A TALE OF UNION CITY: THE HISTORY OF BENEATH A STEEL SKY
When Charles Cecil was seeking inspiration for his second point-and-click adventure, Beneath A Steel Sky, he decided to simply look at the world around him. “I was very much a child of the Soviet era and I found George Orwell’s 1984 to be a great reference for the way a state may want to control you,” he explains. “In the previous decade, Margaret Thatcher had said society didn’t exist any more and people had become very rich and very selfish. I wanted to reflect back that society.”
It was 1992 and Charles’ development studio, Revolution Software, had just released its debut, Lure Of The Temptress, a medieval mooch around the town of Turnvale with the aim of defeating an evil sorceress. Rather than set Beneath A Steel Sky in the past, however, the developer looked ahead. In doing so, it sought to follow the patch trodden by dystopian movies, including Mad Max and Blade Runner, in depicting a scary, oppressive future.
Charles was enthusiastic about those films and he wasn’t alone, either. Fellow fan Dave Cummins, who had designed Lure Of The Temptress, was also excited at the prospect of working on a gritty and thought-provoking cyberpunk adventure and they shared a desire to convey a stark message – or a warning, even – to anyone who bought into their world. “The idea of conveying messages from today is something that really interests me,” Charles says. And in Dave he found a perfect partner.
“I’d met Dave at Activision
