Broken Sword: The Shadow of The Templars - Development

Development

In a September 1992 interview with French magazine Génération 4, Charles Cecil stated that he had begun working on a scenario for Revolution's third game, after 1992's Lure of the Temptress and 1994's then-upcoming Beneath a Steel Sky. The game would be set in Paris with a Knights Templar story line. The following month, Cecil visited Paris to research the Templars; after reading The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, he was certain there was enough known about the Templars to make them a good subject for a game. Cecil, Dave Cummins and Jonathan Howard began work on the story and design. Cecil and Cummins attended a film-writing course and their script was read by Alan Drury, a senior BBC scriptwriter and dramatist. Revolution artist Steve Ince created initial location sketches for the game before working on Beneath a Steel Sky. He was promoted to producer halfway through the project.

In 1994 Cecil and Noirin Carmody met with Sean Brennan, then-head of publishing at Virgin Interactive, and Virgin agreed to publish the game. Despite publishing the PC version Virgin were not interested in publishing the game on the PlayStation, feeling that only 3D games would sell for the console. As a result Cecil contacted Sony Computer Entertainment, who agreed to publish the game for the console.

One of Cecil's goals was to depart from the humour-based adventure games more popular at the time, such as LucasArts' Monkey Island series, by creating a game with good pacing and a complex storyline, a reason he thought the Knights Templar would be an ideal subject. Unlike LucasArts games which used a question-and-answer conversation system, Broken Sword offered "conversation icons" which would not reveal to the player what the protagonist was about to say; Cecil's intention was to make the game more cinematic. Although aiming to design a game with a cinematic feel, Cecil felt the game should not resemble interactive movies of that time; he felt that they were "mimicking movies." He wanted to create two protagonists who would exchange ideas, helping drive the game along. He made George American and Nico French to appeal to US and European markets.

The team at Revolution had high expectations for Broken Sword but there was significant competition. Revolution had a team which had created successful adventure games, but believed they needed to utilise the best of other creative industries. Eoghan Cahill and Neil Breen of Dublin's Don Bluth studios drew the backgrounds in pencil and digitally colored them in Photoshop. The introductory sequence and the main characters were done by animator Mike Burgess, who worked for the Red Rover animation studio. The game's graphics were animated in a style resembling classic animated films.

Cecil contacted composer Barrington Pheloung, who agreed to create the game's score. Revolution had already cast Hazel Ellerby as Nicole Collard, but had trouble finding a voice actor for George Stobbart. Hazel, who went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, suggested her former schoolmate from Guildhall, Rolf Saxon, as George. Charles offered him the job, and Saxon accepted. The remaining credited voice actors in the original are Rachel Atkins, David Bannerman, Rosy Clayton, Jack Elliott, Steve Hodson, David Holt, Peter Kenny, Richard Mapletoft, Matthew Marsh, Colin McFarlane, Don McCorkindale, Gavin Muir, Paul Panting and Andrew Wincott.

Cecil was the game's director and writer, Tony Warriner and David Sykes the designer-programmers and Noirin Carmody the executive producer. The game uses the Virtual Theatre engine, as do Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky. The game's final cost was one million pounds. It was ported to the Game Boy Advance in 2002, and to the Palm OS and Windows Mobile in 2006.

In March 2009, Ubisoft released a director's cut of The Shadow of the Templars entitled Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars – Director's Cut for the Wii and Nintendo DS. Dave Gibbons, with whom Revolution worked on Beneath a Steel Sky, created additional artwork for the game. Due to the platform's size limits the DS version contains no spoken dialogue, only subtitles. A version of the Director's Cut for iPhone and iPod Touch was released on January 20, 2010. In May 2010, a version in high definition was released for the iPad. Versions for Windows and Mac OS X were released in September 2, 2010 on digital-distribution services. An Android version was released on Google Play in June 2012. The original version of the game is only available from Sold-Out Software and GOG.com with Director's Cut purchases.