Another alumnus of PC Gamer‘s Long Play series, slightly remixed and expanded
A ninja dressed in gaudy blue has just grabbed hold of the eyesockets of his opponent and torn his head clear of his body, dangling a couple of feet of glistening wet spinal cord behind him. Cue screams from the horrified Tabloids. Gamers laughed at or with it, depending on their temperament. It’s 1993, and Mortal Kombat, in terms of press controversy, is the Grand Theft Auto of its day. But only in those terms. Anyone who actually plays it understands that this game exists purely in the Grand Guignol traition of video nasties, a comedy fountain of gore. It was just slapstick with a very sharp stick.
It wasn’t bad to the bone.
Conversely, Syndicate was the meanest bastard that the world had ever seen. If you want to find out about the path that lead to GTA, you start with the four gentleman with the trenchcoats, mirrorshades and miniguns, sitting in the corner. Syndicate didn’t get the bad press for a handful of reasons. Firstly, it was primarily on the PC and Amiga, with the corresponding lower public profile. But most importantly, to really understand how grotesquely immoral it was, you had to play it. And playing a game? Well, that’s the one thing the reactionary end of the press will never consider.
Syndicate positioned you as commander of four cybernetically enhanced goons of a global corporation. Your task was building a new world order, one hostile take-over of a country at a time. After receiving your mission and being left in the city, it’s up to achieve it by any means possible. Normally, this will be wiping out opposing corporate agents, but other things to see and do in the near future include rescue, escort, brainwashing and assassination. It distinguished itself by being one of the earliest examples of a convincing living city. People wandered the streets, going about their daily business before having their routine (and often fleshy bodies) exploded by corporate conflict in the high street. Cars patrol the street, and can often be commandeered with a burst of UZI fire. Cops desperately try to keep the peace…
Then, this was all shockingly new. Emphasis on the word “shocking”.
My first experience of Syndicate was the demo on cheery PC Gamer progenitor Amiga Format’s coverdisk. My brother and I were excited anyway. For the time, it was beautifully marketed. Photo-lead adverts of hands hanging of a chainlink fence with a pollution-painted city in the background were – in fact, still are – a few steps classier than the competition. The British cover – which you’ll find heading this feature, is far more attractive than the American version. We both loved cyberpunk fiction, and in a world dominated by cheery platformers were ready for some of the dark stuff. Hell: Living in dreary Stafford even urban decay seemed terribly glamorous.
Within seconds, we’re running rampage through the streets. I’m controlling, with my brother shouting short suggestions of what to do next. Weapons are pulled from jacket and any of the civilians who see them scatter, running for their lives. Cops start firing and are dropped with a burst of fire, the bullets of which we’ll mentally make notes to charge to our expense accounts later. A car pulls around the corner, and we open fire. It slides to a halt, its passengers getting out and running for their lives. Another couple of bursts and the car explodes, bodies flying everywhere.
We’re both wearing our biggest Bad Boy grins when something makes our faces fall. It’s a noise. High pitched and sharp, it cuts through the general aural melee of a city firefight. We realise its coming from the tiny people. They’re on fire. The explosion must have sprayed them with petrol or something, and now they’re reduced to living torches: Living torches in incredible pain. We sit, dumbfounded and disturbed. My brother’s the first to speak: “Kill them”. I open fire, trying to put them out of their misery…
I keep a list of the emotions games have provoked in me. This was the first time one had ever given me the vertiginous sensation of moral repugnance at myself. In the end, the burning people from car explosions were cut from the final version of Syndicate, saved for the appearance of the flamethrower later. It was still a uniquely brutal effect. The choice of sound effect was masterful, and I can still recall the pitch and attack of that noise and feel it race down my spine – I ended up connecting my Amiga to my soundsystem to play it at higher volumes, which turned my bedroom into a riotzone. Even the tiny animation was suggestive enough to let your mind fill in the gaps of flesh melting away from bone.
It’s one of the reasons why Syndicate still sticks with me. It was phenomenally ahead of its time. While I’d argue that Syndicate’s cities were more advanced than anything previously, even if they weren’t, what the game used them for was. It was stripped down from what Bullfrog had talked up for BOB, the game which Syndicate grew into. In BoB characters would, if they were full of peaceful drugs, go and find the owner and get hold of car keys, rather than jacking a ride. Or so went Bullfrog’s always compelling high-concept machine, anyway. You suspect that the version we ended up was far wiser. It simply works. Forget the slaughter and the realistic response of the environment to it. Think of elements like how you manipulated your agents through pumping their bodies with different drugs depending on what you wanted to use them for, or the Persuadertron which allowed you to gather around a mass of consumerist zombies in a ready-made army.
I suppose that’s one of the things which even in these days when everything is taking from GTA’s rampage-in-a-freeform-city mandate that keeps Syndicate precious. For all the nihilism, there was a brain to it, a satirical edge. Multinational agents leading hordes of consumerist zombies to achieve corporate aims? As a pulp object, it makes its point forcibly. What makes it succeed as a game that while all the critique is still there, it simultaneously explains all too well why anyone would want to wield this amount of power through its sheer illicit transgressive thrill. Pulling the trigger on the sniper laser that reduces a politician who wouldn’t play ball to a smudge of ash. Stealing a police car and getting through prison security to rescue someone to paste, and then mowing down every single prisoner for no reason other than seeing their bodies fall in piles at the end of the prison ward. And the final gauss-gun-painted confrontation at the Atlantic Accelerator mission, still one of the most famously challenging end of game missions of all time.
