On holiday this week, so here’s the second of my recent excursions into Bullfrog’s glory days.

My love for Syndicate is something that I find difficult to express in words. It’s a game expressly calculated to appeal to both the 10 year-old version of me and the current gnarled oak of a man I have become. It’s all about trenchcoat-clad cyborgs fighting gang wars with weaponry ranging from Uzis to rocket launchers, all in the middle of a living city where innocent bystanders are routinely incinerated in the crossfire from your obscenely powerful guns — and if that idea doesn’t at least catch a glimmer of your interest then I don’t know what to tell you. Probably you’re not going to be very interested in Syndicate. Probably you’ve also had the joy surgically removed from every other aspect of your life, but I try not to judge.

For the rest of us, Syndicate is possibly the landmark Bullfrog title. People still rave about Syndicate, even today, and it’s pretty easy to see why: it’s the first thing¹ they made that was expressly designed as a game first rather than a system. Populous made the mistake of the system being the game, which is why the reaction to it today is… well, it’s pretty much the one I had when I wrote the last one of these; it’s acknowledged as a remarkable technological achievement but there’s a rather lukewarm reaction towards actually playing the thing. Syndicate still has the open world, autonomous system that all the Bullfrog games are known for, but it stands in stark contrast to Populous by making this system — the city environment — a backdrop for the player’s actions within it rather than the be-all and end-all of Syndicate itself. Sitting on top of the city is something that is very explicitly game-y: a squad of four cyborg agents ordered around the streets with the left mouse button and who will gun down anyone sitting under the mouse cursor given a cue from the right mouse button. Each mission in Syndicate has a concrete objective — assassinate this target, persuade that target, eliminate all rival syndicate agents in the city — but doesn’t tell you how you should be going about it; instead it just dumps your agents into the mission city, gives you a target marker and leaves you to get on with it.

These days this seems like a pretty token amount of structure for a game, but it did wonders for Syndicate’s coherency when compared to Populous. Syndicate isn’t anywhere near as open or sprawling a game as Populous, but that’s a good thing; the bits it cut were fairly flabby and abstract anyway, and what’s left is a pretty focused experience that plays very well to its theme, rather than the theme being an ill-fitting mask for an already-existing system. For example, rather than having Syndicate’s fifty levels be a simple linear progression from one to another, Bullfrog made the effort of contextualising each level by presenting it as a region on the world map. By completing the missions you gradually spread the stain of your syndicate’s colour across the globe, and — importantly — there’s a limited degree of choice given to the player as to which mission they attempt next, as any region that’s adjacent to territory you control will be open for a takeover. There’s also a point to doing the missions that goes beyond “You have to in order to finish the game,” since each region you take over pays tax that funds your R&D labs’ efforts to develop new and better ways of killing people.

The R&D portion of Syndicate would probably be considered pretty basic today – aside from improved body modifications for your agents there’s maybe twelve things to research, half of which are pretty useless — but it nevertheless provides an invaluable sense of progression to Syndicate. The body mods are expensive as hell to both research and install, but they provide your agents with dramatic performance boosts, making them faster, more resilient and more accurate. An agent with only Level 1 arms will spray lead all over the place when firing his Minigun, wasting ammo and increasing Time to Kill², but the same agent with Level 3 arms will fire every single bullet dead-on to the spot where you point your mouse cursor. As for the weapons, the blind research in Syndicate (you can only direct your efforts into one of four very vague research areas) allows you to work your way from basic pistols and shotguns to Uzis, and then to Miniguns, and then to lasers and the infamous Gauss Gun — these days we take the term “Gauss gun” to refer to magnetically accelerated weaponry, but in Syndicate it’s just a fancy name for an immensely destructive rocket launcher. Like most games there’s a point where you have so much money that it ceases to mean anything, but for the first two thirds of Syndicate fully outfitting an agent with the cutting edge in weapons and cyborg implants is ruinously expensive, which in turn makes your otherwise faceless stooges investments to be protected.

