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In 1989 Charles Cecil's computer could often be found in a white Ford Fiesta XR2, speeding along the 200-mile stretch of English motorway that separates Hull and Reading. The PC, a custom-built 386, was so valuable that Cecil would insist it be wrapped in blankets and secured in the back of a car with a carefully arranged seat belt. Cecil, who was 27 at the time and working as head of development at Activison, had blown his savings on the machine, which he intended to use as a dedicated flight simulator. But when the US side of the company collapsed and took his office down with it, Cecil decided to set up his own game studio with a programmer friend, Tony Warriner, who lived in Hull. The pair began working on a demo together, which they intended to pitch to publishers, shuttling themselves and their newly employed PC between the two cities each week. The day before the pair was due to show a demo of their first game to Mirrorsoft, the video game publisher owned by the late media tycoon Robert Maxwell, Warriner drove to Cecil's house with the computer safely swaddled and secured in the back. Warriner arrived in the early evening and parked outside the house. The pair rehearsed their presentation, drank a few glasses of wine and went to bed, hoping for a long night's sleep. The next morning Cecil went outside to find that Warriner's car window had been smashed. Dismay soon curdled into panic with the realisation that the pair had neglected to unload the PC the night before. Cecil ran to the car to find a splay of wires where the radio once sat. But in the backseat, unnoticed and untouched by the thief, sat the blank-faced computer. "Had they taken the PC, which was worth infinitely more than the car radio, that would have been the end of Revolution before it even really began," says Cecil. "There was no way we could have afforded a replacement."
The pitch was a success. But before the game, which later came to be known as Lure of the Temptress, launched the following year, Mirrosoft's duplicitous owner Maxwell died at sea. Cecil and Warriner, who had completed work on Lure of the Tempress and were deep into the development of their second title followed Sean Brennan, the man who had signed them, to Virgin where both Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky later launched to a considerable success. Brennan was ambitious. He told Cecil that Revolution's next game should have far higher production values to make the most of the emerging CD-Rom format (which could hold vastly more data than the floppy discs they had traditionally used) in order to "beat" the American rival adventure game publishers Sierra and LucasArts.
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