Bad to the bone. But the most evil thing about Syndicate – the thing all its players will answer for if ever dragged before the gates of heaven – is how good being so bad was. There’s that twitch guilt, sure… but the pleasure overwhelms it. Syndicate: a holiday in somebody’s misery – and, worst and best of all, a misery you caused.
And if there was a ever a game that could be readily remade with modern visuals (retaining that isometric perspective) it’s this. What a beautiful thing it was.
Aww man! I already have a slight problem with the fact I have about six games in mid play that I’m yet to finish – and then you guys give me another one I want to go back and play thus taking away more of my time…
I love/hate you guys. So much.
I played it. I felt it. And I miss it.
Syndicate Wars, with an updated engine, high rise levelling explosions, huge crowds of indoctrinated cannon fodder, cyborg spiders, manga-style armoured super priests and general sense it was Syndicate EXTREME, was a relatively worthy update thorough one with the complexity dialled down.
It also lacked opportunities for the nuanced evil of breaking a politician’s will by exploding his wife then nicking her car.
The memories.. I still even remember the cheat codes – Marks Team and Coopers Team for infinite money and all upgrades.. I never finished that last level, the framerate in that particular mission was so poor on the old Amiga 500 that it was almost impossible to play it.
You’re writeup sound almost exactly like how it was the first time I played it too. It’s one of the great ones, that’s for sure, and it captured the spirit of William Gibsons visions of Cyperpunk perfectly.
http://freesynd.sourceforge.net/ss.php
An eye-opener yes, but hella fiddly in its PC incarnation at least, with muddy controls and inconsistent speed IIRC.
[nitpick] Scorpion wears yellow and he sets people on fire, he doesn’t tear heads off. Sub-Zero tears heads off. He wears blue! And he wasn’t undead! [/nitpick]
Oh, those ninjas all look the same to me.
KG
Anyone else think it played like the Snes (super nintendo) Shadowrun game?
@Kieron – I had hoped we’d left such ninjrist hate speach back in the bad old days, though clearly such sentiments still exist in the shadows – in a cruel irony, right next to the ninja themselves.
Yes, I do wish someone would hurry up and make a ‘Spiritual Sequel’ to this gem.
The first time my parents ever heard me say “fuck” was whilst I was playing Syndicate.
I have been wanting a sequel to Syndicate Wars ever since it came out. I still think about how awesome it was, and wish someone would make a new version…
One of the first games I remember playing all the way through and actually finishing.
I remember my favourite tactic was Persuadertron’ing everyone in sight, especially the enemy agents, and running round with a huge army of followers.
Bonus points for cramming them all into a train and turning up at a defended station, cue mayhem as 50-100 armed zombies hop out of the train and start going shooty :)
Nice writeup. A great game I remember fondly. I want Peter Molyneux to tap into his dark side again….
EA are mental for sitting on this, I regularly fantasise about how great an online, persistent world Syndicate sequel would be. Reliable whispers reached my ear that EA did start work on something a few years back and then canned it before it got anywhere.
I still hear the screams of the plebs that had been flamethrowered…
I miss my Amiga 500
Jim and I are considering starting a SOMEONE RIP OFF SYNDICATE campaign.
KG
for me, back in the day, it was all about: this game, pizza tycoon and master of magic. Two of those have already been mentioned in this post/comments.
Seems im reading the right blog after all :) Keep up the great posts!
ps: review pizza tycoon pls :) (by Micropose)
I’d love to see someone do justice to a remake of syndicate – not a port as with freesynd, but a nice, graphical update. As long as it kept the old gameplay (perhaps with a few tweaks), I think I’d probably lose hours to taking over the world again.
Blimey, I flippin’ loved this game. It was one of the few games that actually turned out better on the Mac, but which I ended up buying/finishing on the PC. It was just so much fun. Would it actually be as much fun now? I’d like to think so.
Yeah Syndicate yeah!
One of my all-time favorites. It actually runs pretty well in DOSBox nowadays, and it’s every bit as brutal as I remembered.
Oh lord, I forgot the name of this title nearly ten years ago and have been looking for it ever since!
Wow… I’ve got a lump in my throat just thinking about Syndicate. I would have been 12 in 1993, and I remember borrowing a cover disk from the son of a friend of my parents’. I was hooked, and still have the CD (or was Syndicate a 3.5″ floppy game? I’ve certainly got the CD from Syndicate Wars) in a drawer at home.
I would love to play it again…. Maybe my rose-tinted glasses will mean that it’s never quite the same, but I can’t not try….
Any any new version would be so very welcome!
My first PC came with a CD drive, a Creative 4x setup. Bundled with that came gems such as Ultima VIII, Wing Commander 2 & Strike Commander (a real-world spin off of Wing Commander). And Syndicate Plus.
I don’t think I touched Strike Commander nor Ultima for 2-3 years. Wing Commander was done and dusted. Syndicate stayed on 3 successive PCs for years.
