BS4 stands as rebirth for Revolution Software due to its renewed concepts and attractive plot… the formula that gave the series its fame. However, we cannot stop worrying about the future of a company that gave us such good games. What are the future plans of Revolution and, especially, those of its alma mater, Charles Cecil?

Well, I have no plans for another BS game, but, and again forgive me for repeating myself, if people feel that it’s still fresh, and there still is demand for a fifth game, then perhaps we’ll do a fifth game; I have no idea what it would be, but that’s not a problem that I even think about, until there’s solid indication from THQ that the game is being successful and indication from the fans that they want another one.

Also, our second game as a game company, Beneath a Steel Sky, which you may or may not know, was written to DOS as was Lure of the Temptress, and it was a number of years ago, when Windows 98 came out, I think, it finally killed them off, because you couldn’t play DOS games. So both LoTT and BASS were forgotten about. But you probably came across ScummVM, which is an absolutely brilliant collection of programmers that have resurrected all these games. Thanks to them now a lot of people are playing Beneath a Steel Sky, and in some instances clamor for another BASS. So that gives us an interesting opportunity because well, BS had expectations, given its high production values, but Beneath a Steel Sky if you remember, is quite a basic adventure, and I think that that would be very interesting. I’m very seriously exploring opportunities for another Beneath a Steel Sky, but it wouldn’t be high production value and 3D in the way that we produced BS, it would be very much a 2D probably simple game, maybe episodic, this is the thoughts of the game through for BASS.

But also in other genres. What I’ve been seen as an adventure writer, is that the skill comes in any track of narrative, and that is just as applicable for other genres. I’m currently working with some movie studios in the action adventure genre; it’s got nothing to do with the Knights Templar, nothing to historical, but it is the idea of telling a story in sort of dynamic a way, so what’s interesting is actually spreading out: it’s not just doing adventures, doing historical games, it’s actually going out and writing stories and designing the puzzles for a wide range of games. That’s what I’m kind of doing.

Internet is a good medium for new commercial methods and ideas like the episode-based adventure games you talked about. How do you see this distribution system?

You know I think for games that cost, I think BS4 is 40 euros? I don’t know of the prices.

- In Spain it’s about fifty.

Fifty? Right, I think for a game that costs as much as fifty euros, a lot of people actually want to pick it up, they want to look at the cover, they want to turn it around, they want to look at the screenshots, etc. So I believe that retail is about to expire at all. I think there’s going to be two markets, I think there’s going to be the full price, high profile games, that are going to retail and you are to buy them in a shop or it ships to you, but they exist on a DVD with packaging and you own it and you’re proud of it. I think the small and more innovative games, the indie scene, I think that’s the great thing about all what we have now with the electronic species is the opportunity for the indie scene, you know, games that just feel a bit more funky that maybe publishers wouldn’t take, because of the risk involved.

They’re cheap to develop and just feel different. What I find really interesting is things like Xbox 360 the Live Arcade where you can play these games and takes a team of 2 or 3 to write a game. For instance, obviously in the case of Geometry Wars it was a game of a very successful and commercial publisher, but that could have come from a student working in his bedroom, who just had a nice idea. And I think that a lot of the innovation in the market has been lost. For example, I wrote my first game in 1981, that’s 25 years ago, and in those days if you were lucky, you’d get paid 3, 4 hundred pounds for it. You know, 10 years later, when we wrote BaSS and LoTT, that cost about 30 or 40 thousand pounds, so it’d gone up by a factor of hundreds, which was a huge increase. And 30-40 thousand pounds is an awful lot of money. You could buy a house for that much! And ten years later the bloody games cost a million pounds, and suddenly you’re going “Jesus! Where did all this go?”

So if you consider that 20 years ago a game cost a few hundred pounds and now costs a few million pounds, you’re talking about a pack of fifty thousand fold increase. I mean, it’s just quite extraordinary. So, because of the increasing risk, publishers are now risk-adverse, and I can’t blame them. And that was leading to the accusation that games are becoming very safe. So what’s wonderful about elements/ ways of getting games to market like Xbox Arcade is that something you do have in this indie scene is the new ideas that come through, they can bubble through, and perhaps they will turn into the full price games again. But I think that it means that the whole market is much more dynamic and there’s much more choice for gamers which clearly is a good thing.

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