Edge: The making of Syndicate

[coldfish]

http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-syndicate

One of my all time favourite games on the Amiga, I spent days working through the levels and the final Oceanic base was a real brain buster.

" Syndicate was Bullfrog’s first game to lead on PC, an announcement that led to cries of anguish from Amiga users (later mollified by Mike Diskette’s excellent port). “I think the decision to switch was based purely on the fact that the PC allowed us to do all of the cool city stuff that we wanted to,” explains Trowers. “The Amiga, bless its cottons, just wasn’t powerful enough. Early versions of the fully isometric 3D, full-screen engine never used to get above 12fps with any more than a handful of guys running around. Even on the PCs in those days, we had to do some pretty nifty graphics stuff to get the whole thing to work at a reasonable speed. I think all of it made us think that the Amiga had pretty much run its course and that the PC would take over as the main platform. And we were intrigued by all this wonderful network stuff. The Bullfrog philosophy on making games was to try the whole thing out multiplayer and then make an AI to emulate the human players. "

Very interesting read, I remember comparing Syndicate on my A500 to it running on a friends PC and seeing the writing on the wall for Amiga.

[the_leander]

I loved the game, lost many an hour playing it.

But yeah, comparing the PC version to the Amiga was a hell of a shock to the system.

[amigadave]

I loved the game, lost many an hour playing it.

But yeah, comparing the PC version to the Amiga was a hell of a shock to the system.

I wonder if the software houses had started to write Amiga games with a minimum spec of a 68030 and 8mb Fast RAM sooner if it would have made any difference in the sales numbers of the A3000 (not to mention 68030 accelerator boards for the A500 & A2000)?

I really think that much of what drove the increased PC sales during the time when PC gaming was huge and gaming consoles were not on top of the gaming heap (if there was ever a time when consoles were not at the top of the gaming heap, other than when the Amiga was KING of gaming), was that many PC owners needed a faster PC, or a better PC graphics card, just so they could play some new game.  There seemed to be a time when you had to upgrade your PC every 4 months with a faster CPU, or a better video card, if you wanted to continue to be able to play the latest and greatest PC games that were being released at a furious pace.

Just look at how few games were written for the Amiga that need more than a 68000 and 1mb or 2mb of RAM to run.  I would not be surprised if a survey was taken and it was found out that more than 50% of all 20,000+ Amiga software titles ever written would run on an ECS 68000 Amiga w/512kb RAM.  Sure, many Amiga games will run better on faster Amiga hardware, but what percentage of Amiga games, or even less of productivity software requires an Amiga with a 68030/25MHz or better and more than 2mb RAM?  1%, 2%, surely not more than 5%.  Now compare that to the percentage of PC games and software that will run under MS-DOS with only 640kb of RAM that was written during the same years that the Intel 386 was the most commonly used CPU selling in new PC computers.

I guess you could blame it all on the development practices (or lack of) of Commodore.  I can clearly remember reading the disappointment in the Amiga magazine articles when the A3000 was first introduced "too little, too late" and "is this what we all have been waiting so patiently for?" seem to stick in my memory.  I think that there was a similar feeling when OS2.0 was released (did the A3000 and 2.0 come out at the same time?) and absolutely remember the same disappointment, or much worse when the A4000 came out.  But I think that more developers should have written 68030 or better software to make more Amiga users want to upgrade to newer models earlier and perhaps force Commodore into at least thinking of putting the 68030 into the A1200, or making two different A1200's available, one with the 68020 and one with the 68030, either on the mobo, or as a Commodore manf. trapdoor card at the time of it first being released.  It is a real shame that Commodore held back the hardware engineers and settled for "good enough" and waited for PCs and Macs to catch up and surpass the huge lead the Amiga had when it was introduced.

[coldfish]

The greatest thing about the A500 was also its Achilles heel.

Fixed hardware with minimal expandability, like a console.  

This was great in that it meant the hardware spec was a fixed target for software developers, and it made their life easier in the A500 hey day.  They knew that any piece of software would run on most if not all the A500's out there.

Later on this became a curse, consumers had nowhere to go beyond 512k memory upgrades.  When real upgrade options did finally become available they were either too expensive to the majority of users or lacked the kind of jaw-dropping performance improvements that would inspire users to upgrade en masse, the market eroded and the developers either closed shop or moved on to other platforms following the consumer.

