Broken Sword dev ‘simply couldn’t afford’ to remake it without using AICharles Cecil on bringing back his most famous creation
Revolution Software is not a big developer. Right now, it’s 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 Templars, a point-and-click adventure game about a lawyer and a journalist stumbling upon an ancient religious conspiracy, and a close cousin to LucasArts classics like Monkey Island. But the genre fell out of fashion, publishers lost interest, and at one point, Cecil had to let everyone go.
Thanks to the advent of smartphones, Kickstarter, and online storefronts, 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 he once worked in. Sequels and reissues in the Broken Sword series have been key to that process, but the series has now been dormant for nearly a decade — the longest lull in its history.
That’s now set to change, 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 coffee to introduce the two projects, which he describes as a “renaissance” for Broken Sword, and he’s proud to reveal that Revolution has been able to self-fund them. But there are limits to what this tiny indie studio can achieve.
Fans have long called for Shadow of the Templars to be released on modern platforms, but Cecil knew that would require a full remaster of its beautiful, but low-resolution, animated visuals. And that is a huge task: It comprises 30,000 hand-drawn sprites animating hand-painted backgrounds. It was simply too much to contemplate; Cecil estimates that each frame of an animated sprite would take an hour to draw. “30,000 times one hour, times, you know, £15 to £20 an hour, is an awful lot of money,” Cecil says.
So Revolution investigated whether AI could be trained to help update the distinctive look of the Broken Sword games without affecting the overall vibe. “What I wanted to do was to recreate this game that everyone remembered and loved, but not change it except to enhance it,” he says, noting the negative reaction to changes in the Monkey Island games’ art style. Early experiments with upscaling the backgrounds didn’t work out; luckily, Revolution still had the original line drawings by Hollywood animator Eoghan Cahill, so it had human artists work from those instead.
For the sprites, Revolution produced “a few hundred” by hand and took them to the University of York, where an AI research team used them to train a GAN (generative adversarial network). The result “wasn’t quite good enough,” Cecil says, but a tip from a Nvidia engineer about how to use AI to interpolate frames in between hand-drawn key frames prompted a breakthrough.
“Instead of taking an hour to do each one, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes to do each one,” Cecil says. “We’re training the model on our own sprites… What we’ve really focused on is the outlines and the detail in the body, because there’s no way that the hands and the head are going to [look right]. So we have to manually draw their hands and faces.” The hands and head are pasted on after, with animators taking care 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,” Cecil says. “We just simply couldn’t afford to do it. Otherwise, it would be impossible. And you know, I share what reservations people have about AI. But in the case of sprites, it really is, you know, allowing really talented character artists and animators to take the original and mold it into something really special, rather than having to go through the drudgery of redrawing everything again.”
It has to be said, the end result, with dynamic shadows applied, looks fantastic — better, arguably, than the glimpse that Cecil offers of the sixth game, Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, which is being made in 3D in Unity. It’s the ideal of any remaster: the game as you remember it looking, not as it actually looked.
But Cecil is not above making a few changes to “some of the things, which, culturally, have always slightly worried me” about the 1996 game to make it “a little bit more culturally appropriate for 2023.” He cites the examples of a Syrian carpet seller character, changed to be less “stereotypically mean, he’s slightly more jovial,” and an awkward moment between the game’s pair of heroes, American patent lawyer 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 bit strange. [...] It’s just three or four very, very minor things. But, you know, the example of that character, I’d been embarrassed about it pretty much from the beginning. So it’s just wonderful to be able just to tweak it [...] but without losing the core charm that existed.”
Cecil said that, if the reissue of Shadow of the Templars is a success, the intention is to follow it up with a remaster of the second Broken Sword game, The Smoking Mirror, using the same techniques.
