The main protagonists of the series are George Stobbart, an American patent lawyer, and Nicole "Nico" Collard, a French freelance journalist.

The Broken Sword series was conceived in 1994 by Charles Cecil, Noirin Carmody and Sean Brennan, while talking about the mythology of the Knights Templar.

He becomes both a witness and victim of a bomb attack on a Parisian café "La Chandelle Verte", caused by a clown, later revealed to be an assassin named Khan.

[2] Stobbart meets a French photo-journalist, Nicole "Nico" Collard, a resident of Rue Jarry in Paris, with whom he tries to discover who is responsible for the murder of the old man, Plantard, and while doing so, end up unraveling a conspiracy relating to the Knights Templar.

[2] The third and fourth game, The Sleeping Dragon and The Angel of Death, follow the Templar-related storyline: The Sleeping Dragon continuing the story from The Shadow of the Templars with a number of returning characters,[3] while in The Angel of Death, George and Nico, with a newly introduced character Anna-Maria, unravel a mystery related to the Catholic Church.

[9] Cecil and Cummins attended a film-writing course and their script was read by senior BBC scriptwriter and dramatist Alan Drury.

[10] Steve Ince, who created initial location sketches for the game before working on Beneath a Steel Sky,[11] was promoted to producer halfway through the project.

[9] Broken Sword offered a unique "conversation icon" system which would not reveal to the player what the protagonist was about to say; Cecil's intention was to make the game more cinematic.

Theatre director Edward Hall rehearsed the assembled actors and took no more than a week to record the entire game, according to an interview given by Rolf Saxon in 2011.

[30] While Rolf Saxon returns to voice George Stobbart, Nicole "Nico" Collard was this time played by Katherine Pageon.

According to Cecil, the Director's Cut came about thanks to a group of Broken Sword fans, who started an online petition begging him to bring the series to the Wii and DS.

[32] When considering the project, Cecil played the game again and noticed many issues, including that backgrounds were pixelated, the movies and audio were of poor quality, and he also felt some dialogue was out of place.

He thought all these elements could be addressed and improved in a remastered edition, in which they could add a diary, hint system, and new artwork from Dave Gibbons, which they could offer as an interactive digital comic.

[33] Hazel Ellerby returns to voice Nicole Collard in the new sections, playing Nico again for the first time since the original game's release.

[38] The new features include an exclusive interactive digital comic from Dave Gibbons, fully animated facial expressions, enhanced graphics, high quality music, a context-sensitive hint system, diary, and a Dropbox integration which facilitates a unique cross-platform save-game feature, enabling players to enjoy the same adventure simultaneously on multiple devices.

Cecil said that, despite interest from the "industry's biggest third party publisher",[40] funding for the game's remaining development was sought via Kickstarter with a target of $400,000.

[41][42] In August 2021, Tony Warriner did a test run to see how Broken Sword 1 would look as a remastered game, and was kind enough to share the screenshots with Pixel Refresh.

[citation needed] Also at the Gamescom 2023 Microsoft event a new game in the series was announced, entitled Parzival's Stone.

With the decline of the adventure genre at the beginning of the 2000s, sales of the Broken Sword series decreased as well, with The Sleeping Dragon and The Angel of Death selling a few hundred thousand copies.

During the so-called "adventure renaissance", the two Broken Sword remakes were met with success; in 2011, the Director's Cut and The Smoking Mirror: Remastered sold 500,000 copies on the iOS alone.

[citation needed] By 2005, before the release of Broken Sword 4, the series had shipped above 2.5 million units to retailers worldwide.

[72] The series' installments have received positive reviews, with The Shadow of the Templars often being cited as a classic in the adventure genre, ranking high on various "top" lists.