They’re still expendable, mind. Replacing dead agents is a setback, but it’s a price you might end up paying given how violent Syndicate’s combat is. I’m actually a little surprised there wasn’t more of a GTA-esque outcry over it at the time since it inevitably involves the wholesale slaughter of civilians by the dozens. It might be entirely inadvertent, but unless you’ve upgraded your agents with the maximum Arms tech the spread on their weapons means they’re going to catch passers-by in the hail of lead they unleash when they return fire on enemy agents. Because the weapons do include flamethrowers and rocket launchers it’s kind of hard to discriminate when hordes of trenchcoated cyborgs are throwing themselves at your beleaguered team; the wandering-around-on-fire-screaming animations seem a little tame today, but 10 year-old me was very impressed with them at the time. And that’s without even getting into the thing most people remember Syndicate for: using the Persuadertron to press-gang the city’s population into your own private army.

The Persuadertron seems like one of the leftovers from Populous that went very, very right. It’s a magic doodad that brainwashes anybody standing near your agents to your side; basic civilians are converted instantly, while guards, police and enemy agents require a successively greater critical mass of already-converted personnel, but if you have the Persuadertron equipped sooner or later you’re going to be trailing a crowd of converted citizens behind you. These citizens are unswervingly loyal: armed citizens such as the police will fire their weapons at targets when you do, while unarmed civilians will go so far as to arm themselves with weapons dropped by fallen enemies so that they can join in the shooting. They’ll suffer terrible losses if you get into any kind of serious battle, but each bullet they stop is one less that hits your agents. It feels almost like an afterthought that Bullfrog chucked in because it was a shame to have this living city environment that you could only really interact with by killing the population, but it’s one that reinforces the central theme of Syndicate: that life is cheap, and any amount of collateral damage is acceptable as long as you get the job done for your corporate pa ymasters.

Syndicate is a great example of Bullfrog’s imaginative system design being properly harnessed into an actual game; by focusing down the gameplay from influencing an entire tribe to control of just four agents while compensating the player with a degree of choice on the strategic layer it comes across as a much more coherent experience than Populous, even today. It’s creaking a little bit these days – the UI, vehicles and inventory are all pretty painful to use– but I found it was still perfectly playable, and more than that, it was still enjoyable.

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One of my New Year’s resolutions was to make at least one post on the blog every week. I knew that there’d be weeks like this week when work hit me like a truck, which is why I spent a large part of the Christmas break writing some shorter pieces chronicling my experiences with Bullfrog’s games so that I’d have something to fill the gap. Some of them I’d never played, and most of the rest I’d not played in fifteen years, and since I was stuck with a low-tech laptop for a week I just bought the lot off GoG and played through as many of them as I could, in chronological order. First up is Populous.

I think it would be fair to say that Populous is not a game that has aged terribly well. It had its 25th birthday last year; as Bullfrog’s first release all the way back in 1989 it would be pretty surprising if Populous wasn’t showing those years somehow. Even so, as somebody very used to archaic control systems (I once spent a summer playing through the pre-Civilization Microprose titles) I was a little taken aback at how basic Populous seems given the benefit of modern hindsight, and how painful it is to try and play now. Running at a whopping resolution of 320×200 didn’t give it too many pixels to play with, but even so Populous is downright wasteful in the way it uses its screen real estate, with two-thirds of it taken up by the UI buttons and the minimap. All the action takes place in a small box crammed into the centre of the screen which is commensurately awkward to deal with, and I use the word “action” with a certain degree of irony here because there isn’t much you can actually do in Populous.

I remember Godus came in for some considerable criticism last year after the game turned out to be mostly about clicking on land to dig holes. Based on my time with Populous I don’t know what the people who backed Godus were expecting when they were promised a spiritual successor to Populous, because Populous is almost entirely about clicking on land to raise and lower it. You start each map in control of one sect of followers – we’ll call them the Blue People, because I like Megalomania — and your opponent god controls the Red People. Your objective is to grow your population to the point where you can exterminate every single one of the Red People with extreme prejudice; said population growth occurs in settlements that your people automatically build when set to “Settle” mode, but the type of settlement you get depends wholly on the amount of flat land around it that’s available to grow crops. The better the settlement, the faster your population grows and the stronger they are. The best settlement type, the castle, needs something like four tiles of flat land in each direction, so if you want to maximise your population growth you’d better get digging with that Raise/Lower Land spell.

