Games Ahead of Their Time #2
Syndicate, EA, Bullfrog, 1993: Real Time Cyberpunk Goodness
Many gamers might not even recognize the title, or the developer. It’s a shame, too, because these guys were responsible for groundbreaking games like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet, and several others. This company’s games littered my original list of 20 games before I pared it down to five. Oh, you might know the founder, Peter Molyneux. Thought you would.
In 1993, the world of PC gaming was a far different place. The console market hadn’t taken center stage yet (most PC games were too complex to be ported to the consoles) and graphics and sound were primitive. For a game to succeed, it had to be strong in the gameplay department.
Along comes Syndicate, a squad-based game before there were many squad-based games around. Set in a cyperpunk future, the game pits you as a ‘marketer’ for one of a few global corporations that now control the world. Your job? Take out the competition through force.
What set this game apart was the fact that it condoned violence. You had to wipe out people not because of war, or argument, but because they worked for the other team. On top of that, the game was neutral toward killing civilians, something never truly seen before. The same way you can beat up on innocents in GTA, you could set the civilians on fire and watch them run across the screen. I'm not saying you should do this, just that you can.
The game also required the player to research weapons technology with a limited budget. This had been done a few years before with Civilization but never in a game like this. You had to equip your cyborg men/women on a loadout screen, a la Rainbow Six, and send them into tactical battle. This added a level of management not really seen before on this scale. It made the game more thoughful and more engaging.
Though many compare this to X-COM, the two titles are quite different, and Syndicate did it all in real time. Both of these games came out in 1993, further cementing the early nineties as a fantastic era of PC gaming which fed the later boom that we are still enjoying today. Now, thirty years later, the game has its flaws but it still plays well. You can see the makings of what we've come to expect from the genre here. It's definitely still a lot of fun.
So many of the attributes of this game appeared in later games. Much later games. Truly, this game was ahead of its time on many different levels. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the game was released on every platform you could imagine, it didn’t really achieve success. In the end, the game was difficult to get into. The people who stuck with it loved it, and there is still a following. Some people are even trying to create the game for modern platforms.