[Tajmaster]

Ive always thought that one of the contributing factors to the Amiga's downfall and developers like Bullfrog saying stuff like that was the fact that Amiga users have a history of not spending money on their machines to upgrade them and PC users tended to do the opposite. There were plenty of expansions (hard drives and accelerators alike) that people just didnt buy back in the day. I think they were seen as only being needed if you wanted to do "serious" stuff on your Amiga.
 
Equally and I dare say more so, Commodore (as usual) were to blame. They should have made the A1200 sooner and of a higher spec. It should have had a hard drive as standard and a better motherboard (Better IDE ports, a true graphics expansion slot that redirects ALL displays when used and upgrades the actual graphics chipset rather being a bolt on like currect GFX cards, full 68030 or 020 CPU and SIMM sockets for example). Commode seemed to be of the frame of mind that those specs are not for a "low end" Amiga but our beloved platform was a light weight in an increasingley heavy weight world
 
Im sure like many of my fellow Amiga.org readers you think how the world would be different had the Amiga continued to dominate. If I have an Amiga I bought delivered to work, all the guys who know their stuff (ie not the Playstation generation! lol ) come over and reminiss and I said to them once "guys, had this one the fight, we wouldnt be supporting just one OS and hardware platform ". Oh well, we can always wonder how it could have been.

[koshman]

Ahh, I don't think it could have been any different. The key thing about Amiga is that it's built on custom hardware. If it stayed true to its roots than it would have died anyway sooner or later, because in the world where competitors are built on cheap generic expendable hardware, Amiga as we know it could never be a viable mainstream alternative. The only way would be an Amiga built from those same generic parts and I'm not sure I would want that.
I think custom hardware today can only work for gaming consoles and other single-purpose devices with limited lifespan.

[Flashlab]

Syndicate is a great game; I still play it on my Amiga. Although not the Amiga version but the Mac version in Shapeshifter.

The multiplayer would have been great and the other things they wanted sound cool too! But for the time it hit the market it was a great game.

[Matt_H]

Great read!

The Amiga angle is interesting. Regarding what others have said, it's true, there's no comparing a 386 or 486 to a 68000, but the challenge that needed to be overcome was that what seems like huge throngs of people didn't (and still don't) know Amigas even could go faster than a stock A500. Maybe on the development front there were some economics to consider (not enough of an 020/030 userbase to sell to, almost certainly not enough of a network card userbase to sell to)...

But whenever the Amiga comes up in popular conversation (Slashdot, other major computing sites), the collective memory seems to be of a Kickstart 1.3 A500 with no hard drive, or, at best, a Video Toaster-equipped A2000. Almost no one remembers AGA, OS2.x+, 040s, or RAM. Those are the things that gave the Amiga its longevity, and what allow the Amiga to be a servicable, if limited, platform today.

[Moto]

I had both an Amiga and PC in those days and I can tell you that the PC didn't become AT ALL interesting to me until Wolf3D.  Before then I would use my PC for work (writing database apps) and my Amiga 500 for everything fun.  And yes, in the USA most of us just had the A500 + 1084 setups.  And it seemed like once I started gaming on the PC, the upgrade cycle was very short (6-8 months).  I can't even remember how many graphics card, motherboard, CPU and hard drive upgrades I did in the 90s.  Commodore definitely missed the boat by not releasing a more impressive machine during that small window of time.

Just my 2 cents.

[coldfish]

Here in Aus, everyone I knew who had an Amiga, had the A500.  I didn't see my first (other) Amiga until I went to Uni and saw A2000 and A3000's being used for animation.

Just about everything was targetted at the A500 512k - 1Mb spec and the A2000 etc only got a mention on flight sims and gfx apps in the software shop I used to buy from.

As the A500 got longer in the tooth and other platforms advanced (which took at least 5 years!) software on the PC and Mac started looking more and more impressive.  I stuck with my trusty A500 to the bitter end, I looked for upgrades (GVP HD etc) but they usually cost more than a whole new PC computer (back in early 90's) and offered only incremental improvement.  AGA was still a while off.  

Also, Amiga software support was fading...

...and everyone was using PCs, my favourite games devs (like Bullfrog) were building games on Wintel and back porting to Amiga, many were ignoring Amiga all together.

Eventually I bit the bullet and bought a PC primarily for word processing:
Early on, I hated the PC's hit-and-miss gaming compatability, crappy sound support, hardware/ driver conflicts and some aspects of Win 3.1. But I loved the massive speed, storage and resolution improvements.  Eventually I got used to the new environment and the rest is history.