Beneath a Steel Sky is a 1994 point-and-click adventure game developed by British developer Revolution Software and published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment for MS-DOS and Amiga home computers. It was made available as freewareand with the source code releasedfor PC platforms in 2003. Set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, the player assumes the role of Robert Foster, who was stranded in a wasteland known as "the Gap" as a child and adopted by a group of local Aboriginals, gradually adjusting to his life in the wilderness. After many years, armed security officers arrive, killing the locals and taking Robert back to Union City. He escapes and soon uncovers the corruption which lies at the heart of society.
Originally titled Underworld, the game was a collaboration between game director Charles Cecil and comic book artist Dave Gibbons, and cost £40,000 to make. Cecil was a fan of Gibbons's work and approached with the idea of a video game. The game has a serious tone but features humour-filled dialogue, which came as a result of Cecil's and writer Dave Cummins's goal to find a middle ground between the earnestness of Sierra's and the slapstick comedy of LucasArts's adventure games. It was built using Revolution's Virtual Theatre engine, first used in Revolution's previous and debut release, 1992's Lure of the Temptress.
It received positive reviews at the time of its release and is retrospectively viewed as a cult classic and Revolution's greatest game besides Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. A remastered edition was released for iOS in 2009 as Beneath a Steel Sky Remastered, which also received a positive reception from the gaming press. A sequel was greenlit during the Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse 2012 Kickstarter campaign, and was announced in March 2019. Entitled Beyond a Steel Sky, it was released on Apple Arcade in June 2020, on Steam in July 2020, and on GOG.com in March 2021.
Gameplay
Beneath a Steel Sky 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 Robert Foster 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 (NPCs). The protagonist converses with NPCs via dialogue trees 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. Unlike in most adventure games at the time, the protagonist's death is possible, after which the player starts from the last save point. In the remastered iOS version, the point-and-click interface is replaced with a touch user interface, a hint system is added, and hotspots are highlighted.
Synopsis Background Beneath a Steel Sky is set at an unknown point in a dystopian future, when the Earth has been significantly damaged by pollution, nuclear fallout, or both.
In Australia, the six states and two territories who have been consumed by their respective capital cities are described as "city states". Union City is the second largest of the six remaining city states after the acquisition of Asio-City. Within this socio-political milieu, the national intelligence agency ASIO wield a great deal of power.
After the "Euro–American War", all participants agreed upon a set of ideals described as the "neo democratic principles" which remove all labour representation and social benefits. Ironically, those that subscribe to these principles are called "Unions", contrasting the real world definition of what a trade union pushes for. Those that oppose the Unions' ideals are called "Corporations". All of the City States in Australia are either Corporations or Unions.
The larger political context of the game involves a conflict between Union City and the Hobart Corporation, whereby they are each trying to achieve market dominance by the use of sabotage. During the game, characters in Union City remark that Hobart Corporation is winning the "economic war" by flooding the market with "cheap, gimmicky garbage", although it is never clarified whether this is mere propaganda.
Plot The immediate backstory is introduced via a comic book 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 Outback at the time of the game). Too young to fend for himself, Robert is adopted by a group of locals, 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, but also because of the discovery of an empty can of Foster's Lager found near the crash site. Over the years, Foster 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. 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 (Logical Inter-Neural Connection). The abductors refuse to give Foster any explanation as to what is happening. Shortly upon arriving in the city, the helicopter malfunctions and crashes in the city's upper level. Foster survives and flees, making his way into a recycling plant, carrying Joey's circuit board with him.
Foster places Joey's circuit board into a robotic vacuum cleaner (something about which Joey is none too happy). He then attempts to escape the plant, but is cornered 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, which he reveals is controlled by LINC, that Foster must be stopped. In answer the camera shoots him again, 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, Foster eventually arrives in the abandoned subway tunnels. There he discovers that LINC has grown exponentially, to the point where he is now half-machine, half-organic entity. However, in order to function, LINC needs a human host to share its brain. The current host is Foster's biological father, who is old and has become severely worn out from his symbiosis with LINC. It is revealed that LINC sent for Foster because, with the death of its current host inevitable, it needed a replacement, and only a blood relative would do. Foster ultimately defeats LINC by plugging Joey (who, at this point, could be optionally given the new name "Ken" by Foster) into the mainframe. Joey/Ken is able to take control of the system, and set about turning Union City into a utopia.
Development While working at Activision, Revolution co-founder and CEO Charles Cecil got the idea of working with Dave Gibbons, artist and co-creator of comic book Watchmen, as Cecil was a fan of the comic book himself. He approached Gibbons, but shortly thereafter, the old Activision broke down. However, they maintained a friendship, and Cecil later contacted Gibbons to ask him to work on Revolution's second game. Seeing his son play video games, Gibbons became interested and realized that his skills in drawing, writing and conceptualizing could be useful in a gaming environment. Joining the team just before the release of Lure of the Temptress, Gibbons was sent a rudimentary outline of what could happen in the hypothesised game, and wrote a longer story with new characters and scenarios, to which Revolution then further added. Originally the game was named Underworld, a title proposed by Gibbons, but it was renamed due to the release of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.
The production values became much higher for Beneath a Steel Sky than for Lure of the Temptress, resulting in a game six times larger, and by the end of 1993, the team working on the game had grown to eleven. The game was created in sections, which allowed the team to ensure that each part was "perfected" before moving on. Its 2-year development cost £40,000, a large amount of money for the company at the time.
Creative and technical design
The designers' goal was to create a visual bridge between comic and video game graphics. Gibbons drew the backgrounds in pencil, starting with roughs, which were sent to Revolution to see if they were technically feasible. Once agreed upon, Gibbons would then make the final sketch. The pencil sketches were then colored, mainly by Les Pace. The backgrounds were scanned on a Macintosh as 24-bit, 1000x1000 pixel images with 16 million colors, and then transformed to 8-bit, 320x200 pixel images with 256 colors for the PC version. The backgrounds were designed so that the sprites would appear clear on the screen and would not mix with the backgrounds. Gibbons created the sprites using Deluxe Paint on an Amiga. Steve Ince, who joined the team in February 1993, created a number of sprite animations, also painting some backgrounds based on Gibbons's sketches. Gibbons also designed the characters, although he found it challenging to get a character's personality and expression in a face that was only around seven pixels wide and nine pixels high with a limited palette. He would have liked to design a character in a similar manner to Prince of Persia or Flashback, but Revolution wanted something more detailed, so the result became a compromise. All character sprites are smoothly animated with around 20 positions each. According to Gibbons, about 75% of the backgrounds and characters he designed were used in the game.
Dave Cummins wrote the dialogue for the game. The tone of Revolution's early games was born from a tension between Cummins and Cecil. Cummins wanted to be more flippant with dialogue, while Cecil wanted to be more serious. Their goal was to find the middle ground between Sierra's "ridiculously earnest" stories and the slapstick comedy of LucasArts games. For the voice acting, which is only included in the CD-ROM version, Revolution used actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Only two days were spent recording over five thousands lines of dialogue. Not pleased with the results, however, Revolution decided on a lengthy re-recording, and realized that voice actors should be used, rather than stage actors. As a result of this, the speech does not always match the on-screen text, with English terms being Americanized. Cummins was also responsible for the score of the game, writing a specific tune for each of the main locations.