Syndicate Wars came and went. It was brilliant with much more inventive missions and gameplay (although it had that infinite ammo/health concept which nackered the difficulty) and there weren’t better weapons than the Nuclear Grenade and the Satellite Bombardment (run into a crowded district, select the marker, tap the right mouse button, RUN!) but the bugs and stability hurt the game and it just wasn’t as gripping as Syndicate.
Sequel (spiritual or not) = DO WANT… NOW!!!
I wonder who owns the rights to the syndicate IP these days. I mean, EA published Syndicate Wars, but it was still developed by Bullfrog.
Hmm, even Molyneux seems to think there are licensing issues – “Aside from the licensing complications, some sort of next-gen online version of Syndicate would certainly be popular with gamers.” (cvg.com)
I think EA still own it.
I remember Alex Trowers(?) mentioning that there have been a couple of attempts to revive the franchise in the last decade (as someone alluded to above).
Freedom Fighters hinted at how a more ‘consoley’ implementation of Syndicate might work. Although just a very faithful isometric remake would be perfect.
Strike Commander.. that was like Privateer with jets right? That was a great game..as was Privateer actually.
Er, yeah, Syndicate was wonderful.. and the flaming screams were one of the first things in gaming to disturb me as well.
I wish someone would remake Syndicate as a Ghost Recon-style squad-based tactical shooter. Except with less focus on weapon ballistics and more focus on flaming civilians, obviously…
Ah, back in the day it was all about Syndicate, SWOS, Cannon Fodder, and Zeewolf 2.
Good times.
As absolutely shiny as it was, I never did get very far with Syndicate. Maybe it’s because I was 6, I dunno.
American Revolt is possibly the hardest game I have ever played, too.
I once owned Syndicate Wars. I’m sure I would have thought of it as a great game if I had had any idea about what I could do in it. Things weren’t helped by the facts that I was young, the manual was a tome and on top of it all the whole manual was in a foreign language for some reason.
I don´t know what to say, speaking of Syndicate blocks me because there has been so few games I have been so fascinated like this one. Syndicate is probably the first game I truly felt I was there, the feeling of immersion was perfect thanks to the little details: taking trains, stealing cars, different platforms, great variety, the excellent sound and effects…
As game it was incredible, the variety of missions, the adrenaline rush when you approached slowly to your objective, (with that memorable change of music), the brutality of the missiles launch. And it had a lot of tactical deepness in my opinion. It even had character development and I remember the feeling of frustration when one advanced agent was killed.
But the most evil part of the game was not to flame people or killing civilians. For me, my most evil act was “recruiting” the agent and the mind control system. The act of going in the city and enslaving a random person to be your agent, or using the mind control device to create a cloud of civilians ready to die for your agents. It was a real shock seeing myself in that zeppelin, having a so absolute control of normal people and normal life, which only sin was being in the wrong place and the wrong moment. Syndicate is one of the reasons I become interested in videogames for more reason than being a way of entertainment.
By the way, I completely endorse the “Syndicate rip-off” movement.
the intro was well spooky guy
oh the atmos, the atmos
I love the music in this as well. And the mission briefings. I was very young and wild (uh, like 9) back then, and the art style and font in the briefings really stirred my imagination. Me and my mate made our own evil syndicate at school and walked around the playground looking dodgy. Or if it was raining, we’d go indoors and write our own mission briefings (trying to copy the style of the in game ones, down to the exact layout on the screen) for next time we went out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=538rLOAaSOc&feature=related – awesome music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8qSWqAC51w&feature=related – hardest level in any game ever?
I can’t find a good one for the mission briefings alas
Awesome.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s had visions of a modern-day Syndicate remake dancing in his head. For god’s sake, it could work and work beautifully.
Thanks for the great writeup of one of my all-time favorite games.
what a great game, this article brings back some memories.
a remake would be great, but i am not sure if the bird perspective would still work. maybe something more like r6 vegas or graw2?
Awesome writeup of an incredible game. In particular, the mission where you assassinated the senator in the midst of the political rally – surrounded by a throng of hundreds of civilians who it was nearly impossible to resist the urge to gun down – was horribly magnificent.
I never did manage to beat the bloody Atlantic Accelerator. The last levels of Amiga games always seemed insanely hard – someone mentioned Zeewolf above, and the final mission of that I’m pretty sure is nigh impossible as well. I’ll have to go back and try them both again, to see if I still suck as much as I did when I was 9.
Ah yes, the Atlantic Accelerator mission… *shudder* I could get excited about a remake, with the condition that buildings didn’t completely obscure your view. (I could envision a FLIR-type view being very effective.)
Loved this game so much!
I still have the game and the Amiga to run it on, granted it’s lurking at my parents but thankfully they have no idea of the gold mine they are sitting on. I will have to go and reclaim it one day as it was one hell of a game.
I’ve still got an old amiga and syndicate + wars too. One of the best ever games imo.
As someone said above … EA are nuts to sit on this license :/ … should be revived and updated.
While everyone complains about there being no UFO successor, at least people have had a crack. That there’s no decent attempt at a Syndicate-inspired game is a little bizzarre.
