Bullfrog After Populous
filfre.net
filfre.net
I remember Bullfrog's programming tutorials in Amiga format [0]. If that was all you had (it was all i had) then it wasn't enough to let you write your own games or learn enough to get a job.
I got my parents to buy me a book on 68000 assembly to go with it, only to find that the Devpac assembler from the tutorial didn't come with any of the OS include files, so I couldn't get past the second chapter. These kinds of setbacks were typical.
When I think back to those days, I loved the Amiga community and magazines, I loved the seemingly accessible, informal world of game development, but it was so damn hard to just climb the first step and learn to code if you didn't have much money.
[0] https://archive.org/details/AmigaFormatIssue039199210_201901...
I surely played thousands of hours just with these two games, over 20+ years.
A while ago I tried to get in touch with him (among other things I started a tech podcast and I wanted him as a guest), but I couldn't find any way to contact him. I messaged him on Linkedin, but never responded.
What a pity. I would have loved to ask him how was his life when he developed these two games.
Fun fact: MoM has an incredible mod, called Caster of Magic, built by this lonely Japanese developer. [1]
My all time favourite game is Alpha Centauri and I would have loved to be around to see how they designed the tech tree among other things. It still feels like an excellent sci-fi novel wrapped as a game. Wish newer games could attempt something like that. Although I have to say many times an RPG game attempts something like that, the quality of their story leaves a lot to hope for.
Darkest Dungeon is one of the newer games that has successfully created great atmosphere, similar to those older games. Yet sadly I at least got very quickly tired playing it, with dull grinding of the characters who would keep dying by random crits.
I guess also because multiplayer has become so prevalent that it's not even necessary to create great storylines anymore. People will be satisfied by the interactions they have playing other humans and its never-ending challenge by the changing metagame and such.
https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/the-alpha-centauri-s...
Another single player game which can give you a lot of fun is Shandalar. It takes place in MtG setting and is an RPG game.
I had no idea they did it for this reason. But now that you mention it, of course it make sense.
From a contstraint... One of the best features of Master of Magic. The two worlds (connected with a few towers) added a lot of strategic depth.
It was a very hard world to crack into unless you had a community around you, and I did not have such a thing in rural Alberta.
When I got a 486 + really early Linux (0.97 I believe) and an Internet connection in 1992 a whole other world opened up. The machine itself was far less interesting, but the world of development became successively more and more open and easier to get into.
In year 11 we had to organise our own work experience, and I decided I wanted to try to do mine at Bullfrog - this would have been 1991. My friend Chris and I had started fiddling around with building games using STOS and AMOS on the Atari ST and Amiga, and so I asked him if he wanted to try to get in as well.
We talked to our form tutor about it. He was very supportive, got the deputy head involved, and they let us make some phone calls (a big deal for schoolkids at the time) to try to get in touch with Bullfrog. We didn't get anywhere with Electronic Arts, their publisher at the time, who flatly refused to give us Bullfrog's contact details, but then I decided to phone up Amiga Format, explained what we were trying to do, and we ended up speaking to one of their staff writers or editors who gave us Bullfrog's number straight away.
A totally surreal experience then occurred as I rang the number for Bullfrog, asked to speak to Peter Molyneux, somebody gave him the phone and we ended up talking. After explaning to him that Chris and I were looking for work experience, I handed the phone to my form tutor who verified the whole story and, long and the short of it, Peter Molyneux was totally up for us coming on board for a couple of weeks.
Absolutely unbelievable and therefore, in my eyes, regardless of what has happened since, the guy is and will always remain a legend.
Here's where the story gets a little sad though, at least for me.
I hadn't mentioned this scheme to my parents because I thought they'd poo-poo the idea before I'd even started, and I just didn't want to deal with the argument and the discouragement. I thought it would be better to see if we could get anywhere with it, and then talk to them about it if it worked out.
So I did talk to them and, long story short, they wouldn't let me go and stay up in Guildford (I grew up in Dorset). But Chris's parents did let him go, so my final conversation with Peter Molyneux was to thank him very much for the opportunity, apologise that I couldn't come after all, but let him know that Chris was still going to come.
So at least one of us had a great time at Bullfrog, and I think it was probably the coolest piece of work experience anyone in our year group did. For my placement I was instead a teaching assistant in a local middle school, which was still pretty fun, but not as much as working at Bullfrog!
---
EDIT: I've added the below in response to a reply on this comment, but I thought worth including it here as well to round out the story because I don't want to give an unbalanced view of the situation.
This whole idea of work experience at Bullfrog was always a long shot. I grew up poor. So I was disappointed that my folks said no, but there is no way they could have afforded to pay for a couple of weeks' accommodation for me in Guildford (and I obviously didn't have the money). In my heart of hearts, I knew that all along. Really I think I just wanted to see if it could possibly work[0].
It's also worth pointing out that whilst they didn't let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.
[0] Of course, if I'd really had some hustle about me I'd have taken a more bullish approach to the setback and gone on some sort of fundraising drive.
I did something similar and contacted Future Publishing in 1997 for my secondary school work experience. Ended up commuting by train to Bath for a week and working with the editorial team of PC Review. By working they put me in a corner and had me play Little Big Adventure 2. I then also got play and review (with heavy editing) Atomic Bomberman. I still have a print copy of the issue with my name on the review. Twenty three years later and I’ve been making games professionally for fifteen years.
My other week was with a flight school at Bristol Airport which was equally fun in a different way. