Charles Cecil (game developer)

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Charles Cecil, November 2013

Charles Cecil MBE (born August 11, 1962 in York ) is a British game developer .

Life

As a toddler he lived with his family in the Congo , where his father David worked for Unilever ; after the Mobutu putsch in 1965 the family went back to England. In 1980 he began studying mechanical engineering at Manchester University . After completing his studies, he became managing director of Artic Software in 1985, for which he had already programmed three text adventures between 1981 and 1982 . After Artic had closed, he founded Paragon Programming in 1986, which ported games such as Ace of Aces or The Goonies to the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum home computers popular in Great Britain for US gold . In 1987 he moved to US Gold as a development manager. In 1988 and 1989 he worked as a product development manager at Activision before he and three friends in 1989 company Revolution Software founded, whose managing director he is today and with point-and-click adventure , especially the game series Broken Sword , has been known . In 2011 he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the video game industry . In 2019 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of York .

He has two children with his wife and Revolution co-founder Noirin Carmody.

Theses on point-and-click adventures

A thesis by Cecil, which he put forward during the presentation of the adventure game Baphomet's Curse: The Sleeping Dragon at the ECTS game fair in 2002, attracted greater attention :

“The point-and-click adventure is dead. No two ways about it. It is no more. However, long live the adventure. As a genre the adventure is extremely healthy and probably has as much - if not more - potential than any other genre. "

“The point-and-click adventure is dead. There is no doubt about it. It does not exist anymore. Still, long live the adventure. As a genre, adventure is extremely healthy and has as much potential as any other genre - if not more. "

Cecil thus described the difficult situation of the branch of the adventure genre established with Maniac Mansion , which also included the previous publication of Revolution, and at the same time justified the departure of the third Baphomets curse part from the long-time preferred point-and-click Control method in favor of direct character control using the keyboard. His quotation, which was mostly reduced to the first sentence, was received controversially, especially since corresponding games were published at regular intervals even after 2003, and Cecil himself later qualified it in parts. According to this, Point and Click is only useful for static game environments, from which he wanted to move away with the third part. In addition, his statement is still correct from the commercial point of view, since adventure games have developed into a niche market. Nevertheless, with the fourth series offshoot, Baphomet's Curse: The Angel of Death , Revolution again offered point-and-click control as an alternative input method. With the success of smartphones with touch controls such as the Apple iPhone , the first series titles experienced a renaissance. Revolution released both Beneath a Steel Sky , Baphomets Fluch and Baphomets Fluch 2 in a revised version, which transferred the old operating principle to touch interfaces. Since then, Cecil has described the new operating concept as an improvement over the old point-and-click system.

Ludography (excerpt)

For Artic Software

  • 1981: Inca Curse
  • 1982: Ship of Doom
  • 1982: Espionage Island

For Revolution Software

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mirrorsoft press release from 1991. Accessed March 31, 2016 . Posted by Charles Cecil on his Facebook account
  2. ↑ VanguardNGR.com: Nnimmo Bassey bags York varsity honorary degree. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  3. ↑ http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17544
  4. ↑ Adventure-Treff.de: Interview: Charles Cecil. Retrieved March 19, 2017 .
  5. ^ Game maker in Berlin. In: fm4.orf.at. Retrieved December 1, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Cecil, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British game developer
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH York , England