(Personally, I’d like to see a little of UFO worked into Syndicate too, on the research side. Purr….)
KG
I’m sad to say I’ve never played syndicate, but I plead youthful ignorance, m’lud. Does freesynd work under winXP, or does it require the usual DOSbox trickery?
[hyper-nitpick] that “alumni” at the very start of the article should be “alumnus” [/nitpick]
I admit, I couldn’t get FreeSynd to work and the readme gave me the impression that it’s not got much in it yet.
Were I wanting to play it, I’d abandonware the original and DOSBox it.
KG
I throw around the idea of making a Syndicate remake about once a week. Mainly because my uni building looks like the game. Especially as it has that whole “two-tier, brown-and-black buildings with chamfered edge” look about it.
Also: What on earth is Bullfrog’s BoB? Anyone?
You’ve got me playing this again and it’s still bloody good. Some strange behaviour I don’t remember from the Amiga version though; did enemy agents always immediately swarm on your location the minute a mission starts?
Of course now that I’ve got DOSBox installed again I’ll be going back on the Darklands wagon. Best free roaming RPG ever; screw the Elder Scrolls.
And furthermore, Higher Functions is the best working title of anything ever.
Molyneaux was always a big fan of Brigitte Bardot, so he had her initials tattooed on his arse, one on each buttock. And thus he became known as Bullfrog’s BoB.
Bullfrog, Looking Glass and Psygnosis. Three of the greatest gaming companies of time lost… never to be seen again :( Their games are what made me the mad geek I am today, and sadly yearning for more and more with the current state of the industry.
I had it on Mac and I seem to recall explosions from destroyed cars setting people on fire in that version… The Gauss Gun (which incidentally always looked like a giant penis to my hormone-addled teenage mind) definitely did that too.
Now that you’ve mentioned Psygnosis I shall go to sleep with the music of Shadow of the Beast II echoing in my head damn you. What a rock hard game that was; even with the cheat enabled you’d be lucky to beat it (In fact thinking back I doubt anyone ever beat it without using a walkthrough at least once).
I certainly remember this. It was what introduced me to gaming in general. Sure I might have played Maths Quest but that never grabbed me the same way that looking over my father’s shoulder as he played Syndicate did. The visuals were (in my opinion as a 5 year old) amazing, and one of my favourite computer gaming moments was simply telling my dad to get one of the guys to step out of the car while it was still moving at top speed. I was a twisted 5 year old.
Oh, I want to rant every time you mention this game. I got it in a gift pack of bullfrog games. Syndicate, Populous II, Warmonger, Theme Park, from Looking Glass there was Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, and Terra Nova (remember them?) had a Myst-style adventure game called Labyrinth of time that I never beat. Syndicate definitely made an impression on me. I was eight or nine. My mother had expressly forbidden me to play Mortal Kombat, and then unwittingly purchased the bundled set with a few of the darkest games I have ever played. Only cannon fodder has ever come close to providing such a feeling of moral dilemma (IMO) while playing such a simple game, or at least without resorting to the inclusion of little girls. With Syndicate and Cannon fodder it was the gameplay itself that made you grimace.
Syndicate is the game that made me swap my Amiga for a PC. The Amiga A500 version was just a little on the sluggish side, and when I saw the silkier, smoothier PC version being played in a store it was all over.
Terra Nova is probably the best mech game ever made… yep better than Mechwarriors… God I loved it…
Terra Nova was immense fun – made even better by the awesome cut scenes.
Can only agree on Terra Nova, ’twas awesome, yet I only played the demo. About 300 times. I have a vague memory of the music being really cool in it, really adding to the atmosphere in a good way.
Magic Carpet was pretty fun too, that was Bullfrog wasn’t it?
Magic Carpet was bullfrog.
You’re making me want to dig out Terra Nova actually. There’s a game that could do with an examination.
KG
One of the things that (for me) ramped up the awesome on Syndicate Wars, I discovered quite by accident.
The in-game music was stored on the game disc in standard CD audio format. But the game would play perfectly well without the CD in the drive. So if there was an audio CD already in there, it would happily use that.
The day I found this out, the CD in the drive was the Eels Electroshock Blues. My agents stepped out into the city at the start of a mission, and quietly in the background “Going To Your Funeral” started up. A better song for this moment can not be imagined.
@Seth Tipps:
I think that was the pack I got. It was an EA ten-pack that they produced right after they aquired Bullfrog, I think – Syndicate, Populous II, Powermonger, Theme Park, The Labyrinth of Time (I finished that, it was cool), PGA Tour Golf II, Chuck Yaeger’s Air Combat, some crappy poker game and two crappy kiddy adventure games. It was an awesome deal. Syndicate alone was worth the price of admission.
I played Half-Life through several times like this, with the Fight Club soundtrack in the drive. A phenomenally good fit — everyone should do it!
Oh well, too late now.
Oh Jesus – I haven’t played this game for 4 years. I’ve still got the disk somewhere, but it’s got no sound apart from the music, so I never knew how aurally violent it was. Visually however, it was enough
Syndicate was great fun, though I confess I cheated at the time…might have to try again and see if my older, more experienced self could better handle the game as written. But me, I don’t need a new sequel, spiritual or otherwise. I need to be able to play Syndicate Wars. The trouble with it is that it’s a terribly finicky game which runs in DOS but wants 3D acceleration and enough horsepower to go with that – something I’ve never managed to cobble together. I guess I should see if DOSBox is up to the task these days.
