Within minutes, the eerily-lit city streets became warzones – either because a detachment of rival cyborgs had just marched round a corner, or because you’d opened fire on a train or police car to see what the reaction would be. Pull out a gun, and the civvies would flee in terror, while the police – with their own inferior firearms – would attempt to take you out, often to little effect.
As you guided your cyborgs through the streets, cars hushed by, police patrolled the pavements, and civilians ambled to and fro. What brought Syndicate to life was the fluidity of its action and the technical detail in its cities, which were, for the time, quite unusual. Missions were varied but ultimately quite simple: assassinate a politician, kidnap a political dissident, rescue an ally, or, best of all, clear an entire city of its rival cyborgs. The missions themselves were viewed from a remote, isometric perspective, the player controlling a small team of up to four cyborgs, kitted out in anonymous full-length coats, Rick Deckard style. Having successfully completed a mission, that part of the map came under the control of your burgeoning corporation. The overall goal in Syndicate was to take control of the entire planet one territory at a time by completing deadly missions in each area. The violence was a by-product of its cool, minimal dystopia – a grim future world where rival corporations vied for the control of cities, and ordinary citizens were frequently caught in the crossfire.īullfrog was already famous for such games as Peter Molyneux’s Populous and Powermonger by the early 90s, and Syndicate, the brainchild of designer and programmer Sean Cooper, was both a logical extension of those games and a bold contrast to them – this was a realtime strategy game that emphasised action as much as planning and tactics. Syndicate wasn’t influenced by the toxic American dream of Scarface, but by the cyberpunk writing of William Gibson and the impersonal 2019 landscape of Blade Runner. If Syndicate didn’t spark much controversy, that’s probably because of the cerebral, almost nonchalant manner with which the British studio Bullfrog presented it.
#CYNDICATE GAME FULL#
This was, after all, an amoral sandbox game which came out at the height of the videogame moral panic in 1993 – several years before the infamous GTA – and allowed players to do everything from stealing cars to gunning down bustling city streets full of ordinary people. It seems odd, then, that Syndicate didn’t get more negative press than it did. The 90s was the era when journalists and politicians suddenly became fearful of those odd bleeping, colourful things their kids were playing in their bedrooms.
Doom was condemned for its gore and violence, while Grand Theft Auto was lambasted for its criminal revelries – a dance between developer and media which continues to this very day. Tawdry full-motion-video adventure Night Trap was castigated by politicians and columnists for its lurid deaths of young women – even though the object of the game was to protect the young women, not kill them. Mortal Kombat was singled out for its gory array of finishing moves. Through the 90s, a string of videogames hit the media in a sudden wave of fear and loathing.
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