In 1994, a team of just a handful of writers, artists, and programmers created Beneath a Steel Sky. The point-and-click adventure game featured a unique mix of quirky comedy and hard sci-fi elements, earning positive comparisons to the likes of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Now, 25 years later, a sequel has finally been released in collaboration with Apple for the subscription-based Apple Arcade, with a Steam version coming soon.

Like its predecessor, Beyond a Steel Sky is the brainchild of a collaboration between Revolution Studios, led by game director Charles Cecil, and the artwork of legendary comic book artist Dave Gibbons, best known for his work on the original Watchmen graphic novel. While still tied to its point-and-click roots, Beyond a Steel Sky is a full-fledged 3D title built on Unreal Engine 4, allowing for a more cinematic presentation and modern production values. Set ten years after the last game, Beyond a Steel Sky sees the original player character return to Union City in an effort to rescue a kidnapped child, only to discover that a seedy underbelly lurks just beneath the shiny vaneer of the technologically advanced utopia.

Related: 20 Hidden Things In '90s Video Games That Weren't Found For Years

While promoting the Apple Arcade release of Beyond a Steel Sky, Charles Cecil and Dave Gibbons spoke with Screen Rant about working on the game. They discuss how a quarter-century of advances in technology have allowed the new game to build on the original ideas presented by Beneath a Steel Sky, and explain what makes Beyond a Steel Sky so special, even for players who may have never heard of the series until now. They also discuss collaborating with Apple, whose influence and financial backing allowed them to greatly expand the project beyond its initial scope.

Beyond a Steel Sky is out now on Apple Arcade and releases on Steam in July 2020.

Beyond a Steel Sky Union City

First of all, this has been a long time coming. The original fans have been waiting for decades for this, and the fact that you and Dave both have your fingerprints on it, it's more than a lot of us were expecting. Would this have happened without Dave?

Charles Cecil: It couldn't have happened without Dave.

Dave Gibbons: Never. It would have been impossible (Laughs)

Charles Cecil: No, it was never going to happen without Dave. And I'd love to say that's one of the reasons why this has taken so long, but that would be a terrible lie. Actually, Dave and I started talking about it back in 1995. It's only taken us 25 years to actually finally get this game out.

Dave Gibbons: I had so much fun working with Charles and his team the first time, and I found that, in a way, games people are just like comic people, in that they're very enthusiastic about what they do, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I was just waiting for the call from Charles to say the time was right to do it again. I think, without both of us, it never would have happened, and it certainly wouldn't be what it is.

Beyond a Steel Sky got pushed back so you could do Broken Sword, and now it's finally on its way. The game that's coming out now, does it have anything in common with what was in your head in 2009 when the Beneath remaster came out, or in 2004 when the sequel was strongly rumored, or even in 1995 when you were probably brainstorming what the next move might be for the Steel Sky story?

Charles Ceceil: Back in 1995, the game was 2D point-and-click. And there were ambitions we were bringing all the way back then. One of them was called Virtual Theater. It's the idea that characters walk around, talking to each other and responding to the world. At the time, it felt absolutely mind-blowing and incredible. Obviously, 25 years later, it's not so special. But what I was excited about was that, in the original Steel Sky, the idea of both the intelligent characters in the world, and also the fact that you could subvert the world and change their behaviors. We had hints of that in Beneath a Steel Sky. There's one point where there's a factory owner who is very proud of the fact that the coat he wears is from the last five beavers in the world, and they are now extinct. But he moved around the world, responding to what the player did. And one of the things you could do is go into the AI system and remove his privileges, which meant he couldn't go down to the lower level, which meant... Well, we interwove puzzles with that. Ultimately, the weakness with point and click adventures, the weakness is that you have a limited armory of gameplay opportunities. You've got your inventory, you've got your hot spots, you talk to people, and that's kind of it. And what we've been trying to do is actually transcend that.

And how do you do that?