(And yes, I could theoretically play the Playstation version but, uh….no thank you.)
@negative zero.
That’s the one. Still got the CD book sitting on my self. Might be a good project for me to try and port those. Oh, for the time…
I wrote the amiga version of Syndicate and was project leader lead programmer for Syndicate Wars.
Some game design decisions that I’ve always regreted on Syn Wars
1. Limiting the zoom out to the range of your current weapon, In hindsight it was annoying and made little sense after all you are viewing the world form a blimp camera
2. Sourcing the sprite artwork in low res and doubling it up for hi res, made the game look ugly compared to the hi res original syndicate
3. making it so hard at the start to get cash, you basically had to collect weapons and sell them, it was a neat side earner, but made the game start rock hard
4. The persuade a scientist side missions, Sean masterson wrote all the scripts for each mission designing the objectives and we found we had way too many persuade a scientist missions, so we made them side quests that you could ignore and carry on to the next mission but it meant you would have less scientists to use for research, it was really just an attempt to keep the script and not bog the game down with too many persuade missions.
5. maybe syndicate wars shouldnt have been 3d at all, 3d was the new exciting thing and it did allow us to have full dynamic lighting (shoot out all the lights) and even allowed us to collapse buildings, but I think it made the game look ugly (running in low res on most hardware at the time) compared to the original. And probably contributed to the low sales that killed off the franchise.
6. Why did we spend all that time working on too full sets of missions play as zealot or agent, we gave everyone 2 games effectively, when we should have concentrated on the agent mission design and flow. (Hardly anyone even bothered with the zealots)
MikeD (Disky)
P.S I went on to write Urban Chaos at MuckyFoot which was a kind of succesor to Syndicate in terms of living breathing city, even if it was a third person action adventure with a crap plot.
Syndicate kept me and my uni house mates busy for ages – it was a fantastic game. I never got into Syndicate Wars as much for some reason – it never quite had the same sparkle as the original, even if it did have 2000AD and Manga adverts scattered liberally throughout the landscape.
A few years ago there was an attempt at doing a Syndicate mod for one of the Quake games – can’t remember if it was 1 or 2 – but I don’t think it ever got finished which was a shame.
A movie would be good too. If, that is, movie adaptations of video games were good.
I bought Syndicate Wars the second it was released, I played the ehell out of it – even played as the Zealots. The only thing I didn’t like was the aforementioned camera zoom limitation, that really was quite annoying.
I have fond memories of the zap and crackle as you vapourised people with the beam laser and of knocking down a bank with a nuclear grenade and running off with the cash. Even the way they said “Cataclysm” was satisfying.
Sorry to hear it didn’t sell well, I never realised =(
Magic Carpet was the first game I got for the PC along with Theme Park (depending on whether you count the old Amstrad CPCs or not..) in fact I bought them at the same time as getting my first PC (a mighty 486DX66 with 8MB RAM a 2 speed CD ROM drive and 500MB of hard disk space!). I love the original Magic Carpet still, but for some reason my copy crashes when I press both mouse buttons now =(
@Mike Diskett
Kudos for having a major hand in two such classic pieces of software and excuse me for dragging you into an old arguement but – Do you think developing SW for console and PC meant you had to compromise the design vision to accomodate accessibilty? I’m thinking in terms of stripping down the ammo management, switching to the whiz bang 3D, that sort of thing?
Double!
Hah! I’ve been playing this recently, after many trials getting the thing to run now I have I love it to death. It’s still great, still more engaging that many modern games. So much love :)
Those guys that’ve remade UFO with the Q2 engine got me thinking, the same as you lot, how hard could it actually be to recreate this on a modern(ish) engine?
I loved the original syndicate and played it for months on the Amiga, and re-purchased it for PC with the “American Revolt” expansion which was also great fun, but insanely difficult at times.
Syndicate Wars was a good successor to the original, and I enjoyed it just as much, and for the time the gas grenade effects were beautiful. Nuking a building and flattening it, robbing banks for cash, capturing scientists, turning enemy agents with a huge army of civilians… it was a classic.
Now, if anyone knows how to get them both working on a modern machine, I’d go back and replay them both…
Syndicate + DOSBox = joy
@Phil
The consoles version had no impact on the design of Syndicate wars, it was well on the way before I started doing the ps1 engine. It was a concious decision to simplify the interface to the agents, all most people did was either wack all bars to max to go into killing mode, or drop them all to zero for healing, so we simplified it to one bar with neg/positive. plus added shields.
And if anything at the time the ps1 was as powerful as the 486 we were developing on for pc. (ps1 had full 24 bit rgb gourad, while pc used a 256 colour palette carefully arranged to allow gourad type shading). Obviously the lack of a mouse was the most crippling factor for consoles (BTW I left bullfrog before the ps1 version shipped, a seperate team had allready taken it on to complete while we finished the PC version)
Xerxes:
Gas grenades were great, especially the madness inducing one which would set everyone fighting each other, I remember setting up a debug level to test the game overnight which had several hundred AI’s all with madness grenades ,miniguns and nuclear grenades, infinite health and infinite ammo, all just going crazy at each other all night.
