Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

About Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (1996), Circle of Blood in the US, is Revolution Software's Knights Templar conspiracy adventure with hand-drawn animated art and a Barrington Pheloung score, a million-seller widely ranked among the best adventures ever.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars in Depth

On holiday in Paris, American tourist George Stobbart sees an assassin dressed as a clown steal an old man's briefcase in a café and kill him with a bomb. He teams up with photojournalist Nicole Collard, who was due to meet the victim, Plantard, and has been investigating a string of killings by the same costumed assassin, Khan. An ancient manuscript recovered from Khan's hotel safe leads them into a conspiracy of Neo-Templars seeking the power of Baphomet and his broken sword, taking George to Lochmarne in Ireland, Marib in Syria, a villa in Spain and finally the ruins of a church at Bannockburn in Scotland. The story was meant to be serious but is laced with humour.

It is a third-person point-and-click adventure in which George collects and combines items, uses them on the world or gives them to characters, and talks through dialogue trees presented as "conversation icons", which, unlike LucasArts' question-and-answer system, do not show what he is about to say. A map gains new locations as the story unfolds, and unusually for the time, George can die, sending the player back to the last save.

Making Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

Cecil and Noirin Carmody pitched the Templars to Virgin's Sean Brennan in 1992, and Cecil, Dave Cummins and Jonathan Howard wrote the story, attending a film-writing course and having their script read by BBC scriptwriter Alan Drury. Cecil wanted to move away from the humour-led adventures of the time towards a complex, well-paced story. Built on Revolution's Virtual Theatre engine, with designer-programmers Tony Warriner and David Sykes, it cost one million pounds. Released on 30 September 1996, it was renamed Circle of Blood in North America, which Cecil disliked. Virgin did not want a PlayStation version, believing only 3D games would sell, so Sony released one, and it sold nearly 300,000 against expectations of 60,000. The game was the first to earn Revolution royalties and passed one million copies by 2001. Edge called it an "adventure gaming milestone" and the "best graphic adventure to date", superior to Monkey Island and The Dig. A Director's Cut followed in 2009 and a remaster, Reforged, in 2024, alongside four sequels.