Charles Cecil: What we've done is bring forward a lot of the visions we had back then, but now we have the technology to make it work in a much more sophisticated way, not least going to a full 3D world. You still have the characters walking around, but rather than disappearing off and not knowing where they are, you can actually change the world, subvert the world, and you can see their reactions. An example in the very first section, and it's a trivial example, but there's a drinks vending machine, and what you can do is go in there and see the basic logic: you scan your hand. If you have permission, it gives you a drink. If you don't, it politely rejects. If you're trying to vandalize it, then it sets an alarm off. And you can swap things around, and it's very simple. You can say, "if you've got a legitimate ID, then the alarm goes off." Which means, a character can come over for a drink, but the alarm goes off, sending over a droid, and the world changes. The world is changed, and all the characters have responded, and that then allows the puzzles to emerge from those changes, rather than being binary solutions that would happen in a normal point and click adventure. In some ways, it's very different, but in some ways, it's exactly what we wanted to do, but now we can because of technology.

Dave Gibbons: I think that goes, not only for the gameplay, but the way the game looks, as well. For the first game, it was assembled, pixel-by-pixel. I was using Deluxe Paint on an Amiga.And it was a slow and laborious, almost Victorian, process. All the backgrounds were hand drawn, and then painted and scanned. Now, of course, everything is 3D modeled. We've got a fantastic "toon" renderer, which means it's got the feel of a comic book with lines around things, done in a really sophisticated and convincing way. This game is so much better than I ever could have imagined things would be when we were working on the original. The height of technology then, for me and Charles, was being able to fax sketches back and forth. We thought that was a miracle. Now, I draw on my graphics tablet, hit the button, and he's got a full color sketch seconds later. It's made a tremendous difference to the way we work, and it's eased things a lot. It's made us much more nimble and responsive.

Charles Cecil: But you have to admit, Dave, you miss the trips up to the fine city of Hull.

Dave Gibbons: Yes, Charles used to work out of a town called Hull, which is a fishing city. They're proud people in Hull! It's not the most glamorous city in the world, and I used to take a couple of trains to get there. But fortunately, Charles' office was above a place that was full of "One Armed Bandit" fruit machines and sold really good junk food. So they would always have to buy me a bacon butty. And butty is British for "sandwich." So I'd come up on the train, have a nice big bacon sandwich, and then we were ready to work. I do miss that, a bit. That was an adventure to me.

Beyond a Steel Sky skyline

This is very much a sequel, but not a throwback. It's not a nostalgia play. It's the next generation of this game.

Charles Cecil: It's really important that people need know nothing about the original game. There were many reasons why it was wonderful to work with Dave, but one of them was because that allowed us to tap into the comic book history of the original game. We now have motion comic, and it conveys an awful lot... Dave, you're probably better talking about this than me!

Dave Gibbons: With the first game, we had really rudimentary graphics, but we were able to have a really cool looking comic book that was fully drawn and detailed and colored. We had our backstory in that, and we were also able to show what the blocky little pixel figures, the sprites, were supposed to represent. If the player used their imagination, they were able to see, "Oh, this isn't just a collection of pixels, it's a really cool guy in a long leather coat!" So when we came to the second game, we decided to do a comic for that, for the same reason, to give backstory. That's why you don't really need to know anything about the first game. All the backstory you need, and the character motivation, is in the comic. But this time, we were able to do a motion comic. We were able to bridge the gap between a regular comic and a full motion experience. And then you go from the motion comic into the game, which has the same style of drawing as the comic, so it just looks like the comic has come alive. And it works really well, due to a lot of clever behind-the-scenes tech wizardry. I'm really happy that it looks so authentic.

Charles Cecil: We emulated what Dave liked, and then Dave, retrospectively, when he did the comic, emulated what we had to try to make the two together. The reason we've gone for our style is twofold. First of all, from an aesthetic perspective, we felt like the comic book style looked so good. But part of the point of adventure games is that you scan the background, looking for hotspots of relevance. This game is made for a wide range of devices, from an iPhone up to a Mac. So, particularly on the smaller screens, the simplicity of the graphics style lets you focus on the elements that are important, which actually enhances the gameplay experience.

Is this based on the Broken Sword tech at all?