BTW syn wars runs fine on windows 95 and ME, I played it just a month or two ago, but what a dissapointment, god it looks ugly now.
Here’s hoping Introversion’s Subversion will be something of a Syndicate remake. Totally random cityscapes with bits of Uplink thrown in, squad commands a la Darwinia? Well, maybe in a dream..
Mike Diskett: Also was the creator of the splendid Mr Wobbly Leg. Thanks for dropping in, sir. I always had a lot of time for Urban Chaos.
KG
you know how, as you progress through the game, you cover more and more of the world with your syndicate colours?
Next time you see a tv advert for HSBC, have a look at their ‘world’s local bank’ insignia…looks just like that…
I tried it on both the XP and 98 setups on my machine, but the entire game ran at such a speed that generally all the mission scripts had run before I’d selected all four agents and got them moving, at which point they shot across the screen at an insane speed.
It does look ugly these days, but in its time, I don’t think I’d ever seen a particle effect quite like those gas grenades.
They caused endless entertainment too, especially when your own troops were sent insane by them and you clicked desperately to gain control of them.
The tv screens playing the advert for Ghost in the Shell were a touch you rarely see in games….
It didn’t help that most of the ones that tried – Gender Wars, Bedlam and so on – just sucked beyond measure. It’s a bit like the UFO clones that just did the tactical combat system – everyone seemed to utterly miss the point.
On the other hand, most of them had an ending!
(Still ticked after all these years… sigh…)
Thank Christ. The tannoy announcements, the vans, the constant advertising… I made a point of blowing up the Manga vans with rocket launchers. Pooslice, indeed. Satellite Rain was made for those irritating bastards.
(That said, the hidden Breakout game was a fun inclusion)
My mother reading:
“One of our politician friends has started to refuse us our normal and courteous requests. This is extremely bad form and is just not tolerable.
In order to restore the status quo and make an example of him we have decided to kill his good lady wife.”
Was one of those awkward moments in my history of trying to justify playing computer games.
And since everyone seems to have their own ideas about a Syndicate sequel: my one involves SHODAN turning up.
I might be confused but I think they had ads for 2000AD in there as well Manga UK.
Syndicate Wars, then – a concentrated dose of all that made British geek culture good in the mid-90s.
@Kieron Gillen
Mr wobbly legs versus the invaders from space, perhaps my most influential work;)
This was the amiga power Competition to win a job at Bullfrog , a wacky PR stunt my Mr molyneux, legend has it that he only picked my game because he thought my name M.C.Diskett was a hackers handle and I therefore wouldnt come forward and claim the prize.
Let us also not forget Psycho Santa another amiga magazine coverdisk, my first game at bullfrog, one female journo visiting Bullfrog said she thought Psycho Santa was bullfrogs best game, I doubt that went down well, what with populous 1,2 and powermonger all being out.
Startopia is really the game I’m most proud of having been involved in, Mucky Foot magnus opus
MikeD
And Manga.
Startopia really was lovely. I always recall (I think) Ste from Edge talking about climbing up to the environmental deck and just sort of panning the camera back so he could watch the stars spin slowly.
KG
Startopia another game that failed to sell and pretty much killed off MuckyFoot we were always limping along after that.
In fairness it was nowhere near as bad as Splinter Cell: Airwaves Theory. Gawd that was awful; I stopped playing when the Airwaves blimp made it’s appearance.
Let us also not forget Psycho Santa another amiga magazine coverdisk, my first game at bullfrog, one female journo visiting Bullfrog said she thought Psycho Santa was bullfrogs best game, I doubt that went down well, what with populous 1,2 and powermonger all being out.
Holy shit man, my Dad bought that mag, I played that game, I still remember it now and it must have been what, 15 years or so ago?
“Syndicate Wars, then – a concentrated dose of all that made British geek culture good in the mid-90s.
And Manga.
In fairness it was nowhere near has bad as Splinter Cell: Airwaves Theory. Gawd that was awful; I stopped playing when the Airwaves blimp made it’s appearance.”
I’ve always thought the extra costumes in Devil May Cry 2 are the most annoying example of product placement – you actually had to earn them and they were completely out of tone with the rest of game.
@Richard Manga UK – admittanly, Legend of the Overfiend and the like had a target market of pale, replica shuriken owning basement dwellers, but what’s there not to love about Ghost in the Machine or the utter camp of Fist of the North Star?
Ghost in the Shell is awful, awful, awful, and awful – one of the most overrated things since sliced bread. But pretty much all their stuff was many millions of times worse, making it look like Midas’ own glittering baguette. With Overfiend especially they basically poisoned the well, and bringing over stuff like Violence Jack, Angel Cop, Ninja Scroll, and most of their other toss, they took a great big poo in it.
Not that they didn’t release some good stuff later on, like The Castle of Cagliostro. And you could argue that if they hadn’t jumped into the market, nobody else would have. But their early years were not good for anime fans, and circa SW, I don’t remember much worth crowing about.
