Charles Cecil On A Christmas Carol

02 Dec 2009 at 16:09:03 by Tim McDonald

With Christmas just around the corner, we thought we'd interrogate industry luminary Charles Cecil and see what he has to say about the game of the movie of the book, A Christmas Carol.

What can you tell us about the game, first off?

It's a game based on the Robert Zemeckis film, which is obviously based on the book. It's quite a faithful translation of the book, and I think what excited Zemeckis and his team was that a lot of the images that are described in the book can actually be translated into CG in a way that hasn't really been possible previously. If you think of the scenes where they're flying across England, in and out of lighthouses, into ships on the sea, etc. etc.

So how has this translated into game form then?

Initially, I was approached by Disney to consider how this could be done, and it was a really interesting one. Normally in a game you have a protagonist that you control, and normally, if you have a title like this, it would be a platform game and you'd be controlling the protagonist, and he'd probably be bouncing up and down on the Christmas baubles. Clearly that's completely inappropriate in this particular case, because Scrooge is a miserable skinflint, and he's not in any way – particularly in the beginning – empathetic.

That immediately created quite an interesting approach. My approach was to say, well, look. We don't actually want to control Scrooge, but what we do want to do is to drive him down the road of redemption. Often he's unwilling to go, and we want to convey the humour that exists in both the book and the film. A lot of it's very grim in some parts but there's a lot of humour as well. So our approach – to be clear, I did the initial design, and I designed some of the sections, and then Sumo in Sheffield designed the rest and actually wrote the game. But the approach that I took was to say that we've got certain key parts where major changes happen in Scrooge's life. We need to reflect those in the game. But rather than control him directly, why don't we control him indirectly, so that you're effectively the hand of fate, interacting with the background, interacting with characters, but driving Scrooge down his path to redemption – even if he's unwilling, in the way that he goes?

So that's our approach. You are manipulating the environment, and not actually dealing with him at all, and in manipulating the environment, you tell the story and you drive the story forward. The initial example was that, in the book, when Scrooge comes back to his house on Christmas Eve, he refuses to acknowledge the ghost of Jacob Marley and puts it down to a bout of indigestion. That was a really important part of the story, so the way that I thought that might work well was that Scrooge absolutely refuses to acknowledge the ghost because it's dark, and so he can explain it away as indigestion. What you have to do is light a candle - but the candle blows out because there's a draft, so you have to stop the draft, but if you close the window then it opens again... Ultimately, you need to find a way to light the candle, and then you've got to click on Marley to make him rear up, and it's only at that point – when he's lit – that Scrooge accepts that his friend really has come back to haunt him. There are 14 sections; 14 discrete elements where we actually drive the story forward in that way, and there a lots of little minigames as well that are acquired, whether it be snowball fighting, or ringing the bells. Lots of really fun little games.

You're best known for your work on various adventure game series, like Broken Sword. How has that influenced your work on A Christmas Carol?

Well, what excited me about Christmas Carol is that I think it's really important, as a medium, that we can broaden our scope. I think that if we can encourage younger people to play a game like Christmas Carol, watch the film, and then go and read the book, then that is a very, very worthy objective. I like to balance what I do personally between writing original games – we recently re-released one of our older games, Beneath a Steel Sky; we created a remastered version and launched that on iPhone a couple of weeks ago – and then, as you know, we did Broken Sword: Director's Cut on DS and Wii earlier in the year. But personally, I really enjoy this mix of working with third-parties on third-party licenses, and developing original games. I find that, intellectually, you get a lot from each, and hopefully both are better because of the other.

In this case, that must've been particularly exciting – it's such a well-known property. Have you had much freedom with it to rework the way events go, or are you very much stuck to the original text?

Well, when I was originally approached by Disney, they really didn't know what they wanted at all. They saw this as quite a difficult license to translate.

Understandably.

Once they liked the idea and they bought into it, then they've been incredibly supportive, both creatively and in terms of smoothing the relationship with the film producers. The whole journey has very smooth, although I have to say that since it was Sumo that did the production, it was mainly them that had the benefits of the relationships.

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