Charles Cecil: No, we've moved on to Unreal. Engine. We're delighted with it. We have post-processing that draws textures with normal maps. We're all huge fans of Telltale Games. One of the things about their characters is, when they come, what looks like a thin black line from a distance suddenly becomes a gash across their forehead. We can control the color and the thickness in real time. Our vision for this was that any frame should look like a comic book artist would have drawn it. We even, at one point, extended to cross-hatching. And cross-hatching on a static image looks great, but... Dave, you reviewed it at one point, what were your thoughts?

Dave Gibbons: It looked like someone had scribbled on the character's face with a sharpie marker, when you looked at it closely! So we got rid of that. One thing I found particularly exciting was... I did see some of the game in a VR engine in an Oculus, and that was amazing. That really was like being inside of a hand drawn comic book. From my point of view, I was wondering if they were going to be able to get the right effect, but they absolutely smashed it. It looks really good. And it makes it warmer. Rather than a cold 3D rendering with textures that just butt up against each other, this has the feeling of being handmade and feels more warm and human and involving because of that.

Beyond a Steel Sky Foster Image

Back in the old days, you had, what, 25 pixels to convey emotion on a guy's face?

Dave Gibbons: Yes.

Now you've got all this space. Does that make it easier because you don't have to use tricks and shorthand, or is it harder, just in terms of manpower?

Dave Gibbons: Well, it's easier because once it's written, there is no manpower! It would be a nightmare to have to go through and write all the expressions. I mean, I did some detailed sketches of the characters that showed them with a range of emotions, and we were able to go through different iterations really quickly to get to the effect we wanted. And then Charles' artists tightened it up even more, and then it was given to the 3D guys. But to have to draw it all would have been impossible.

Charles Cecil: When we decided to work with Apple on this, and we're thrilled to work with them, part of what they wanted was for us to increase the ambition. That was the point. We would have had shortcuts before, but now we have artists going through making sure that, for every conversation, the characters have the right expression. We have a very advanced lip-sync system, as well. I always feel like your lip sync is right when you don't notice it. That's an obvious thing to say, but you do notice it when it's wrong. As we started polishing, you get to the stage where you play through the game, and it works so well that you're absolutely engaged in the story, and a lot of that comes from the ambition that we were able to deliver because of our relationship with Apple.

Dave Gibbons: Certainly, that's something I remember. Once I knew we were onboard with Apple, our vision increased dramatically. We realized we could now do things that we had only dreamed of. So it's fantastic that we paired with them at that stage of development, where there was still a lot of work to do, and it meant the work we did was able to be much closer to our vision than what we would have done otherwise.

The whole Apple Arcade initiative, I think, is awesome. It really dispels the notion that the mobile landscape is only microtransactions... Which is kind of unfair, since the console space is full of microtransactions, too! But that's a whole other discussion.

Charles Cecil: When we were publishing our games in the 90s, they were successful and that was great. But by the end of the 90s, publishers decided that PC as a format was dead, and adventure games were gone forever. So we found it impossible to have any of our games commissioned. And then when we did, they were on such unfavorable terms that we were losing money. It just didn't work at all. The big change happened in 2007, with the release of iPhone. Then, in 2008, we had a call from someone in the UK. We were blown away because we were approached by Apple, and they thought our games would work well on their platform. And we were able to self-publish. And our first game was Beneath a Steel Sky. And the resolution was 320x200. By chance, that was the same resolution as the first iPhone. And then we brought Broken Sword across, which was 640x480. And that was the same resolution as the second generation of iPhone. By incredible serendipity, we were able to bring over our games, and they were perfectly tailored for the size of the screen. That allowed us to have the confidence to start developing our own games. And a side effect of that was the ability to meet our community, which was unbelievable. As a developer in the 90s, our primary customer was the publisher. Theirs was the retailer. And theirs was the gamer. So there was no direct relationship with the community. But by self-publishing on the iPhone, and the iPod as it was at the time, we were able to organize our own events. It was such a thrill to be able to meet our community, and we had no idea who these people were!

It's almost like what's happening with streaming, where there's more of a direct line between artists and their fans, rather than everyone having to watch whatever is made for the lowest common denominator.