(Since then, quite a few things. Read or Die is a particular favourite in recent years.)
Syndicate and Syndicate Wars were both fantastic games. I loved them to bits, and they regularly tore me a new one.
I’m proud to have beaten the Atlantic Accelerator – and it was a close thing. I’d eliminated almost everyone in a huge firefight, losing only one agent. There was just one enemy left, who had unfortunately gotten himself stuck inside a building. It was impossible for me to hurt him from outside. So I send one agent in and he dies before he can get a shot off. Damn. I can’t risk losing another agent – or can I? I send the next hopeless bag of implants and meat inside and self destruct him. Bam: mission complete, game over, with one surviving agent to lord it over planet Earth.
I didn’t complete SW without cheating – having three separate levels with no checkpointing or saving in-mission was extremely harsh at the time, and would seem genuinely bizarre today. Especially considering it was all too easy to /destroy the entire environment/ on the second of the three end levels. Bonus points for the beanstalk, though!
There should be two T-Shirts.
T-Shirt One: “I Beat The Atlantic Accelerator”
T-Shirt Two: Same, but on the back: “…In American Revolt“
Not to derail the discussion but;
Ghost in the Shell was stone cold classic – bold and beatiful animation, action sequences that established a template Hollywood has aped yet not yet matched, a relatively well structured, well devolved plot line (which admittantly stole a lot from William Gibson, but then again, who doesn’t?) and overall sense that the people who made it actually knew movies – instead of just the interior of a animation sweat shop.
I agree though, for the lowest time Manga wasn’t kosher to bring up in pub conversation – mainly thanks to the early associations with demon based violations and childish ultra violence.
I disagree. GITS was a very pretty, but utterly vapid clip-show turned into a movie. It has some beautiful scenes – Kusanagi’s walk through the town especially, and the eerie building of a cyborg at the start. Likewise, the fights are very impressive, especially – as was the case for most people at the time – if you’d never really seen anything but western cartoons at the time.
Then the story kicks in properly, being confusing primarily due to just picking scenes almost at random, and playing them out in a way that’s slow and pretentious with either being deep, or having anything of real interest to say. GITS didn’t get a decent conversion until SAC.
I beat the Alantic Accelerator by loading up with Lasers. You run at the start to the bottom left of the map, where you can get in a closed area with a couple of kill-zones coming in. Take out the hordes as they come and get you, then sweep the level for the survivors.
KG
@KG – I used the same strategy though mixed in a gauss for crowd control and to give the lasers cool down time (I seem to remember this was problem.) This was on the Amiga so the controls got fairly laggy with lots going on, though strangely I don’t remember it being that hard, especially compared to Cannon Fodder’s horror show. Possibly I had more time to fail/reload, fail/reload back then.
@Richard Fair points about GIST disjointed nature, though that’s a problem common to most manga, even class acts like Serial Experiment Lain and Cowboy Bebop tend to throw regularly jarring narrative jumps, flashbacks, fantasy seqences and strange pauses where characters seem to do nothing (almost like the loading of a cut scene) into an episode. It’s part of the charm I suppose.
Atlantic Accelerator is actually fairly easy to beat if you know how to exploit choke points. Use lasers and/or shields to reach the first decent-sized building, get to the far back wall away from the door and just minigun everything that comes through the door. If you’re far enough away from it, the occasional self-destruct explosion will never touch you.
Of course that’s also a really boring way to play, and dodging gauss rockets while jumping from building to building is a more stylishly violent and violently stylish way to play.
Syndicate Wars did slightly better with this because buildings could demolish and (if I remember correctly) enemies would occasionally use indirect fire like grenades.
This article is well-timed, my current desktop wallpaper is a gigantic screenshot map from one of the first missions:
http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/4903/syndicateub1.png
It spans two large (1680×1050) widescreen monitors, cut it down as needed.
Also I think I made sure it tiles horizontally.
God, it’s a beautiful game.
SOMEONE RE-MAKE IT.
KG
Somewhere in EA’s headquarters, there’s a Mission Impossible style mega-secure vault room with little pieces of paper sitting on a desk that read “Syndicate IP”, “System Shock IP”, “Ultima IP”, etc.
Someone needs to break in and steal those little pieces of paper and distribute them to hungry developers.
Jonathan: Yes. Shadowrun on the SNES is one of my all-time favorite games.
In these times of sandbox “discovery” and spiritual sequels, it blows my mind EA has not shown any public interest in trying to make a new Syndicate (I would even stand hearing childs saying it is “a GTA clone”). However, even if EA as publisher has improved a lot its content, maybe is not the best of the ideas if they don´t have a studio able to carry with such responsibility.
@JP
Well, I did once infiltrate Naval Research Labs to bring my girlfriend her forgotten lunch, so if anyone likes to live dangerously, feel free to join me. After all, Who Dares Wins. FYI I’m just kidding. I think. Damn that was a good game. Many thanks to you, Mr. Diskette. You did the world a great service.
I have Syndicate on the Mega Drive and that’s where I played it but after seeing it on the PC at a friends, I despaired.
Oh my god… the floating traffic lights!!!
@Mike Diskett
Worth noting is that Diskett in swedish means “floppy disk”.
