Assimilate Target

Despite all this talk of red splatter, one of the iconic moments of Syndicate was walking around the map with a flock of re-programmed civilians, gathering more and more until the crowd had swelled to include almost everybody in the mission. The narrative fluff to support this feature hinted that everybody on earth had been implanted with a chip that could alter their perception, to the extent that the majority of the population now dwell in a Matrix-like utopia to avoid the horrors of the world (an idea fleshed-out by the sequel, Syndicate Wars.) As a result, anybody could be re-chipped in-game to follow the player's agents around and even fight on their side. It was non-violent, but morally just as dubious.

"Peter came in one day and said 'it'd be really cool if we could have gangs and increase the number of agents you're walking around with' and we just went off that. It was some artist I think who said 'oh you should have some sort of weapon called a Persuadatron or something, where that takes the people over' - and that was a really good idea, so we put that in."

Sean explains that the use of multiplayer played a crucial role in getting ideas like the Persuadatron implemented rapidly. "What we would do is set up a four player game, mainly in the evenings because we were doing coding and art during the day. You'd hear people saying 'aw this is fucking shit!' and you'd quickly run over and ask 'WHY is it shit?' It wasn't so much watching people as listening to them, because I'd be playing the game myself, writing ideas down as I was going." By listening to this direct feedback and monitoring areas that needed to be improved or altered, the game could quickly take shape, "[it] allowed the tuning to happen almost instantly - you could make a really nice build out of one nights playing."

"It was pretty much standard Bullfrog practice. We'd played Populous multiplayer over serial port [during development] too, and what that eliminates is the need to write a computer player or any complex AI. The challenge is other human players playing the game. So therefore that gives you that inspiration to think 'what else will players want to do?' earlier - rather than trying to implement this computer player at a point when you don't even know what the game is yet."

Sean believes the results of this method can clearly be seen in the finished title, "It was such good fun, modifying the game to suit all the players in the room. It made the game what it was I think."

Sadly though, general multiplayer didn't make it to the final release Syndicate. "Yeah, it failed QA (Quality Assurance) ... it was really disappointing actually, I think we were two days away from the release window and we wouldn't have made the June release. The problem was it went out of synch, so the games weren't the same on all the machines - and that happened when the connection dropped below a certain rate."

That issue had been fixed in time for the release of American Revolt, an expansion disc released later in the year, but this update brought its own problems. An extremely punishing difficulty level and something of a lack of new features gave it an unpolished feel. Sean is candid about the mistakes that were made and his own role in the process; "We just didn't monitor it enough, we didn't monitor the levels enough and I didn't play it through because I just wanted to get on with the next title. I dunno ... what a disaster, I mean I would never do that now."

"If I was thinking about [American Revolt] today I'd think 'I want everybody who bought Syndicate to play it and I also want loads more people to play it because it's just so cool'" he says,  "we'd have added twenty new features instead of about three."

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