05:42
Introduction and inside Bullfrog's offices
Amiga Power went down to the pub with Peter Molyneux and his Bullfrog colleagues in 1991 to talk Amiga games — including Populous II, Powermonger and 'Bob', which turned out to be the wildly successful Syndicate that was released in 1993.
Ask someone to name a programming team and they'll invariably come up with the Bitmaps. Ask them to come up with a second famous team though and the answers will vary a bit – some (those with long memories) may mention Jez San's Argonaut mob, others might plump for The Assembly Line or Core.
Chances are, though, most will pick out Bullfrog – they may not wear shades and stare meaningfully into the middle-distance, but they have developed a distinctive, recognisable style (this 3D isometric for-want-of-a-better-word 'God-sim' stuff), they are consistently interesting in what they do and (most importantly) they did, after all, develop Populous.
Ah, Populous. Without doubt one of the most distinctive, original games ever seen on the Amiga (or indeed elsewhere), Populous has become something of an international phenomena. It's sold a good 750,000 (750,000!) units worldwide ("Guess how many different machines you can play it on now?" Peter Molyneux asks, "Fifteen!"), and is still constantly referred to as 'One of the Greatest Games Ever Written'.
Who are Bullfrog?
It's the sort of thing that becomes an obsessive experience with people. (Indeed, ask Peter what games he's been playing recently and he comes over all sheepish – "I still play Populous quite a lot," he eventually admits).
Here's another question for Peter Molyneux – how would you describe Bullfrog? After a bit of rigmarole ("I'll only answer that if you'll tell me how you'd describe yourself" etc) he eventually comes out with some variation on his 'slow, disorganised, but keen' line. That being said, for a team of only seven or eight people they've got a lot of things on the boil.
There's Creation, the genetic engineering-based project, there's the as-yet-not-properly-named 'Bob' ("I think it has the potential to become the best thing Bullfrog has ever produced," he told us last issue), there's the Powermonger data disk, there's another further away and more mysterious secret project and then, of course, there's Populous II.
"Of all the programs we've done, this is the one I really wanted to do," says Peter. "It's because I like playing Populous so much, but I keep seeing ways in which we should change it." Certainly, if ever a program was 'long awaited', this is it.
In fact, it's the chance to see it at an early(ish) stage that gets me and photographer Stuart into a (painfully slow) Fiesta hire car with a boot-load of lighting equipment and an illegible set of instructions for a day-trip to Guildford. In particular, for a day-trip to a typically programmer-chic (i.e. ratty and run down) series of offices above a hi-fi shop in the centre of town. "It's a stupid place to be," says Peter, "there's no need for us being in the city centre like this. It just sort of happened."
Back in business
Bullfrog's offices – the place is signposted 'Taurus', the name of the old business software company the outfit was born out of – occupy a number of floors built around a rickety staircase.
The bulk of the programming seems to be done in the one at the top, a room shared with a tankful of baby piranha fish ("we catch them tiddlers from the river to feed them on – the thing is, they'll only eat food that's moving") and a thankfully separate tank full of Oscars (another wimpier sort of fish) which'll gladly gum your finger to death. So it's here, in these slightly unlikely surrounds, that great games are made, eh?
"Well, sort of. The easiest and hardest part of it all is coming up with the Good Idea to start with. That can be done anywhere – usually we go down the pub, or for a meal, and just bounce ideas around until one sticks. In fact, I've got tapes of the original conversations we had about Populous – if you listen to them there'll be one point where you can say, 'Yes, there's where the idea came from. That was the moment we thought of the game'."
Big in Japan
We've had some Japanese magazines in the office lately, I tell Peter. LOGiN's the famous one, but there are lots of others and they're all about 400 pages long and totally unintelligible – apart from the Populous ad with its little Bullfrog logo on the back cover, that is. When you think that all those people in Japan know who Bullfrog are, or certainly know your games, you get to a state where you're expecting something of a more, well, impressive operation than you've got here.
"Yes, I know what you mean," he replies. "We had a few journalists from LOGiN here the other day actually. I don't know what they expected, or what they thought of what they found. They took us outside and made us all climb up a tree to have our pictures taken. Not like you lot at all."
He's referring to the fact that Stuart's currently struggling up the narrow stairs with armfuls of lights and rolls of white paper to set up for our photo shoot later. While he's doing that we take a brief look at some games – very impressive, the lot of them, though going in all directions that make Flood look like even more of an anomaly ("We did Flood purely to prove we could do something like a platform game," says Peter.
