Broken Sword developer “just couldn’t afford” to recreate it without using AI

Revolution Software is not a big developer. At the moment it is six people, based in the historic English city of York, plus freelance contractors. It was a bit bigger in the mid-1990s, when Charles Cecil’s team released its biggest hit: Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templarsa point-and-click adventure game about a lawyer and a journalist stumble upon an ancient religious conspiracy, and a close cousin to LucasArts classics like Monkey Island. But the genre went out of fashion, publishers lost interest, and at some point Cecil had to let everyone go.

Thanks to the advent of smartphones, Kickstarter and online stores, as well as the increasing influence of niche fan communities, Cecil has been able to slowly rebuild Revolution into something reminiscent of the 1980s cottage industry in which he once worked. The Broken Sword series has been key to that process, but the series has been dormant for nearly a decade now – the longest lull in its history.

That’s about to change now, with the announcement that a sixth Broken Sword game is in development, alongside a full remaster of Shadow of the Templars. Cecil meets me in London over a coffee to introduce the two projects, which he describes as a ‘renaissance’ for Broken Sword, and is proud to reveal that Revolution has managed to self-fund them . But there are limits to what this small indie studio can achieve.

Fans have been asking for it for a long time Shadow of the Templars to be released on modern platforms, but Cecil knew that would require a full remaster of the beautiful, but low-resolution, animated visuals. And that’s a tall order: it consists of 30,000 hand-drawn sprites that animate hand-painted backgrounds. It was just too much to think about; Cecil estimates that drawing each frame of an animated sprite would take an hour. “30,000 times an hour, times, you know, £15 to £20 an hour, is an awful lot of money,” says Cecil.

So Revolution investigated whether AI could be trained to help update the distinctive look of the Broken Sword games without affecting the overall atmosphere. “What I wanted to do was recreate this game that everyone remembered and loved, but not change it except to improve it,” he says, noting the negative reaction to changes in the Monkey Island art style. games. Early experiments with scaling the backgrounds failed; Fortunately, Revolution still had Hollywood animator Eoghan Cahill’s original line art, so human artists could use that instead.

For the sprites, Revolution produced “a few hundred” by hand and brought them to the University of York, where an AI research team used them to train a GAN (generative hostile network). The result “wasn’t quite good enough,” says Cecil, but a tip from an Nvidia engineer on how to use AI to interpolate frames between hand-drawn keyframes led to a breakthrough.

“Instead of taking an hour to do them all, it takes five to 10 minutes to do them all,” says Cecil. “We train the model on our own sprites… What we really focused on is the contours and the details in the body, because there’s no way the hands and head will do that (look closely). So we have to manually draw their hands and faces.” The hands and head are glued on afterward, with animators making sure to flesh out facial expressions that the original art didn’t have enough detail to resolve.

“The ability to use AI on sprites is an absolute game changer,” says Cecil. “We just couldn’t afford it. Otherwise it would be impossible. And you know, I share what reservations people have about AI. But in the case of sprites, what really matters is that really talented character artists and animators can take the original and turn it into something really special, instead of having to do the whole hassle of redrawing everything all over again.

It has to be said, the end result, with dynamic shadows applied, looks fantastic – better, perhaps, than the glimpse Cecil offers from the sixth game, Broken sword: Parzival’s stone, which is created in 3D in Unity. It’s the ideal of any remaster: the game as you remember it, not as it actually looked.

But Cecil isn’t above making a few changes to “some of the things that, culturally, have always worried me a little” about the 1996 game, to make it “a little more culturally appropriate for 2023.” He cites the examples of a Syrian carpet salesman turned less “stereotypically mean, he’s a little more jovial,” and an awkward moment between the game’s two heroes, US patent attorney George Stobbart and French journalist Nico Collard. “There’s another point where Nico is tied up and George can kiss her when she’s tied up. And you know, that’s just a little strange. (…) It’s just three or four very, very small things. But you know, the example of that character, I was embarrassed about it from the beginning. So it’s just great to be able to just customize it (…) but without losing the core charm that was there.”

Photo: Getty Images

If you’re unfamiliar with Broken Sword, the games’ plots – always with Stobbart and Collard traveling the world to unravel sinister yet academic conspiracies involving ancient artifacts and secret societies – can be uncannily similar to The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown’s other successful airport novels. “Our fans are absolutely convinced that a young Dan Brown must have played Broken Sword, because of the similarities. Now I never make that claim myself because his lawyers are paid much better than I can afford. Okay, so I’m silent about this, but I’m allowed to quote others”, Cecil chuckles with a glint in his eye.

