“Broken Sword,” a point-and-click adventure game by Charles Cecil (the 127th dining stranger) is becoming a film.
Variety reports that Charles, who heads Revolution Software, will produce the movie with Noirin Carmody and Story Kitchen, and Evan Spiliotopoulos – the screenwriter for Disney’s live-action “Beauty and the Beast” – writing the script.
At lunch with Charles in York in January 2020, he shared the origins of “Broken Sword,” which developed into a hit series following George Stobbart and Nicole Collard on globe-trotting quests to uncover conspiracies.
A movie makes sense because Charles told me he wanted the first game to be a cinematic experience from the start: beautiful 2D graphics, top-quality voice talent, a story that unravels like a movie the player is controlling. Writing a video game is “much, much, much more complex” than writing a film, he said, because of the interactivity and constraints involved. It’ll be interesting to see that process reversed, taking a player-controlled world into something they can only watch.
Charles also told me about the passionate fanbase that’s stuck with “Broken Sword” across five games and three decades, including a Kickstarter for The Serpent’s Curse that raised roughly $850,000. That community just backed another Kickstarter – for Smoking Mirror Reforged – to the tune of nearly $1 million against a $68,000 goal.
You can read my full conversation with Charles, in Revolution Software’s base of York, England, right here.