"We didn't want to become known just as the 3D isometric God-sim people") before breaking for lunch down the local pub. It's a nice one, with seats going down towards the river, so we sit outside and talk games and magazines.
Righting wrongs
We try and think of games that would qualify as the 'most overrated of all time,' and ones that 'should have been great, but weren't'. Peter talks about the importance of graphic designers to games ("they have at least as much say in the look and feel of them as the programmers, but they're hardly ever covered in magazines") and we try to come up with new ideas for things that we should try and do in Amiga Power. It's here that the idea for our 'Win a job at Bullfrog' competition came from, for instance.
"When we were doing Populous the first journalist to see the game came down – he was from Ace magazine, back in the days when it was with you guys at Future – and I was really worried. What would he think of it? Were we totally barking up the wrong tree, or not? It's so hard to know when you're that close to a project. Thankfully he liked it – this real megastar, big name journalist liked it! In fact, when we came back to the office all he'd do was play it some more. I don't think he realised how much that meant to me."
It's interesting to know how much outside opinions can mean when you're developing a product, but I can only laugh when I realise this 'big megastar journalist' was in fact cuddly old Bob Wade, currently editor of our sister magazine Amiga Shopper, occupying the office just next to the Amiga Power one.
As we leave he tells me he'd taken the guys from LOGiN down here too. "They asked where our ideas came from, so we bought them a pint of Burtons Bitter and told them here, this is where – this drink has special creativity-expanding properties. I'm not sure if they swallowed it, ha ha, but they certainly drank up their pints."
The importance of playtesting
Back in the office then, and we check out the latest versions of all their new games. Like I said, very impressive they are too – check out page three of this article for the full lowdown on Populous II, 'Bob' and Creation – taking the whole God-sim/manipulation of little computer characters idea a few notches further on, and certainly in directions I hadn't thought of.
Powermonger must have been a bit of a difficult thing, I suggest. To many people it appeared to be a Populous II.
"Well, yes," admits Peter, "while we were working on that I was constantly aware of Populous, and quite often went out of our way to make sure it didn't appear too similar. There were plenty of things we could have put in Powermonger, but deliberately saved because they were earmarked for Populous II.
"Still, at the same time, that was the project where we learned much of the stuff that's made both Populous II and 'Bob' possible – the way you can have up to 2000 individual personalities operating in the same game, for instance. That's the limit for these machines, I think."
Seeing the future
Someone goes and makes some coffee, and I'm about to put mine down on this nice flat, black surface next to Peter's desk when I realise what it is. It's a CDTV. What's that doing there then, Peter?
"Commodore sent us one – it's nice to be thought of, but unfortunately there are no instructions to go with it, and the little carriage thing to take the actual CDs appears to be missing, so we can't actually do much with it. It's nice to have though."
This seems like an obvious link to getting an opinion on whether CDTV is actually a good idea or not, and being an obvious sort of person I take it. So, erm, what do you think of CDTV, Peter?
"I think the concept's great – to have a computer inside something that looks like a video recorder is a Good Idea. The problem with computers is that they look a mess – they've got all these horrible wires everywhere. The problem with CDTV, on the other hand, is one of timing. If it was released a year ago, it'd be brilliant, but as it is lots of other people are already making exactly the same thing – I believe Tandy are, for instance – and theirs will be cheaper and potentially more powerful.
"What Commodore failed to do was get sample machines out to programming houses a good year or six months before release. If you remember when the ST and Amiga came out it was a few bits of (at the time) stunning software that sold the computers, and Commodore aren't going to have that this time."
Spilling secrets
The drive home looms. Painfully aware that I haven't got Peter to admit any big secrets about Bullfrog (I still haven't the faintest idea what their secret project is – "it may even be another platform game," he teases at one point) or say anything ridiculously controversial, I try and come up with a good parting shot. I can't think of one though, so instead we go with: What's the secret of great games then, Peter?
"Playtesting."
Oh great, it's a one word answer. Erm, can you expand upon that at all?
"One of the problems with trying to come up with original ideas for games is that there's always the risk that you'll get halfway through the project and find out that it just isn't working. The other problem is that they take a long time anyway – when you add the proper amount of playtesting they take an awful long time. Often products are forced out before they've had a sufficient amount of time spent on just checking if they work for the player, and that's where things can really go wrong.
"It was only by playing Populous again and again that we could make it as good as it was, and actually playing the thing is proving to be one of the most important parts of the development of Populous II."
But surely that's not half as important as actually having the programming skills to start with?
