You're also working on The Da Vinci Code, which is more of an action/adventure game. Do you think adventure gamers will be interested in it? Or is there too much action for this audience to really enjoy it?

It's been designed as an intelligent game. It has elements of action, but it's not an action game. It's an adventure game with elements of action.

Would you say it's more of an action game than Broken Sword 3 is?

Oh yes. It's a very interesting project. I got involved very heavily at the beginning, much less so at the end. My role was to design the story and the high-level puzzles. It was absolutely vital that the game come across as intelligent. The book is an adventure, it's a classical detective adventure. That's what the game is, a detective adventure game with elements of action.

Is it based on the book, or the screenplay?

It's based on the screenplay. The screenplay is very similar to the book.

Have you played Gabriel Knight 3? Before this game was announced, people were always saying the book is so similar to Gabriel Knight 3, they have a lot of the same elements.

There's a big difference though. From what I have played of it, Gabriel Knight 3 is about the mythology surrounding Rennes Le Chateau. The Da Vinci Code is not! To be honest with you, The Da Vinci Code shares a lot more with Broken Sword than it does with Gabriel Knight 3. The book and the movie are about the idea that an ancient conspiracy has resonance in the present day, and that an ancient conspiracy has resurfaced to threaten our protagonists. We all explore themes that overlap.

I just got a Nintendo DS, and I bought the GameBoy Advance version of the first Broken Sword game, which is so cool.

It's fun, isn't it?

It is, I like it a lot. Is there any possibility of Broken Sword 2 coming out for the Nintendo DS?

Broken Sword 1 has just been released on Palm, and it's going to be very shortly released on PocketPC. It's based on the port that came out for the GBA. Broken Sword 2 was in development for GBA but never released, so we have all the assets, and we intend to do Broken Sword 2 at some point on Palm and PocketPC. I really like the DS as a platform, but I don't see Broken Sword appearing on it.

Why not?

I think we need to do something new. The DS has a different audience. I think it needs an original IP, to be honest.



Have you played any adventures on the DS?

Another Code, which is fun. I haven't played the detective game [Phoenix Wright], which is a terrible sin, but I'm looking forward to it when it releases in Europe.

I'd love to see more games like these, but there haven't been any more adventure games announced for the DS.

I think there is demand. The nice thing about the DS is that the production values are a lot lower, and people don't have the same expectations as they do on a console. That, in many ways, is quite liberating, because it means you can do sort of funky things and the production values don't get in the way. The opportunity that the DS gives for innovation, with the dual screen, it's just exciting. At the moment, with Da Vinci Code and Broken Sword 4, I have no time to do anything else. But at some point it'll calm down. I'm also not up to date in my games. Another Code, I've played for an hour... I need to finish these games, I really do.

The last thing I wanted to ask you about is Beneath a Steel Sky 2. Does it exist?

As a design, yes. And as a little bit of work, yes, but it's not in production. We just don't have the bandwidth. One of the things that people say about Revolution, "Oh, they're so generous, they gave away Beneath a Steel Sky for free." From my perspective, we weren't earning much money from it. I'm so pleased that it's so widely distributed now [with ScummVM]. It's on Linux, you can play it on PSP, it's very widely distributed. And that's great, everybody wins, instead of being one of these franchises that just sort of disappears, that people covet and say they're never going to give it away. We've lost very little because it wasn't selling much anyway, and it's now getting a bit of a cult status. So I'm just delighted.

That's a great attitude. I wish more companies thought that way.

The point is, though, that Revolution's so small, we can just make decisions. We don't have to go through attorneys and management committees, we can see the big picture a lot easier than our huge competitors... we don't have to discuss the ramifications with the legal people saying, "But what if you did this, what if you did that"... it's just not worth it. Whereas we can just sit down and go, "That's a cool idea. Let's do it!"

Many thanks to Charles Cecil for giving us a peek into his busy mind. To see how all these ideas translate into gameplay, stay tuned to Adventure Gamers for more Broken Sword 4 coverage in the next few months.