back in the 1990s but were cut at the time for various reasons. “It’s particularly a reward for huge fans who played the game many times and then come across new scenes or new lines,” says Cecil.

But speech is one area where AI really did pan out well for Revolution on the initial Reforged release. Cecil explains that they were unable to find the original recordings for the game, which were held by publisher Virgin Interactive and at this point are presumed lost. So the studio only had access to horribly compressed dialogue recordings, which they ran through enhancement software.

“But it was still very rough,” says Cecil, “and then at the time of release, a new piece of software called dxRevive came along, and that was much better.” This piece of software from Accentize uses machine learning to selectively enhance speech.

“So we absolutely scrambled to enhance the audio [using dxRevive], and it was a much better result,” says Cecil. “And then we released that as a patch as quickly as we could.”

Broken Sword 6

What of Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone? The sixth entry in the Broken Sword series was announced with a teaser trailer back in August 2023, but little has been seen of it since. The game is well advanced, says Cecil, but not to a level that meets the current moment.

He points to the Lync hacking element that was introduced for Beyond a Steel Sky in 2020, which allowed the player to reprogram certain systems. “Now that was a really, really strong idea, and we should have made more of it – and I should have seen at the time that we should have made more of it.

“With Broken Sword 6, we have a substantially designed game, we have substantially designed characters, and some of the dialogue written. Given that we haven’t done very much [with it] for quite some time, I would like to go back and, with the benefit of some time passing, look back at it and say, ‘What are the strong bits and what are the not strong bits?’

“Because this is a point and click adventure, but it needs to innovate. What we can’t do is just simply what’s gone before.”

He points to games like Disco Elysium, Kentucky Route Zero, and Oxenfree as examples that have pushed the medium forward. “People love innovation, and we innovated in our Broken Sword games. We need to innovate again. And so for Broken Sword 6, I’ll take a long, hard look, and then it’ll be a completely new pitch, based substantially on what we’ve done before, but making sure that we innovate.”

This might seem unnecessary, given the ongoing success of the studio’s remakes, but Cecil points to the sales of other games like Kentucky Route Zero which outpaced Broken Sword 5, the last new entry in the series. “And I think that the reason that these games outsell us is because they feel more innovative,” he says.

“Our Broken Sword games have been commercially successful, and I am super ambitious to then move forward with games that carry forward the spirit, but innovate more. I’m confident we will bring our audience along, [and] bring in a new audience as well.

Self-reliant

Cecil has endless stories of terrible decisions by publishing executives that have caused no end of problems for Revolution in the past. Yet ultimately, Revolution is the last one standing, with its previous publishing partners Virgin Interactive and THQ having long since collapsed into administration, in part because of their financial overreach.

“Both of those companies, they shone very brightly with venture capital money and corporate finance money,” muses Cecil. “But it didn’t work, and so they’ve all crashed, and new ones came up in their place.” A cautionary tale, perhaps, that explains the modern Revolution’s reluctance to resort to borrowing, along with its fiercely guarded independence.

Given how self-publishing gave Revolution a new lease of life, we have to ask a question that no doubt many indie studios are also pondering: do we even need publishers any more?

Charles is quick to point out that publishers still have great value when it comes to physical products, in terms of shipping or selling to retail: something that Cecil says is “way beyond our capacity.”

“People talk about physical being dead, and for most games they probably are, but we have such a loyal, wonderful community, and they want physical versions of the game.”

He recalls conversations from ten or fifteen years ago when “we were all sort of sitting sagely in the pub saying, ‘Physical is dead, everybody wants digital’,” and extolling the virtues of being able to ditch a cumbersome DVD collection. “But it should have been obvious that for things that people care about, they want a physical version,” he says. “They want the tactility. When I was a teenager, you’d go into somebody’s room and the first thing you’d do is you’d look through their record collection, and that defined who they were. You don’t look through their digital playlist, you look through their physical records. And in this particular case, you’d look at people’s games, you’d look at their figurines and you’d immediately know what they were into.”

Your physical goods are a way of “defining your tribe,” he suggests. Perhaps the majority of people’s music, films, or games are digital, but they want to have physical goods to show their loyalty and dedication to the things they’re really passionate about: like point and click adventures. In that sense, says Cecil, “having a box on your shelf is quite important.”

But handling physical goods aside, there’s one big thing that publishers can provide – money. Securing funding has become an uphill battle for developers of all sizes, and Cecil is under no illusions it will get any easier, either.

“I remember going to Develop last year, in 2024, and the old expression was, ‘Just survive to ’25’. And I remember standing up – and I made myself very unpopular – and I said, ‘Why do you think we’re going to go back to how it used to be?’ It was so extraordinarily benign with Game Pass putting in millions and millions and millions, pumping up the industry. I said, ‘Honestly, we have to find a new way to do business, because it’s just not going to be the same.’ And huge numbers of developers who did very well from the vast amounts of money being pumped into the industry just hoped it would return – but it won’t.”

That leaves open the question of exactly what that new way of doing business will be. Cecil agrees that Revolution needs to seek some alternative form of funding. He says he’s “very interested” that Netflix is taking games “seriously” again.

A totally new Revolution adventure game would cost in the region of £5 million, he thinks. So, given Revolution’s natural reluctance to sign up with a publisher once more, or borrow money from venture capital firms, how is Cecil going to pay for Broken Sword 6?

“If I knew the answer to that, I promise you, I would tell you,” he laughs.

“I will give you a very direct answer: I will tell you when I know. But what we won’t do is go charging into Broken Sword 6 without knowing how it’s funded, because that would be a recipe for disaster. And to an extent, time is on our side.”