Charles Cecil

Who is Charles Cecil?

Charles Cecil MBE is a video game designer and co-founder of Revolution Software. Cecil was brought to the Democratic Republic of the Congo when he was still very young, but was evacuated at two years after Mobutu Sese Seko's coup d'état. He was then educated at Bedales School in Hampshire, England. In 1980 he began his studies in mechanical engineering at Manchester University, where he met student Richard Turner who invited him to write some text adventures for Artic Computing. After completing his degree in 1985 he decided to continue his career in game development and became director of Artic. In the following year he established Paragon Programming, a game development company working with British publisher U.S. Gold. In 1987 he moved into publishing as software development manager for U.S. Gold. One year later he was approached by Activision and was offered the position of manager of their European development studio.

In 1990, Cecil founded Revolution with Tony Warriner, David Sykes and Noirin Carmody. Originally located in Hull, the company moved to York in 1994. Cecil became Revolution's managing director and would focus on writing and design. For the company's first title, Lure of the Temptress, Cecil conceived with others an innovative game engine, called Virtual Theatre, that was designed by Tony Warriner. Cecil's interest in cinematic techniques and technical developments became manifest in Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars and the games that followed. Broken Sword 1 was a 2D point-and-click game, but by the end of the nineties Cecil took the company to 3D games with direct control, including Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. In 2004 a project didn't get signed and he had no other option than to let everyone go. Nevertheless, he could continue to design by implementing the so-called "Hollywood model", in which each time a team is assembled to create a movie. For the fourth Broken Sword game, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, he decided to work with Sumo Digital. By the end of the decade new developments made it possible to renew the back catalogue of Revolution, and in 2011 Develop ranked Revolution Software among the top 50 most successful development studios in the world. Currently Revolution is working on Broken Sword – The Serpent's Curse.