Tony Warriner, one of the original co-founders of Revolution Software, has shared new images of the cancelled GBA port of Broken Sword 2 on social media, and has also teased online that "there is a chance the project will come back to life as it was more or less finished...".
Broken Sword 2 for the Game Boy Advance — just in case you're not up to speed on your Broken Sword history — was intended to be the follow-up to the 2002 GBA port of the original game, developed by Revolution Software in partnership with the publisher BAM! Entertainment. As the story goes, however, BAM! Entertainment went out of business just two weeks out from completion, forcing Revolution Software to put the project aside in the hopes that it could potentially be revived further down the road.
As far as we're aware, Warriner remains the only person who has in his possession a copy of the "mythical" port and has previously only shared a single image of the title screen in his book Revolution: The Quest For Game Development Greatness. There he wrote the following about the cancelled project, detailing just how close it came to release:
"We worked through the project and got right through to final testing. We were about two weeks from completion when... bam! BAM! Entertainment hit financial trouble and everything ground to a halt. They'd more or less paid for the development of GBA Broken Sword 2 upfront but were now in no position to release it.
"We scratched our heads and stopped working. Maybe the situation would fix itself and someone would buy them up? But it never happened. We archived the project — this time properly, I still have it — and all of us were quickly subsumed into Broken Sword 3."
As a fan of the Broken Sword games, these new photos are pretty remarkable to look at all these years later, as they give us our first proper glimpse at the GBA version in action, including a preview of the opening section in Professor Oubier's House and the Café location in Paris.
We'd definitely be interested in seeing more of the project in the future, and we're hoping that Warriner can eventually realize his dream of bringing it back to life — whether that's as a licensed release (Warriner has since left Revolution and is working on his own projects like UrbX Warriors for Spectrum Next) or as a publicly available dump of the game.