Syndicate began, one of its makers remembered, with a lunchtime design meeting in the pub. By the summer of 1993 it had become a game in which the player ran a corporation that ruled the world through the chips in its citizens’ heads, and kept order with four cyborg agents carrying miniguns and flamethrowers. Amiga Format gave it 91% and called it “incredible fun and massively addictive”, then said it would have trouble recommending it to children: “if Syndicate had a certificate, it would be 18.” Bullfrog had made its name with the god game Populous. Peter Molyneux later described Syndicate as the same idea at the scale of a city.
Fast facts
- Developer: Bullfrog Productions, Guildford.
- Publisher: Electronic Arts.
- Released: summer 1993, for the PC and the Amiga; £34.99 on the Amiga.
- Project leader: Sean Cooper, with Alex Trowers on mission design, Paul McLaughlin and Chris Hill on the art, and Mike Diskett on the Amiga version.
- Reviews: 91% and an Amiga Format Gold in Amiga Format; 88% in The One; 90, and later 92 for the CD version, in PC Zone‘s buyers’ guide.
- Data disk: American Revolt (PC late 1993, Amiga 1994), with network play on the PC.
- Sequel: Syndicate Wars (1996).
From the pub to the PC
Edge told the story of the game in 2004, from interviews with Cooper, Glenn Corpes, Trowers and McLaughlin. Its working title was Cyber Assault. Corpes, who had written the engine for Powermonger, remembered a lunchtime meeting in the pub and “talk of multiple characters”, an idea left over from an early version of the platform game Flood. Cooper had written Flood, and Syndicate was his second game and his first as a team leader. “We were so inexperienced, all of us,” he told Edge. “We were there until four in the morning most days.”
The squad began at eight agents. “It didn’t feel that good with eight,” Cooper said, “but we reduced it to four and, all of a sudden, it really worked. And you could set them up differently.” The team designed the game by playing it against each other over the office network, before the computer opponents existed. “We were playing it before a line of AI code had been written,” Corpes said. Trowers explained the Bullfrog habit: try the whole thing out multiplayer first, “and then make an AI to emulate the human players”. Syndicate was also Bullfrog’s first game to lead on the PC rather than the Amiga. “The Amiga, bless its cottons, just wasn’t powerful enough,” Trowers said.
Running a corporation
The player is the boss of a syndicate in a world carved into 50 territories. Each one is a mission, and each territory won can be taxed. The money pays for research and for the agents’ equipment. In the equipment screen, which Computer Gaming World’s reviewer called “the Q Section menu”, the player buys weapons, replaces dead agents from a cryogenic store and fits cyborg parts: new arms, legs, chest, heart, eyes and brain, each an upgrade on the flesh.
The missions happen in cities seen at an angle from above, full of pedestrians, police and traffic. The objectives vary: assassinate a target, “persuade” a scientist to defect, rescue someone from a rival syndicate or clear a city of enemy agents. The player can move the four agents together or separately. Three bars on each agent’s panel control the drugs that the game calls Intelligence, Perception and Adrenaline. Push them up and an agent reacts faster, shoots straighter and moves more quickly, but The One warned that you could not keep them at maximum all the time.
The arsenal ran from a free pistol to the Uzi, the minigun, the flamer, the laser and the Gauss gun, which Amiga Format described as a portable rocket launcher with three rockets. Its list ended with “the single most important weapon of all”, the Persuadertron. It brainwashes whoever it hits into following the agent for the rest of the mission. Persuade 16 civilians and you can persuade a policeman; persuade 32 and enemy agents can be recruited. The game paid the player for every persuaded follower who survived. Cooper told Edge he did not know “to this day” whose idea it was, and that Molyneux was convinced it was his.
Reviews
The One reviewed the Amiga game in July 1993 and gave it 88%. David Upchurch thought it “a brilliant game”, not quite in the league of Bullfrog’s other hits “but it’s a close run thing”, and ended: “Good, violent stuff.” Amiga Format gave it 91% and an Amiga Format Gold the next month. Its reviewer, Andy Nuttall, praised the “Blade Runner-style graphics” and the “dark, doom-laden atmosphere”, and warned that it ran rather slowly on an A500 or A600. He also asked Molyneux about the violence. “I didn’t originally set out to create a violent game, but having said that I didn’t want to pull any punches,” Molyneux replied. “Obviously it is violent… but there is nothing I would like to see more than ratings in computer games.”
