Beneath a Steel Sky

1994 · Point-and-Click Adventure · PC/DOS / Amiga

About Beneath a Steel Sky

Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) is Revolution Software's cyberpunk adventure, drawn by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, in which an outback survivor and his wisecracking robot uncover the secret of Union City's all-powerful computer, LINC.

Beneath a Steel Sky in Depth

In a polluted future Australia carved into city states, Robert Foster, the only survivor of a helicopter crash in the outback, known as "the Gap", is raised by locals who name him after a can of Foster's Lager found at the wreck. He learns engineering and builds Joey, a sentient robot whose personality lives on a circuit board that can move between robot bodies, a running gag throughout. Security soldiers sent by Union City's computer, LINC, destroy his tribe and kidnap him, but their helicopter crashes in the city, and Foster escapes through a recycling plant, putting Joey's board into a robotic vacuum cleaner, to Joey's disgust. Working his way down through the city, he discovers that LINC has become half-machine, half-organic and needs a human host, its current one being Foster's own dying father.

It is a third-person point-and-click adventure: players collect items to combine, use on the world or give to characters, and question them through dialogue trees. Unusually for the time, the hero can die, sending the player back to the last save. Writer Dave Cummins and director Charles Cecil aimed for a middle ground between Sierra's "ridiculously earnest" stories and LucasArts' slapstick, giving a serious story humour-filled dialogue.

Making Beneath a Steel Sky

Cecil had wanted to work with Gibbons since his time at Activision, and Gibbons, interested after watching his son play games, expanded Revolution's outline into a fuller story. Built with Revolution's Virtual Theatre engine from Lure of the Temptress, updated by Tony Warriner and David Sykes into an object-oriented 2.0 version, it was six times larger than its predecessor, took two years and cost £40,000, a large sum for the company, with a team of eleven by late 1993. Virgin published it in March 1994 on 15 floppy disks and CD-ROM, with a Gibbons comic in the box. It was critically acclaimed and reached number one in the British charts, selling 300,000 to 400,000 copies, mostly in Europe; PC Gamer gave it Best Dialogue and it won Best Adventure at the Golden Joysticks, CU Amiga calling it "one of the greatest adventures ever". A remastered iOS version in 2009 was also well received, and a sequel, Beyond a Steel Sky, was released in 2020.

Beneath a Steel Sky Trivia

Its original title, Underworld, was dropped because of Ultima Underworld.
Gibbons drew the backgrounds in pencil and designed characters with faces only about seven by nine pixels.
Royal Shakespeare Company actors first recorded 5,000 lines in two days, but Revolution re-recorded them with voice actors.
It was the first game not developed in Portugal to be released with a Portuguese translation.
It was released as freeware with its source code in 2003, letting ScummVM support it.