Tony Warriner - Biography - Revolution Software

Revolution Software

Warriner didn't stay long at Bytron, as he was contacted by Cecil in 1989, who wanted to set up his own studio. Together with Sykes and Cecil's then-girlfriend Noirin Carmody they founded Revolution Software (March 1990). Warriner would stay a member (and co-owner) of the company till the present day. He would focus primarily on programming, but he also became involved in design, for which he is credited in various games.

In March 1990, in an office located in Hull, he began to work on what would become Revolution's first game, Lure of the Temptress (1992). Warriner designed an innovative engine for the game, called Virtual Theatre, which was in some respects more versatile than the game engines used by LucasArts and Sierra at that time. One of its new features was that it allowed the in-game characters, in stead of being static NPCs, to wander around the game world independently of each other, living their own lives and doing their own thing. The game became, critically as well as commercially, one of the many successful games that would follow.

The next games he worked on were Beneath a Steel Sky (1994), Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (1996) and Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror (1997). The typical Virtual Theatre features shown in Lure of the Temptress were scaled back in Beneath a Steel Sky, as they were hard to design for and more suitable to RPGs. New features were added to Steel Sky though, such as an object-oriented system, a new conversation system and a sophisticated, separate conversation editor. The cinematic Broken Sword games included more scripted events, cutscenes and parallax scrolling, as well as a new user interface and a conversation system with subject icons that didn't reveal what the main character was going to say. Though it was released only a year after the original game, Broken Sword II added more technical advances. The sequel included an Easter egg for the first time in Revolution's games, and a couple of years later Warriner revealed that the port of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars to the Game Boy Advance would include – unlike the PC version - an Easter egg as well. The biggest change in the GBA version is the control interface that replaced the point-and-click method by direct control. The original games used a version of the Virtual Theatre engine, which was updated frequently.

He continued to work on all the games that would be published in the next decade. As In Cold Blood (2000) was the first one of the 3D games that would follow, he had to write new functionality to the game engine, and he worked on story design as well. In the same year Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado was published, a game that was based on the animated film, The Road to El Dorado. In this period he also worked on Good Cop Bad Cop, an action adventure for which a new in-house engine was developed, but the game, intended for the PS2, wasn't released. After these games the Broken Sword series was continued in real-time 3D with Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (2003). Unlike some other companies, they had deliberately waited to bring Broken Sword to 3D until they felt that they got the quality they wanted. And the move to 3D was fairly difficult, as many technical issues had to be dealt with that would never surface in a 2D game. Besides for AI programming, Warriner was credited for story, game and section design. For Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon he received together with Cecil, Steve Ince and Neil Richards a nomination for Excellence in Writing at the Game Developers Choice Awards 2004. In 2006 the fourth episode of the series, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, was released, for which Warriner was credited for additional design. The game allowed the player to choose between point-and-click and direct control.

In 2009 and 2010 he was credited for his work on Beneath a Steel Sky - Remastered, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director’s Cut, and Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror - Remastered. He considered the iPhone version as the best one, as the interface brings the player closer to the game by touching the screen. The Directors Cut of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars includes another Easter egg, showing a room from Beneath a Steel Sky with one of its characters (the robot Joey) and the spaceman from Warriner's first game (Obsidian). For the game he received together with Cecil and Neil Richards a nomination in the category Story at the British Academy Video Games Awards in 2010.

After the Director's Cut version of Broken Sword, Warriner started working on a brand new engine, Virtual Theatre version 7, in order to deal with multiple platforms and screen resolutions. The engine is used in Revolution's fifth Broken Sword game, entitled Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse, which was successfully funded in a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign updates included a video in which Warriner and Cecil talked about the game's characters and feedback. In October 2012 he set up a Tumblr blog, called Tony's Revolution Dev Blog.