A new 3-hour documentary has just been released by the YouTube onaretrotip about Bullfrog Production's classic real-time strategy game, Syndicate, featuring new interviews with the level designer Alex Trowers, lead programmer Sean Cooper, the composer Russell Shaw, and the intro artist Paul Walker.
So if you happen to be a fan of the Bullfrog title and have always wanted the inside scoop on how the groundbreaking game came to be, we definitely recommend giving it a watch.
Syndicate, in case you've never never heard of it, is a 1993 isometric title that saw players taking control of a Syndicate executive tasked with ordering agents around a map to complete various objectives, including assassinations, brainwashing civilians and police, and carrying out rescue missions. The ultimate goal of the game was to spread your influence far and wide, and to eventually make your mark on the Syndicate's top brass, in the hopes of moving up the chain of command.
Following its original release on Amiga and DOS computers, it was later ported to a bunch of other platforms (such as the Macintosh, FM-Towns, PC-98, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, CD32, Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, Sega CD, SNES, and Acorn Archimedes), and also later went on to inspire a sequel, called Syndicate Wars, in 1996, as well as a reboot simply titled Syndicate in 2012.
In the documentary, onaretrotip takes viewers through the "Making Of" the title, asking the former Bullfrog devs about the origins of the project, as well as various other aspects of its production such as the art, design, music, and mechanics.
There's also some interesting discussions among the devs about the way in which the design of Bullfrog games were credited across many of their games, and thow the Bullfrog studio head Peter Molyneux was often considered to be deeply involved in every project related to the studio as "the face" of the company, despite having "almost nothing" to do with projects like Syndicate, in the words of Trowers.
If you want to give it a watch, it's available here.