Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is a 1996 point-and-click adventure game developed by Revolution Software. It is the first in the Broken Sword series, co-written and directed by Charles Cecil. The player assumes the role of George Stobbart, an American tourist in Paris, as he attempts to unravel a deep conspiracy involving a sinister cult and a hidden treasure, seeing him travel to various locations around Europe and the Middle East. The game's storyline was conceived to feature a serious tone and heavily influenced by research on Knights Templar by Cecil, but was also interlaced with humor and graphics in the style of classic animated films.
Development of the game saw considerable work to achieve its presentation. Artwork was conceived by Eoghan Cahill and Neil Breen, who particularly drew the backgrounds in pencil and digitally colored them in Photoshop, the game's design was handled by Tony Warriner and David Sykes, while the game's musical score was composed by Barrington Pheloung. The game was built with Revolution's Virtual Theatre engine, which had already been used by the company in two previous games, Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky.
Broken Sword proved a critical and commercial success following its release on 30 September 1996. Critics lauded praise on the game's story, puzzles, voice acting, writing, gameplay, and music, leading to it receiving numerous award nominations and wins. Sales of the games bested expectations by the company, with around one million units having been sold by 2001. The game has topped several listings of the best adventures games, with many developers citing Broken Sword as an influence in future adventure games.
After its initial release on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and PlayStation between 1996 and 1998, the game was released on the Game Boy Advance under the same title, and later received ports to Palm OS and Windows Mobile in 2006. The game spawned a number of sequels that would collectively form the Broken Sword series: Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror in 1997; Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon in 2003; Broken Sword: The Angel of Death in 2006; and Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse in episodic format, between 2013 and 2014. An extended version of the game, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars – Director's Cut, was released between 2009 and 2012 for Wii, Nintendo DS, Microsoft Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and Linux. A remaster of the game was announced at Gamescom 2023, titled Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars: Reforged. It was announced on August 16, 2024 that the game would be released on September 19, 2024. It is based on the original version, not the Directors Cut.
Gameplay
Broken Sword is a 2D adventure game played from a third-person perspective. The player uses a point-and-click interface to interact with the environment and to guide protagonist George Stobbart through the game's world. To solve puzzles and progress in the game, the player collects items that may be combined with one another, used on the environment, or given to non-player characters. The protagonist converses with NPCs via dialogue trees presented through "conversation icons" to learn about the game's puzzles and plot. Clues and other information are obtained by clicking on items in the inventory and on objects in the environment. The player navigates with a map, to which new locations are added as the story unfolds. Unlike in most adventure games at the time, the protagonist's death is possible, after which the player starts from the last save point.Plot
While on holiday in Paris, American tourist George Stobbart witnesses an assassin dressed as a clown steal an old man's briefcase from inside a café and kill him with a bomb. George then meets and teams up with photo-journalist Nicole Collard; she was supposed to meet the old man, Plantard, and is investigating a string of assassinations involving the same person in different costumes. George tracks the assassin to a hotel within the city, thanks to evidence they left behind near the café, and recovers an ancient manuscript from the hotel safe that the assassin, known as Khan, had taken from the old man. George smuggles the document around a pair of thugs that are after it as well. George and Nicole discover it to be related to the Knights Templar and housing clues relating to places across Europe and the Middle East.Discovering a tripod mentioned in the manuscript being housed in a local museum, George visits the site from where it came from at Lochmarne, Ireland. He learns that the archaeologist who found it, Peagram, had disappeared, leaving a package in the care of his assistant. The assistant is abducted by Khan outside a local pub, dropping the package. George tracks it down; it contains a gem mentioned in the manuscript. At the excavation site, he locates a mural pointing him to the Montfauçon in Paris. In Paris, George investigates a hospitalised man named Marquet who wanted the gem, and learns the tripod is to be stolen, moments before Marquet is murdered. George and Nicole thwart the theft, and hold on to the tripod.
George finds a hidden chamber beneath Montfauçon, within the city's sewers. He spies on a group there claiming to be successors of the Templars and plotting their rise, Marquet's killer among them; Marquet, Peagram and Plantard are revealed as Neo-Templars as well. After they leave, George investigates the chamber, discovers through the gem and tripod another clue pointing to the village of Marib in Syria, and travels there. George discovers a nearby rock formation called the Bull's Head detailed in the manuscript. He uncovers in a hidden cave a glass lens that the Neo-Templars sought, an idol of the being called Baphomet, and a stone map of Britain. Khan, who had been seeking George, arrives and corners him, but George outwits the assassin and escapes.
Back at Nicole's, George learns from her that a friend, André Lobineau, uncovered his next destination: a villa in Spain owned by the De Vasconcellos family. With permission from its sole surviving member, George examines the grounds and the family mausoleum and uncovers the family's chalice, hidden centuries ago. Returning to Paris, George tracks down the tomb of a De Vasconcellos ancestor at the Montfauçon – where also the lens reveals in a stained glass window a burning Templar and the date 1314 – and investigates an excavation site that had uncovered another idol of Baphomet, using the chalice to find another clue depicting a church with a square tower. George investigates the grounds in Spain further and finds a hidden well based on biblical references taken from the tomb. Within, he discovers a mural depicting a river running across a chessboard.