It looks like he’ll leave it at that, but Cecil—a chatty, friendly, academic type in his early sixties—can’t help it. He has a passion for early medieval European history, the stories of the Holy Grail and the Cathar Christian sect, and Brown’s apparent dilettantism in the area gets his attention. He elaborates on Brown’s obsession with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a popular 1980s work of speculative history that states that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene, creating a bloodline of southern French kings championed by a secret society called the Priory of Sion. Cecil describes this very popular conspiracy theory as “absolutely crazy,” “insane,” “complete madness,” and “a bunch of bullshit.”

On a holiday in France, Cecil and his wife once ran into Jean-Luc Chaumeil, an author who had interviewed the alleged Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Pierre Plantard (“an annoying little anti-Semite”) and exposed him as a fraud in the 1970s. “But his voice is drowned out by this kind of cacophony of people who found him Holy Blood and the Holy Grail so convincing.” Including Brown, of course. “In the beginning, Dan Brown says, ‘Fact: there’s an organization called the Priory of Sion.’ No, Dan, that’s not true. That’s just nonsense. Sorry.”

Not that Cecil mind exploring the gray area between history and legend on his own. In fact, he loves it. His conversation is full of wild, historical tangents and funny, personal anecdotes; I have never seen so many snapshots of family holidays in the South of France during a game presentation. Define the setting for the new game, The Stone of Parzival, Cecil unexpectedly brings up a selfie he took with cult horror film director Richard Stanley. Wait a minute, what?

As it turns out, Stanley is also a lover of Cathar and Grail history, living in Montségur in the French Pyrenees, where a Cathar fortress once stood. After watching a TV documentary Stanley made about Otto Rahn – a German Grail historian in the 1930s who was eventually recruited into the SS by the occult-obsessed Heinrich Himmler, despite being “both gay and half-Jewish” – Cecil contacted the South African director. They met in Montségur and Stanley led him on a strange expedition to some so-called secret Cathar caves in the hills. Cecil met a friend of Stanley’s who called himself ‘Wizard of the River of Colors’, and the way to the caves was opened for them by a witch. He shows me a smiling selfie of himself in a cave. “There is a ring of fire – which you can’t see in this picture, I should have taken it – which was made by a witch. And she was just setting here on the left. I should have photographed her.”

Image: Revolution software

This all makes less and less sense, but Cecil plows on and pulls out some small black stones from his pocket which, when moistened and rubbed together, produce a red liquid. “Grail Stones! They are very rare and you won’t find anything about them on the internet,” Cecil improbably claims. Rahn, it turns out, was a student of one of the first sources for the Grail myth, Wolfram von Eschenbach, who argued that the Grail was not a cup but a bleeding stone.

“So I really think so much of this is bullshit,” says Cecil. “But I do like the idea that the Grail is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version, which is this bleeding stone.” These are the stories that Broken sword: Parzival’s stone will be based on, and in the short section that Cecil shows me, you see George exploring the village of Montségur.

There is more – much, much more. Cecil gives me a brief overview of it History of the Cathars, involving the suppressed Gospel of Mary Magdalene, giving rise to the Gnostic and then the Cathar movements; the Cathar crusade against corruption in the Church; and the Church’s crusade against the Cathars, which culminated in a decade-long siege of 10,000 crusaders at Montségur. He shows me a picture of his son standing next to what he says is a trebuchet ball from the siege, 800 years ago. “I mean, it’s all just brilliant stuff. Absolutely brilliant stuff,” he enthuses.

Back to Otto Rahn. “And so actually what (The Stone of Parzival) is following this idea of, you know, the Nazi scavenger hunt,” says Cecil. ‘You know what made the stone so special: the Cathars believed they could see into the past and the future if they were the guardians of the Grail. So for me this is perfect because it has the gameplay of an authentic history. One of the things we’re committed to doing isn’t just writing a point-and-click adventure; we still want the point-and-click elements, but also the ability to play with time, all of which fits perfectly into this history.”

This last bit – a vague hint at some kind of time manipulation mechanism, or perhaps a time-skipping story – is about the only new detail I get about the sixth Broken Sword game during our chat. I spent over an hour talking to Cecil and it was mostly rumour, speculation, anecdotes and jokes – which, when you think about it, couldn’t be more appropriate for Broken Sword’s return.