Awesome
In Italian too. Nomen omen, they used to say.
The Syndicate music was brilliant.
Talking about remake, look at this
http://www.jongware.com/images/syndicate2.gif
http://www.jongware.com/images/syndicate3.gif
Syndicate in 3D, but keeping the pixelart style !
from http://www.jongware.com/jongware.html
Sadly, it obviously wasn’t more than an engine test. Too bad.
I know no one will read this, no one ever does after the first day. BUT:
Mike Diskett. Congratulations on havnig a hand in a few of my favourite and most memorable games; Not only Startopia and Syndicate, but mr wobbly leg. The name was unfamiliar, so I googled it. I came across THIS video. From the first sound bite of that video, I knew EXACTLY what that game was! Amazing.
Heh, loved Syndicate and Syndicate Wars. Even took a stab at making a 3D clone. Unfortunately, it never got too far along in development. I did have some fun making models for it.
http://www.virmin.com/synd_gallery.htm
–
TAZ
Mike Diskett wrote:
Hi there, Mike… If you ever stop by again, just a question or two… I have been working on fixing SYNDICATE WARS to work under the WinXP (SP2) NTVDM. Some interesting system level programming decisons your team made, the effects of which were obscured by the DOS&Dos4/GW DPMI environment of the day… I am aware that SYNDICATE WARS can be successfully executed in the very fine DOSBOX v0.72 emulator, however I wanted to get it to run in the NTVDM of WinXP (SP2).
Easier to ask you (if you remember) than for me to follow the code path backwards – why the command-line options after the MAIN.EXE of “/w /g” in the PLAY.BAT file? These startup command-line options could have been made internal defaults, yet were still ‘optional’ yet required. What did they do?
The other question, noted some support for potential 800x600x8bpp resolution (VESA mode 103h), was this ever tested or activated? The low-res animation artwork ‘could’ be re-done :-), would then bring the SYNDICATE look to SYNDICATE WARS in both SVGA 640×480 and 800×600 – if the engine supports such.
The ‘zoom-out/in’ could be changed globally, not sure how that would affect game-play and/or balance.
Thanks for any replies,
dvwjr
I think we need a Startopia retrospective…
“My brother’s the first to speak: “Kill them”. I open fire, trying to put them out of their misery…”
Evil!
This thread is unbelievable! Normally when I stumble onto something like this, it’s from 2002. The internet will save us all. Every few months I check up on the attempt to recreate Rocket Jockey, a game that few have heard of let alone played, from 1996, and now, I have hope that someone will recreate the Syndicate series, which dominated my video game fantasies for years. I’m sure as a 13 year old I spent more time wishing I was a cyborg than anything else. And Sucram, I couldn’t agree more – System Shock was such a close second.
I would sell a kidney to play a new version of Syndicate!
If they wanted to have some upgrades to the birds eye view i would suggest a tab where you can shift between BEV and 1st person. It would be excellent for assasination missions where you have to snipe out a target.
And regarding the flaming civilians. I can clearly remember dragging my best friend into the “computer room” and saying “Check this out” as i torched some civies, his face as they ran around on fire and screaming was priceless. Needless to say he became an addict that day.
BRING BACK SYNDICATE!!!
I’ve recently started a mod for the PC game crysis based on syndicate and syndicate wars. We’ve chosen crysis because it allows us to include civilian interaction – persuasion etc and also have persuaded ai follow you around. Its going to be intersting porting it to a current gen game and to the first person shooter style, but hopefully we can do it justice!
Anyone got any ideas on how I can play Syndicate on a new Intel Mac? It doesn’t support the classic environment…
I had completly forgotten about this game, I knew deep down something was missing from my memory !!
Que search to find a way to play it again ASAP!
Rest assured that, if I ever get my way, Syndicate *will* be remade. Properly.
Hi Disky!
Well folks, I just discoverd the Dos Box and one of my first games to be played is Syndicate. Well I was pretty impressed – it was actually my first time with a sound blaster – wohoo!
But well I have a big problem – to save my game doesn’t work at all. I press F3 – the window comes – I delete the empty part and write anything in there an press save. Then comes the main menu and when I look for my saved games – nothing is in there. Can somebody help me?
It’s one of my most favorite games so I would miss it dearly!!!
Syn3D image #1
Syn3D image #2
>Sadly, it obviously wasn’t more than an engine test. Too bad
I was pretty content with it — it showed all levels in glorious (slow) Direct3D. I also remember why I put it aside … the engine worked by reading the actual level definitions (and all worked!), and I discovered the programmers cheated with the placement of objects! So, traffic lights were either on the ground or way up in the air, buildings had no back, etc. I was pretty miffed that I had to re-design the levels, so I abandoned the whole project.
Oh — and it was dead slow as well. Long live D3D …
Im playing a this game using dosbox on osx and am having difficulties making progress. I cant use the agent’s panic option in fights because I have no right mouse button. I can fire using apple+click, but I cant panic because my single left click was spent synthesizing the right click. Does anyone have any advice out there besides getting a pc mouse?
Don’t try to game on Mac?
I am going to try to remake it for pc, but does anyone has the original sprites from Syndicate?
I think that if I work on a remake it should be with the original sprites…