"Programming isn't that hard – I could teach anyone to program in two weeks, and the way we work at Bullfrog is we'd rather take on young enthusiastic people and train them up than take on experienced programmers. It's keeping your ideas and enthusiasm for a project flowing that's the tricky part. It's only by working in a team that you can do that – it's almost impossible on your own. The only way you make a game good is by playing it, getting other people to play it, and enjoying it yourself."
So that's the secret?
"Yes. In the future I expect each project to take five years, not one or so, and for half that time to be spent playtesting. That's the way games will get better – I think it's at least as important as people having original ideas."
I'm thinking about that as we leave, and I'm sure he's right. Having said that though, you just have to look at the games Bullfrog is producing to see that there's a wealth of new ideas here – something so few people seem to be concentrating on these days – and that's what makes what Bullfrog are doing really exciting.
If there's anybody out there currently developing this many projects that could truly be said to be different – and beyond being different that actually look like they'll work – I'd like to see them. Sad to say, I'd be very surprised if there are.
Populous II, Bob and Creation
During their visit to Bullfrog, Amiga Power took a look at the games under development back in 1991. Here's what they discovered about the Populous sequel, along with 'Bob' (which eventually became another massive name Bullfrog game – if, after reading the piece below you still can't guess what, we shall reveal all), and Creation…
Populous II
This is the big one, I guess, the one that everybody's been wondering about.
So, Peter, how's it different to the first Populous?
To a large extent it's just a case of fixing all the things we thought were wrong, or at least could have been improved, in the first one. The gameplay is basically the same – except for one major difference which I'm not going into at the moment – but there are lots of effects in here that you didn't get in Populous.
There are about 40 new ones in fact – some of which are brand new, some of which we had in early versions of the first game but dropped somewhere along the line. These include columns of fire, plagues and pestilence, whirlpools, tidal waves, water spouts and so on. Every religious type disaster we can think of we've done in graphic, animated detail. There's even the parting of the Red Sea in there! Not all the effects will be destructive however – you'll be able to fertilise your land so that it produces food faster, which you couldn't do in the first game.
What's the thinking behind adding all this stuff?
We're hoping to make it a bit more hectic than the first Populous, more visual and much more of an action game. The effects will play a more important part in the sequence of events – to help with that we've got the basic display working eight times faster than the first game, for instance.
You'll see whirlwinds picking people up and throwing them about – each time an effect is used it will have a consequence, and in this case it'd be that the people spread out faster, because they've been thrown around by the whirlwind.
We'll have it possible to change the land to channel these natural disasters too – columns of fire will always try to seek high land for instance, so if you build the ground up you can actually turn it round and direct it back at your enemy!
One thing we've aimed for is having an unpredictability about everything – when you cast an effect, you'll never be sure quite what it will do. It could damage your own town, for instance. We're hoping to have hundreds of frames of specialist animation in here, to make it all as visual as possible.
Looking at what you've got so far, the towns look a lot more impressive.
Yes, we've set it in a single time period this time – ancient Greece, so you presumably play one of the Greek gods – and have spent a lot more time on the different buildings and so on. We'll have towns joining up to make major combinations and all sorts – the more mature your city, the stronger you get.
On a normal Populous it would take half an hour to do what it'd take you five minutes with this one. The possibilities seem endless – we could do Celtic or Norse data disks for it, for instance.
The layout of the game hasn't changed all that much, though the book seems to have gone.
The view point was so original we've found it difficult to change it too much, to be honest. You can't have any display areas on the top right of the screen, because when you build the land up high it'd totally cover them up. Gary Carr, the graphic artist on this new one, eventually copied the view we've gone for from the box artwork of the original Populous, rather than from the game itself.
Bob (Higher Functions)
When I first heard of this I thought 'Bob' must be the name of some cute little platform game character, perhaps like the chappie in Flood – but no, it is, in fact, merely a working title, something that can be typed nice and easily on your standard keyboard. In fact, there's not much that's cute about this game at all.
Actually, it's the same story with 'little.' There's not much that's little about it either. 'Bob' could quite easily be the best thing Bullfrog have ever done – all the more remarkable when you think it's being written by 20-year-old Sean Cooper, the chap who did the bulk of Flood and was a mere trainee a short while ago.
Okay then Sean, tell me about 'Bob'.
I actually prefer the other title we have for it at the moment – Higher Functions. It says more about the game.
