Have we done a cyberpunk dystopia on AAA yet? Speedball 2 was a bit too focused on the contest of sport for its wider world to count. Exolon didn’t have enough inhabitants. Impossible Mission came closest but has its own idiosyncratic niche (plus: too damn suave). So I guess the lovingly detailed high tech gloom of Syndicate was something new to many gamers. Its suit-encased guards and harsh architecture, its world of advertising screens and missions for corporate saboteurs presented in medi-scan silhouette, green lines and data all around: all novel and, more importantly, cool.
It’s an educated guess, but one drawing on assumptions I make in a spirit of generosity. Because this way, the fact that playing it for the first time didn’t do much for me isn’t just a result of failures. It’s a result of successes, in that it can be put down to Syndicate’s aesthetic having succeeded so thoroughly as to become one of gaming’s defaults. Not that we can’t still have a good dispute over what cyberpunk, or indeed Cyberpunk, really means, obviously. I’ve played a dozen better technological cautionary tales; we’ll be getting to a few of them in this project. Without any personal nostalgia for Syndicate, it’s hard to see it as anything other than an inferior take on familiar themes.
It doesn’t help that it has some serious oddities even in the implementation of its aesthetic and story, possibly an inevitable side effect of being a trailblazer. Its tales of cybercorporate rivalry and stealing cyberresearch are accessed via a Risk-looking world map where you take over each region of the world in turn through carrying out assassinations and persuasions and the like. Once you’ve taken places over, you can go back to the map and stick high taxes on all of the residents to fund your cyberresearch and, presumably, continue to deny said residents affordable cyberhealthcare. But the disconnect in scale between the two concepts of what you’re doing is massive. There is space to fill in the gaps in my head, conjecture about how in each level I’m intervening in the one key action that tips the balance and leads to overall control, but it’s not very satisfying.
The actual method you use to carry these things out is part of that too. Syndicate has you clicking around on an isometric view to direct individual members of a squad around to stake out territory and fire at enemies. It then adds on all sorts of bells and whistles in terms of destructible territory, different weapons, and enemies and soldiers who don’t go down in one hit. It ties things back to the overall picture by being able to use your money to kit out your squad better, including upgrading their body parts (and it happily has nothing to say on the subject of whether this makes them less human). The level of detail is impressive but never quite joins up the fighting to the wider picture. And while Syndicate leaves vast uncrossable gaps, the level of detail is does have is enough to take away much of the mystery and intrigue that an even vaguer look at its world could have left. Later games having shorn it of any blinding sheen of cool, it’s hard to see anything else but the gaps.
Another thing that it’s hard to ignore when looking at Syndicate in retrospect is that it’s made by one of the big names of British gaming, Bullfrog (not to be confused with Bulldog, of the vaguely Bullfroggy Feud). We’re going to be meeting Bullfrog less than you might expect, having already missed out on the big and influential (and slightly slowburning) Populous, but Syndicate gives some pointers for the future. Receiving mission briefings about how you have to clear the enemy corporation scum out of an up and coming town because head office thinks it’s a very promising base for your marketing boys to experiment with? It’s pointed satire, but again all the detail of the game (and the time you spend shooting people) doesn’t fully connect with it. Perhaps taking on capitalism in a setting with a theme closer to present reality might prove more profitable?
Amiga chart, Edge 001, October 1993