Interview | Revolution’s Charles Cecil

Talkin’ about Revolution…

Interview: Charles Cecil

On the day of the announcement that Charles Cecil is working on a Doctor Who videogame series with the BBC, Lewis Denby talks to the adventure games legend.

It takes me all day to finally sit down with Charles Cecil. Evidently, he is an astonishingly busy – and popular – man.

It’s both the ideal, and most inconvenient, time to arrange an interview. The adventure games legend, founder and managing director of independent studio Revolution Software and a man whose credits include Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series, is hosting the first State of Independence conference in York, England – a day of talks and panels about self-publishing in the games industry. He’s also just announced that he’s working with the BBC and Sumo Digital on a series of videogame adaptations of Doctor Who. And I do mean just announced – the press releases hit while I’m on my way to meet him. Naturally, Charles Cecil is in high demand.

Eventually, on a second floor terrace glistening in the evening sun and overlooking York’s famous racecourse (“It’s a lovely venue, isn’t it?” Cecil remarks as we sit down), I get the chance to speak with him. I’m struck mainly by his enthusiasm, and the genuine thrill with which he speaks of his achievements. Cecil has been making games for 30 years, hugely acclaimed ones for 20. He’s clearly confident in his abilities as a designer, and has a lot to be proud of – but there are times when he sounds as if he can still barely believe he’s actually doing this.

Given that the vast majority of Cecil’s career has been built around adventure games, I was curious to find out a bit about his relationship with the genre – as well as his new Doctor Who series, the opportunities of independent development, and the Minesweeper-based game he revealed, then went silent about, last year.

RM: What is it that’s attracted you to the adventure genre? Because you’ve basically built a whole career out of it…

CC: I think that the whole idea of interactive narrative from a creative perspective, from a theoretical perspective, is actually fascinating. What we are doing is obviously pioneering a totally new form of entertainment, in the way that, if you think of other entertainment media – television has a lot more to do with film, and obviously books and plays – we have something quite extraordinary. And what I find fascinating is that while there are clearly huge opportunities, there are also great constraints.

The opportunities are clear. Well-written videogames are incredibly compelling. What I think is quite interesting is that there was a period at one point where it was felt that people from outside the industry could write much better stories than we could, and so scriptwriters were brought in, and actually what everybody failed to realise is that the medium inherently has constraints. Like the way that we build empathy with characters is much easier, because in a non-linear medium it’s all about looking at a character, and building an emotional bond with them – an empathetic bond – and then experiencing their emotion through that character. But clearly if you’re controlling that character then the relationship is different. Yes, there is an empathetic bond, but it’s also much more associational. And that’s why, certainly in our infancy as an industry, there’s this sort of emphasis on licensed characters, because the great thing about a licensed character is you immediately inherit all the empathy that the character built in whatever medium it’s come from.

Continues…

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