Broken Sword dev ‘simply couldn’t afford’ to remake it without using AI

polygon.com:

Revolution Software is not a big developer. Right now, it’s six people, based in the historic English city of York, plus freelance contractors. It was a bit bigger in the mid-1990s, when Charles Cecil’s team released its biggest hit, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, a point-and-click adventure game about a lawyer and a journalist stumbling upon an ancient religious conspiracy, and a close cousin to LucasArts classics like Monkey Island. But the genre fell out of fashion, publishers lost interest, and at one point, Cecil had to let everyone go.

Thanks to the advent of smartphones, Kickstarter, and online storefronts, as well as the increasing influence of niche fan communities, Cecil has been able to slowly rebuild Revolution into something reminiscent of the 1980s cottage industry he once worked in. Sequels and reissues in the Broken Sword series have been key to that process, but the series has now been dormant for nearly a decade — the longest lull in its history.

That’s now set to change, with the announcement that a sixth Broken Sword game is in development, alongside a full remaster of Shadow of the Templars. Cecil meets me in London over coffee to introduce the two projects, which he describes as a “renaissance” for Broken Sword, and he’s proud to reveal that Revolution has been able to self-fund them. But there are limits to what this tiny indie studio can achieve.

Fans have long called for Shadow of the Templars to be released on modern platforms, but Cecil knew that would require a full remaster of its beautiful, but low-resolution, animated visuals. And that is a huge task: It comprises 30,000 hand-drawn sprites animating hand-painted backgrounds. It was simply too much to contemplate; Cecil estimates