Revolution Software: Broken Sword and the British Adventure

When the rest of the industry declared the adventure game dead, Revolution Software just kept making brilliant ones. Charles Cecil and his team founded the studio in York in 1990, and while LucasArts and Sierra drifted away from point-and-click, Revolution planted a flag and never left. Its Broken Sword games sent an American and a French journalist chasing a Templar conspiracy across a beautifully drawn Europe. Its Beneath a Steel Sky built a cyberpunk world with the Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons on the pencils. And decades later, when everyone else had given up, Revolution was still here.

This is the studio's whole run: the Broken Sword saga, the Steel Sky worlds, and the stubborn, brilliant refusal to let the adventure game die. Here is the map.

The British point-and-click that refused to die

Revolution's story is one of stubbornness in the best sense. The adventure game's commercial collapse in the late 1990s killed studios far bigger than this one, but Revolution adapted, went independent, crowdfunded new Broken Sword games directly from the fans, and kept the craft alive. Where LucasArts stopped and Sierra was dismantled, Revolution simply carried on, which is why the classic adventure never fully went away.