| Beneath a Steel Sky | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Revolution Software |
| Publisher(s) | Virgin Interactive |
| Designer(s) | Charles Cecil Daniel Marchant Dave Cummins Dave Gibbons Tony Warriner |
| Engine | ScummVM/Virtual Theatre |
| Platform(s) | DOS, Amiga, Amiga CD32, iOS |
| Release date(s) | March, 1994 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Rating(s) |
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| Media/distribution | Amiga: 15 3½-inch Floppies, 1 CD-ROM PC: 6 3½-inch Floppies, 1 CD-ROM, or Download |
| System requirements
PC: 386, DOS 3.3+, 2 RAM |
|
Beneath a Steel Sky is a 1994 science-fiction point-and-click adventure game in the cyberpunk genre. Like many point-and-click adventure games, it features comedy elements, and was developed by Revolution Software, a British developer, and published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment. It was initially released for DOS and Amiga. Its working title was Underworld.
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The game takes place at an unknown point in a dystopian future in Australia, where the Earth has been significantly damaged by pollution or nuclear fallout. The backstory is introduced via a comic book (shown on-screen in the introduction sequence of the CD release), drawn by comic artist Dave Gibbons, that tells the story of a young boy called Robert who is the sole survivor of a helicopter crash in "the Gap" (the name applied to the Australian Outback at the time of the game). Too young to fend for himself, Robert is adopted by a local group of Indigenous Australians, who teach him the skills he needs to survive in this harsh new environment; they name him Robert Foster, partly due to him being fostered by them and also because of the discovery of an empty can of Foster's Lager, an Australian beer, found near him at the crash site. Foster even learns engineering and technology and builds a talking, sentient robot called Joey.
Joey's personality is stored on a small circuit board, which can easily be inserted and removed from many types of robot bodies. This allows him to change bodies as the situation requires, provided his circuit board is not damaged. His commentaries on the current "shell" he is in are a running gag throughout the game.
As the game starts, Foster is kidnapped and his tribe annihilated by security soldiers sent from Union City by its all-powerful computer LINC. Interestingly, Union City mentions prominent suburbs and train stations found within Australia's largest city, Sydney, leading some to speculate that Union City was once Sydney. This was confirmed in a 2005 interview with the Australian gaming magazine, PC PowerPlay.
The abductors refuse to give Foster any explanation, however shortly upon arriving, the helicopter malfunctions and crashes in the city's upper level. Foster luckily survives the crash and flees. He makes his way through a recycling plant with the help of Joey (who is now a robotic vacuum cleaner, and none too happy about it) but is eventually caught up by a security officer who had also survived the accident. The officer, Reich, addresses Foster as "Overmann". Just as Reich is about to kill Foster, a nearby security camera shoots a laser, disarming him. Reich tells the camera, whom he reveals is controlled by LINC, that Foster must be stopped. In answer the camera shoots him again, this time killing him. Foster takes the officer's access card and sunglasses before he continues his escape.
As he makes his way further down the city looking for a way out, Foster eventually arrives in the abandoned subway tunnels. There he finds out that LINC has become an exponentially growing, half machine half organic entity. However, in order to function LINC needs a human host to share its brain. The current host is none other than Foster's father, who is old and seems severely worn out from his symbiosis with the organic computer. It is revealed that LINC sent for Foster because with its current host soon dead, it would need a replacement, and only a blood relative would do.
In the future world of Beneath a Steel Sky, the six states and two territories of Australia have been consumed by their respective capital cities and are described as "city states".
Union City is the second largest of the six remaining city states after the acquisition of Asio-City. Notably ASIO is Australia's national intelligence agency.
After the 'Euro-American War' all participants agreed upon a set of ideals described as the 'neo democratic principles' which removes all labour representation and social benefits. Ironically, those that subscribe to these principles are called 'Unions' contrasting the real world definition of what a Union pushes for. Those that oppose the Unions' ideals (and are thus, presumably, more amenable to Unionisation as it is known today) are called 'Corporations'.
All of the City States are described as either being Corporations or Unions.
The back-story involves a conflict between Union City and the Hobart Corporation fighting over 'market' dominance by the use of sabotage which is used as a common theme throughout the story. Hobart is the capital city of the Australian state Tasmania. During the game, characters in Union City remark that Hobart Corporation is winning the "economic war" by flooding the market with "cheap, gimmicky garbage," though it is never clarified whether this is mere propaganda.