Charles Cecil: The magazines were very good. What worked very well was when we did a Kickstarter. People gave feedback. We were thrilled because what would have happened a generation ago was, we would have paid a company to go and find out their opinions! But they were giving us their opinions, we were acting on them, and they were thrilled that we were listening to them! It's this virtual circle that they were delighted to communicate with us and that we respected their opinions, and we were delighted that we could actually get really important and valuable feedback from the people who matter the most.

Beyond a Steel Sky

It's obviously the two of you, Charles and Dave, but is there anyone else from the original team who is, if not outright working on the new game, still involved in one way or another?

Charles Cecil: Yes. The company was founded by four people. Noirin Carmody is the Executive Producer, and she was one of the founders of Revolution. I don't think anybody else is involved. But we do give them a big thanks at the end, the original team, because they were fantastic. It was a completely different time, as Dave was saying, a completely different working environment. And one of the things I'm thrilled with at Revolution is, an awful lot of people used to work at Revolution at various points, and then left when we effectively closed the studio, and have come back since. And we have this balance of people who worked originally at the studio, and also new people, which gives us a wonderfully diverse team, which is something great, and is hopefully something that reflects in the way we tell our stories.

Dave Gibbons: And I think there's still a big legacy from the original creative team. And very much the sense of humor, which is one of the things I loved from the first game, still comes through. That slightly wacky, anarchic thing, where people are walking through an environment with strange English accents, American accents, and Australian accents, and it's a wonderful mix of serious stuff and silly stuff. I think that dates back to the people who worked on it the first time around... Not least of them being Charles, obviously! He's got an awful sense of humor, as you know!

Charles Cecil: (Laughs) There's two references we used at the time, and are still really important. The first was the film, Brazil, by Terry Gilliam, which was effectively 1984 with a twist. And I think he did that brilliantly. I think it's his best film, and I think he's fantastic. And the second film is called Stand By Me, about a group of boys and the relationship between them. Dave Cummins, who sadly passed away, I worked very closely with him, as he wrote the first game, these were our favorite films. Stand By Me drove the relationship between Foster and the droid he created who became his best friend. And then the idea of the ludicrousness of an overpowering and dangerous world inhabited by ludicrous characters... And the key thing is that the player experiences the world through the main protagonist, who is normal like us and realizes how ludicrous the world is while other people don't think the world is ludicrous. The world, by their values, is absolutely normal. That's why you need to have a character come in from outside: because he's not part of it.

I love both of those movies. And how does the story kind of segue into the sequel?

Charles Cecil: It's ten years later. In real time, it's been 25 years, but in game time it's ten years later. That means quite a lot has been allowed to change. At the end of Beneath a Steel Sky, you leave your AI best friend, Joey, to run the city, with instructions of "making the people happy." So what this game is, is imagine that ten years ago, the people were told to be happy by an AI. A benign AI who does its very best to make sure people are happy. To begin with, it becomes a utopia, but underneath, there's a dark dystopia. The game kicks off with your best friend's son being kidnapped in this wolfdog-like vehicle. And you go in search, and you're shocked to find that the trail leads back to Union City, the place from which you escaped ten years ago.

watchmen-regina-king-hbo-show

I can't wait to play it myself! Finally, Dave, the work you've done keeps coming back around. Part of me was tempted to ask you a thousand Watchmen questions, but Steel Sky is so precious that I didn't want to distract. But Watchmen came back in a big way last year, and now Steel Sky is having its time again. Do you feel like you're having a personal renaissance, or are you kinda like, "Oh, that's cool," before you move onto the next job?

Dave Gibbons: If you hang around for long enough, things do come around again. And, of course, I'm very happy that they have, that people are still interested in my work. In the case of Beyond a Steel Sky, I don't do anything like as much work as I used to, because I'm a gentleman of mature years now, but I just couldn't turn down working on this game. Mainly because, what I've always loved is the collaboration, and I have such a great laugh collaborating with Charles and his team. It's like being invited to a party that you knew you were really going to enjoy. It's come around again, and it's come around in a way that's so much better than I ever imagined it could be in the way it looks and in the way it plays. So even if it comes around again, I'll probably still be on board!

Charles Cecil: Well, I'd hope so!

Next: 15 Sci-Fi Masterpieces You’ve Probably Never Seen