Cecil worked on A Christmas Carol for DS News

Charles Cecil, creator of the Broken Sword adventure games and kindly uncle to the British videogame industry, has revealed that he worked as designer on Disney's A Christmas Carol game for DS.

The game is a spin-off of a new animated film adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens tale, directed by Back to the Future helmsman Robert Zemeckis and starring the voices of Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman. Both game and film are due for release on 3rd November.

"It was a really nice little project," Cecil told Develop. "I was approached by Disney to design a game based on A Christmas Carol and it turned out to be really fun... If we, the industry, can start embracing classic works of literature like Dickens, then that's really breaking down a barrier there."

Players won't exactly take the role of Scrooge in the game, Cecil revealed. "The approach I took was to place the player as the hand of fate, guiding a very wilful protagonist down the road to redemption, and he doesn't want to down that road at all... I'm very happy with it."

The game reunites Cecil with Sheffield developers Sumo Digital, who collaborated with him on the last Broken Sword. Cecil also recorded some place-holder voice narration for the game, which his paymasters at Disney insisted be used in the final product.

"They simply said I had to," he said.