The game's story was scripted by Dave Cummins with graphics and artwork done by Dave Gibbons, Paul Humphreys, Steve Ince, Stephen Oades, Les Pace and Adam Tween. Design was done by Charles Cecil, Dave Cummins, Dave Gibbons and Dan Marchant, while the Virtual Theatre (VT) design was done by Tony Warriner. Programming was carried out by James Long, David Sykes and Tony Warriner.[1]
Despite its status as one of the classics of adventure gaming, Beneath a Steel Sky suffered a troublesome production. The small team at Revolution found the size of the game a daunting task, resulting in long, stressful hours of programming, leading to tension within the company.
Because of the scope of the game—being four times the size of its predecessor, Lure of the Temptress, the programmers couldn't implement their Virtual Theatre system of independently roaming NPCs as effectively. Characters instead follow very simplified routines, as opposed to Lure where their freedom of movement was much greater. The design of the game was also simplified and greatly altered from its original design, according to Warriner.
The working title for the game was Underworld[2] and was the second to use Revolution Software's Virtual Theatre engine, the first being Lure of the Temptress.[3] The game's backgrounds and introduction sequence were designed by Dave Gibbons.[1] The introduction sequence was also included as a separate promotional comic book in some releases of the game.[3]
The game's initial release in the UK was met with critical acclaim, reaching the number one place in the GALLUP charts and receiving 95% from CU Amiga, 94% from Amiga Format and 93% from The One. The release in the USA was met with almost equal success with 4/5 from Computer Gaming World and 91% ('Editors choice Award') and ('Best Dialogue') from PC Gamer in 1995. In May 1995 Beneath a Steel Sky was awarded the prestigious Golden Joystick Award for 'The Best Adventure'.
Since its initial release the game has received glowing reviews from various websites. Adventure Classic Gaming gave the game a 4/5 rating and stated that the game was ahead of its time and "despite its gloomy and serious storyline, Beneath a Steel Sky is a game filled with humor and warm characters."[3] The review at Quandary gave the game a 3.5 out of 5 overall rating, stating that "there are many newer games with infinitely superior graphics and sound that are inferior experiences to this."[4]
The game was the first (and to date, only) game not aimed at children to be translated to Portuguese and was re-released in Portugal in translated form several months after the English-language version. The comic supplied with the game was not translated and was the version that could be found with the UK-release.
In August 2003, the game was released as freeware and support for it was added to ScummVM, allowing it to be played on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows CE and other compatible operating systems and platforms.[5] The data files for both the disk and CD version are available from the ScummVM website. The files on the ScummVM website do not include the original program executables since they are not needed by ScummVM.[6] The Fedora RPM software repository has a free down-loader which grabs the freeware game files and installs them alongside ScummVM. This game is directly included in the Debian software repository.
The game is also freely downloadable upon registration on digital distribution service Good Old Games.
"Beneath a Steel Sky 2 is a project Revolution has been considering for a while, and has started to move forward on, but we are unable to comment beyond this," company boss Charles Cecil said in 2004. On March 4, 2004, Revolution purchased the domain name steel-sky2.com, although this has now seemingly been sold.
However, in September 2005 Tony Warriner stated in Revolution’s forum that the game wasn’t cancelled, and that he would not lose hope that there would be a Steel Sky 2 at some point in the future. More recently, Charles Cecil spoke in an interview dated August 10, 2006, on Eurogamer of his admiration for the work done by Scumm VM and the resulting interest in a sequel. He also stated that if he were to make the game he "would dearly love to work with Dave Gibbons again.[6] In a February 20, 2009, interview with IGN UK about the Wii and DS versions of Broken Sword: The Director's Cut, Charles Cecil and Dave Gibbons re-iterated their interest in a sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky.[7]
In July 2009, Revolution announced that a remastered edition of Beneath a Steel Sky would be released on iOS later that year. The remastered edition features new animated movies by Dave Gibbons, a context-sensitive help system and improved audio quality.[8] The game was released September 23, 2009. The animated movies in the iOS remastered version make use of the original stills and use a style like sliding paper to animate them. There is also an inclusion of a new cut scene on the end of the game (after the credits) which may be a hint as to the plot line of the sequel mentioned above stating "In a world where all are free, the price of liberty is enslavement", parodying the famous quote "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance".
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