Broken Sword – the Shadow of the Templars: Reforged launches on PS5 Sept 19

blog.playstation.com:

Many of the Broken Sword fans that I meet today first discovered the series in 1996 when a demo of ‘Broken Sword – the Shadow of the Templars’ was included on the Official PlayStation magazine’s cover-mounted CD. I am thrilled that subsequent Broken Sword games have continued to be hugely popular on PlayStation platforms. 

A year or two ago, encouraged by enthusiastic fan communications which have continued over the thirty years since then, I decided that the time was right to undertake a substantially enhanced version of the game for PlayStation 5. We would redraw all the graphics in 4K – over 50 times the resolution of the original PlayStation version, and I was determined to ensure that the adventure gameplay felt utterly contemporary for a modern PlayStation audience.

With over 100 backgrounds, and 30,000 sprites (animation frames) creating this enhanced, or Reforged, version was always going to be a huge undertaking. 

The original backgrounds were hand drawn in pencil on A5 (or larger) sheets by extraordinarily talented layout artists who had worked for most of their lives at the Don Bluth animation studios in Dublin. I decided that the game’s ‘canon’ should be those original pencil layouts, and where the game screens varied for whatever reasons, we would base the new high resolution art on the pencil layouts. This allowed us to digitally repaint over the original linework in 4K, which we had scanned at very high resolution, with confidence using the original game screens as reference.

This does mean that there have been some changes where the original digital colourist took shortcuts – for example in a Parisian Museum, the layout artist had originally drawn a sphinx, but the colourist then chose to save time by using an image of a goddess – probably adapted from a photograph. The high resolution game screen now includes a sphinx as originally intended. We did get caught out once or twice where we painted background elements from the original pencil layout,