In America Computer Gaming World described it as “Ridley Scott (director of Blade Runner) does PowerMonger”, and warned that it was “not a game for the squeamish”. Its reviewer’s main complaint was that the finished game had no head-to-head play, “as in Populous and PowerMonger”. Only Sound Blaster cards were supported, and a PC Zone reader was still complaining about that in 1995. PC Zone‘s buyers’ guide rated the floppy version 90 and the CD version 92, both “Classic”, and summed it up as “incredibly violent, completely amoral and brilliant fun”.
American Revolt and the lost network game
The multiplayer game had not been cut for design reasons. “EA couldn’t get the network game working on their system, so we had to drop it,” Trowers told Edge. It came back in American Revolt, a data disk in which the Americas rise up against the player’s corporation. Computer Gaming World counted 21 new single-player missions and ten network missions for up to eight players, and two new weapons, the clone shield and the air strike. On the Amiga there were no new weapons, only missions. Amiga Format reported that Bullfrog had made them “at least three times as hard” because players had complained the original was too easy, and that even the programmers had trouble completing some of them.
Conversions
The game went, as Edge put it in 1996, to “just about every machine imaginable”. There were versions for the Amiga CD32, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, Atari Jaguar, 3DO and Acorn Archimedes; the Super Nintendo version was later included in EA’s EA Replay compilation for the PSP. Not every conversion worked. Ultimate Future Games complained that the Jaguar version had “turned Syndicate, a great game on the PC, into an irritating nightmare”, because a game played with a mouse and two buttons now needed every button on Atari’s joypad.
Syndicate Wars and after
Syndicate Wars (1996) was set a hundred years later, when the corporation’s rule is falling apart. Its lead programmer was Mike Diskett, who told Edge the team had aimed for “Syndicate, only more so”. Computer Gaming World’s review described a 3D city that could be rotated and zoomed, buildings that could be destroyed, and a rival faction, the Church of the New Epoch, which the player could also play.
In 2012 Starbreeze made a new Syndicate for Electronic Arts. It was a first-person shooter, and Edge told its readers to put their nostalgia aside, because it had “nothing to do with Bullfrog’s early-’90s tactical cult classic”. Mike Diskett’s own studio, 5 Lives, raised more than £460,000 on Kickstarter in 2013 for Satellite Reign, a real-time tactics game in the old style released in 2015. Wireframe called it a “spiritual spin-off” in 2021, in a column asking EA to bring back “the true, proper Syndicate”.
Sources
- The One, issue 58, July 1993, pp. 82–85: David Upchurch, review, 88%.
- Amiga Format, issue 49, August 1993, pp. 83–85: Andy Nuttall, review, 91%, Amiga Format Gold, £34.99 (the cyborg parts, the weapons and the Persuadertron, 50 missions, Molyneux on violence). Advertisement in the same issue (50 territories).
- Computer Gaming World, issue 110, September 1993: Wyatt Lee, review (50 areas, mission types, the Intelligence, Perception and Adrenaline levels, no head-to-head play, Sound Blaster only).
- Computer Gaming World, issue 116, March 1994: Jeff James, American Revolt review (21 missions, ten network missions for up to eight players, clone shield and air strike).
- Amiga Format, issue 60, June 1994, pp. 56–57: Andy Hutchinson, American Revolt review (Alex Trowers’s missions, harder than the original, no new weapons on the Amiga).
- Ultimate Future Games, issue 2, January 1995: Jaguar version review.
- PC Zone, issue 24, March 1995: reader’s letter on Sound Blaster support. Issue 29, August 1995: buyers’ guide (90 and 92, “Classic”).
- Edge, issue 31, April 1996: Syndicate Wars (Mike Diskett, a hundred years later). Issue 38, November 1996: Syndicate Wars (the original’s sales and conversions).
- Computer Gaming World, issue 151, February 1997: Peter Olafson, Syndicate Wars review (the Church of the New Epoch, rotating and destructible city).
- Edge, issue 140, September 2004, pp. 110–115: “The Making Of… Syndicate”, with Sean Cooper, Glenn Corpes, Alex Trowers and Paul McLaughlin.
- Retro Gamer, issue 43, 2007: Bullfrog history (Andy Robson on the 3DO version; Syndicate on EA Replay).
- Edge, issue 239, April 2012: review of Starbreeze’s Syndicate.
- Wireframe, issue 48, February 2021: column on Syndicate and Satellite Reign.
- “Syndicate (1993 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): conversions and their publishers (Mindscape for CD32, Ocean for Jaguar, R-Comp for Acorn); EA Replay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(1993_video_game)
- “Satellite Reign beams back £461k from Kickstarter”, Engadget, 29 July 2013 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2013-07-29-satellite-reign-beams-back-461k-from-kickstarter.html