George and Nicole compile their clues with the help of André, and learn that the Neo-Templars are travelling to a site under the ruins of a church in Bannockburn, Scotland. The pair takes the night train to get there, only for the Neo-Templars to abduct Nicole. An old lady from their carriage is revealed as a disguised Khan, who helps George to overcome the kidnappers and rescue Nicole. Before dying from his wounds, Khan, implicated to belong to the Hashshashin sect opposing the Templars, explains that he and George were on the same side. The pair arrives to the church, where they discover the Neo-Templars seek to acquire the power of Baphomet and reforge his sword, the titular Broken Sword. To stop them, George and Nicole destroy the site with explosives acquired from Khan, burying the Neo-Templars and destroying the ruins above. When the explosion is finished, they kiss.
Development
In 1992, Cecil and Noirin Carmody met with Sean Brennan, then-head of publishing at Virgin Interactive, and spoke about how the Knights Templar would make an ideal subject to base a game on. Later, Virgin agreed to issue the game. In a September interview for French magazine Génération 4 at the time, Charles Cecil stated that he had begun working on a scenario for Revolution's third game, after 1992's Lure of the Temptress and 1994's then-upcoming Beneath a Steel Sky. The game would be set in Paris with a Templar story line. The following month, Cecil visited Paris to research the Templars; after reading The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, he was certain there was enough known about the Templars to make them a good subject for a game. Cecil, Dave Cummins, and Jonathan Howard began work on the story and design. Cecil and Cummins attended a film-writing course and their script was read by Alan Drury, a senior BBC scriptwriter and dramatist. Revolution artist Steve Ince created initial location sketches for the game before working on Beneath a Steel Sky. He was promoted to producer halfway through the project.Despite releasing the PC version, Virgin was not interested in publishing the game on the PlayStation, feeling that only 3D games would sell for the console. As a result, Cecil contacted Sony Computer Entertainment, who agreed to release the game for the console. In North America, Broken Sword was renamed to Circle of Blood. Cecil was uneasy about the name change, feeling that it gave a wrong impression of what type of game it was. In 1998 however, THQ published the game on the PlayStation platform under its original Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars title.
One of Cecil's goals was to depart from the humorous adventure games more popular at the time, such as LucasArts' Monkey Island series, by creating a game with good pacing and a complex storyline, a reason he thought the Knights Templar would be an ideal subject. Unlike LucasArts games, which used a question-and-answer conversation system, Broken Sword offered "conversation icons" that would not reveal to the player what the protagonist was about to say; Cecil's intention was to make the game more cinematic, but not resemble interactive movies of that time; he felt that they were "mimicking movies." He wanted to create two protagonists who would exchange ideas, helping drive the game along. He made George American and Nico French to appeal to US and European markets.
The team at Revolution had high expectations for Broken Sword, but there was significant competition. Revolution had a team that had created successful adventure games, but believed they needed to utilise the best of other creative industries. Eoghan Cahill and Neil Breen of Dublin's Don Bluth studios drew the backgrounds in pencil and digitally colored them in Photoshop. The introductory sequence and the main characters were done by animator Mike Burgess, who worked for the Red Rover animation studio. The game's graphics were animated in a style resembling classic animated films.
Cecil contacted composer Barrington Pheloung, who agreed to create the game's score. Around the time of the game's release, Pheloung stated: "Virgin would probably have been happy with a main theme and a few cues, but I thought that rather than creating an orchestral score like for a movie, I could make one which interacted with the game. So I've written over three hours of music, which is unique in the genre, and over 400 cues." He scored the music for orchestra and added the structural elements by breaking it up into sampled pieces.
Revolution had already cast Hazel Ellerby as Nicole Collard, but had trouble finding a voice actor for George Stobbart. Hazel, who went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, suggested her former schoolmate from Guildhall, Rolf Saxon, as George. Charles offered him the job, and Saxon accepted. The remaining credited voice actors in the original are Rachel Atkins, David Bannerman, Rosy Clayton, Jack Elliott, Steve Hodson, David Holt, Peter Kenny, Richard Mapletoft, Matthew Marsh, Colin McFarlane, Don McCorkindale, Gavin Muir, Paul Panting, and Andrew Wincott.
Cecil was the game's director and writer, Tony Warriner and David Sykes the designer-programmers, and Noirin Carmody the executive producer. The game uses the Virtual Theatre engine, as do Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky. The game's final cost was one million pounds. It received a Game Boy Advance port in 2002, and it was later ported to Palm OS and Windows Mobile in 2006.
In March 2009, Ubisoft released a director's cut of The Shadow of the Templars entitled Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars – Director's Cut for the Wii and Nintendo DS. Dave Gibbons, with whom Revolution worked on Beneath a Steel Sky, created additional artwork for the game. Due to the platform's size limits, the DS version contains no spoken dialogue, only subtitles. A version of the Director's Cut for iPhone and iPod Touch was released on January 20, 2010. In May, a version in high definition was released for the iPad. Versions for Windows and Mac OS X were released on September 2 on digital-distribution services. An Android version was released on Google Play in June 2012. The original version of the game is available from Sold-Out Software and GOG.com with Director's Cut purchases, and from Steam as free DLC for Director's Cut owners.