The idea is that we're someway into the future. You play the head of a large corporation, and it's your task to use fair means or foul to become the top company in the world. It's an extension of the way things are in Populous, I guess – you don't ever get directly involved in the action yourself, but control lots of little people from afar.
What we've done on this one is we've come closer in on everything – it's still a 3D isometric design, but instead of the viewpoint being as if you were standing on a hill quite a way from the action, here you're standing maybe on the top of a large building. You're that much closer to the action.
The whole game scrolls, doesn't it?
That's right – in all directions. We've got a massive map of a city in here, and we've got it acting as much as possible like a real one. There are little cars driving around the roads, people walking about and so on, as well as an airport, monorail trains and so on. It's a living, breathing city, and one that operates to a realistic time scale. You'll get lots more traffic around at 9:00 in the morning and 5:00 at night, for instance.
The background world seems very impressive, but how does the game actually work?
When I said we've come in tighter on things, that applies to the characters you control too. Instead of manipulating whole societies, here you control just four characters. They're cyborgs created by your corporation, and they're your agents in the game. Don't treat them as robots though – they have their own personalities, and if you're not careful will run off and do their own thing rather than follow your orders.
To control them you stimulate their brains to produce more chemicals – sensory fluid to make them more aware, adrenaline to make them stronger and initiative to allow them to make their own decisions.
There's a danger to all this though – give them too much initiative and their loyalty will go. They'll just run away. Even with a low initiative level they react to their environment – if you tell one to stand in the middle of the road, he'll run off when a car looks likely to knock him down. They're not stupid.
And the missions you have to accomplish?
They're sort of secret agent/dirty business sort of things. One job may be to kill a journalist – ha ha, that's Peter's favourite! – who's going to write something bad about your corporation and so send your stock values plummeting.
A lot of the game is to do with earning money for your corporation – these cyborgs cost a lot, and the more money you make, the more you can spend on improving them, repairing them or making them more specific to one task. You can build one man up to be more technically minded, for instance. We hope to have an option where four people with linked machines could control a man each, which would be fun.
What you've got to remember is that everything's as real-world as possible – you can't be caught doing anything bad because that would damage your company.
So what stage is it at at the moment?
We've got all the basics there, but we've not decided on how all the missions or maps will work yet. We're thinking in terms of taking some bits outside of the city – perhaps into a jungle, or out onto oil rigs, ships and the like. Then there's fitting it all into half a meg, of course, but that's another problem.
[TechRadar Note: 'Bob' or Higher Functions eventually became a little known game called Syndicate which was released in 1993, if you didn't already guess.]
Creation
Creation (being worked on by programmer Glenn Corpes) is a lot further off than the other projects – one for well into next year. The basic idea is that you're messing about with creating different life forms to survive in different circumstances. It's almost an anti-God sim – it's evolution that holds sway here.
How does that work then? Well, say you have a giraffe over here on the left hand side of the screen, eating leaves and so on, while over on the right there's a large but attractive elephant.
The giraffe might reckon that having a nose that long would prove very useful for those tricky to reach higher branches, while the elephant's rather jealous of the giraffe's long neck for similar reasons. So they mate (don't worry! You won't be able to see them humping on screen!) and you get a girelephant or whatever, with a long neck and a long nose.
The idea is that you can break animals down into their constituent parts and the game is that you've got to try and create the ultimate life form – like man, say, or perhaps like ants – which can survive more or less anything.
You have to admit, this is a bit of a tricky one to get your mind around. Can you give us an example of how the game will actually work?
Okay, well say you have some giant flesh-eating 'Trisaurus Rex' creatures in this bit of land over on the top right of the map, and lots of fluffy bunny rabbits down in the bottom left. All is fine and dandy, until the game throws some changes in weather at you which send the Trisaurus Rex population down into the southwest. They're going to start eating all the bunnies, aren't they, and soon there'll be none left. What you've got to do in this instance is create a creature to drive off or eat the Trisaurus Rex population, while leaving the bunnies alone.
Here's another example: you've got a life form on an island, say a race of elks – and they're running out of food. You've got to save them, but there's nothing on the island to cross them with to create a race of swimming or flying elks, so you've got to create a life form on the mainland which will somehow contribute to save them. How about a race of beaver-type creatures who'll build a bridge, for instance?
It's all sort of like a game of consequences. As the game goes on it gets more and more complicated. Once you've created a life form there's no easy way of getting rid of it – you've got to cope with the actions of whatever it is you've come up with.
[TechRadar Note: Creation was a long time in development, and was eventually cancelled in 1997, sadly.]
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