Revolution software

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Revolution Software Ltd.
legal form Limited
founding 1990
Seat York (United Kingdom)
management Charles Cecil
Number of employees 3
Branch Entertainment software
Website www.revolution.co.uk
As of March 31, 2017

Revolution Software Ltd. is a British computer game development studio founded in 1990 by Charles Cecil , Tony Warriner, David Sykes and Noirin Carmody. The company is based in York, England .

history

Studio co-founder and CEO Charles Cecil

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, so-called point-and-click adventures became more and more popular compared to their predecessors with text parsers . To get on this bandwagon, four programmers from the English city of York got together and founded a company that was only concerned with the development of such games. In order to stand out from competing products, the company initially invested £ 20,000 in the development of the game engine Virtual Theater, the focus and USP of which was the control of non-player characters through the game world and which in each case was modified in all later Revolution games was used. The first title, Lure of the Temptress , was originally developed for the British publisher Mirrorsoft . After the bankruptcy of the company won revolution with Virgin Interactive a new publication partner, who is also the next three Adventures of revolution, including Beneath a Steel Sky , brought out. Revolution was also commissioned by Sierra On-Line to develop the Amiga version of King's Quest VI based on the Virtual Theater Engine.

The company finally achieved great fame with its adventure series Baphomets Fluch (original title: Broken Sword ), published from 1996 , with which the company was able to celebrate both commercial and critical successes against the trend in the stagnating adventure market. Nevertheless, the economic situation proved difficult; Virgin Interactive refused major advance financing in Adventures, so that the follow-up game Baphomets Fluch 2 had to make do with a smaller budget. The two games sold very well for Adventures, with over 1,000,000 units each being sold. Still, Virgin Interactive did not fund any other games from the company. In an effort to position themselves for the future, Revolution switched from 2D to 3D in the way they represented their games; the spy science fiction adventure In Cold Blood was released in 2000 by Ubisoft , Baphomets Curse: The Sleeping Dragon in 2003 by THQ . Because of the sharp drop in sales for Adventures, managing director Cecil had to lay off the entire workforce in 2004; the company was only retained as a shortened company. The fourth series offshoot, Baphomet's Curse: The Angel of Death , was developed by Cecil with only a few freelancers, while the actual programming was taken over by the British developer studio Sumo Digital .

In 2009, Revolution published Baphomets Curse: Director's Cut, a revised and expanded version of the first Baphomets Curse, through Ubisoft . In the same year, the company also began to prepare and publish its adventures for smartphones , in addition to the Director's Cut, Baphomets Fluch 2 and Beneath a Steel Sky . In 2012, Cecil initiated a crowdfunding campaign on the online platform Kickstarter.com to finance the development of a fifth part of the Baphomets curse series. The company received more than $ 770,000 for this from over 14,000 supporters. At Gamescom 2015, Cecil announced a sixth part of the Baphomets curse series.

Computer games

Studio co-founder and programmer Tony Warriner

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 2018 accounts available from Companies House , accessed May 25, 2019
  2. ^ Company. Revolution Games, accessed November 3, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . No. 3, 2015, p. 27.
  4. ↑ Krawall.de: Back to 2D ( Memento from October 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Eurogamer.de: Kickstarter campaign by Baphomet's curse: The fall of man ended. Retrieved February 11, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Adventure-Treff .de: News about Baphomets Fluch 6. Accessed on February 11, 2018 .