This is what takes up maybe 80% of your time in Populous. Being able to sculpt the landscape at whim like this was probably a great technological achievement back in 1989, but coming to it in 2014 it’s painfully obvious that this is all the game really is. Control of your population is almost totally hands-off; settlements periodically spawn walkers who will meander about and eventually found new settlements, and this is how your population spreads. When they encounter a Red walker or settlement they’ll fight it out, with the victor determined by the strength of the walker (multiple walkers can merge into each other to increase a walker’s strength) and the tech level of the settlement they came from. The winner claims the land and the settlement. All of this will happen without any direction from you; in practice, I found that aside from raising and lowering land plots all I had to do was wait until my population had reached a reasonable density before plonking a waypoint down in my opponent’s territory. Once I had enough walkers merged at the waypoint I’d convert them into a knight, who would then tear off on his own to fuck shit up. Ten minutes later my knights have torn apart the entire enemy settlement and I’ve won.

I played five levels of Populous. That’s not a lot considering there’s apparently five hundred of the things, but I find it significant that aside from the topography (which was rapidly smoothed over into a boring flatland anyway) these levels didn’t differ from each other in any way; they each started and finished in identical fashion. Yes, there’s spells you can cast — if the game will let you, it turns the fun ones off to start with — but while a volcano is certainly pretty it doesn’t match the fucking-shit-up potential of a knight. To create knights you need population. Hell, to cast spells you need population, since your mana stock is dependent on how many people you control. Having the game be all about population might be tremendously fitting for a game called Populous, but when that population is so uninteractive it does rather limit the scope of Populous as an actual game.

As a system, though, I find Populous very interesting. You can trace the structure and philosophy of literally every single subsequent Bullfrog game directly back to the concepts Populous pioneered – they all involve independent, living systems that the player can only interact with in an indirect fashion. (Well, okay, in the case of Syndicate gunning down half the population of the city is pretty direct, but the city and its inhabitants are entirely autonomous.) While they’re comparatively basic here, the spells in particular reared their head again in Dungeon Keeper, and Magic Carpet was an entire game built around them. Early Bullfrog games are also put together in a very similar way to Populous — the system and the levels are built first, and then they come up with a context to justify it. Syndicate’s infamous ending — where it dumped players straight to the DOS prompt after they completed the Atlantic Accelerator mission — is easier to understand when you consider it was their next game after Populous (and Populous II). Populous had a hastily-added ending screen that was only included after Molyneux realised during testing that yes, people would eventually batter their way through those five hundred levels, and so Syndicate just flat-out not receiving one makes more sense after you remember that Bullfrog’s general tendency was to treat it as an afterthought. This is a great example of Bullfrog never being too concerned about their worlds, instead always seeing the system as the key thing to get right. In some cases this worked well (Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper) and in other cases less well (Magic Carpet, anyone?) but the approach remains the same all the way up to Dungeon Keeper 2 and Bullfrog’s subsequent demise.

When viewed in that context, Populous starts to make a lot more sense. Populous was merely the first stab at something they continually refined over the next decade, and while it hasn’t so much aged at this point as it has ossified, the system Bullfrog created here must have been tremendously impressive at the time. It’s a world that evolves with or without your input that you can influence but not directly control; that this reduces Populous to what today would be little more than a flash game doesn’t diminish how innovative it is. It’s rare that developers get things 100% right the first time around, and since Bullfrog spent the rest of their existence iterating and improving on the ideas they came up here I can hardly hold the basic nature of the game part of Populous against it. I don’t think it’s a game that’s very fun to play today, but it has definitely been an educational experience.

(Oh, and then you’ve got Populous II, which — as you’d expect from a sequel — adds a few more bells and whistles but is pretty much the same game in a less offensively-ugly package.)

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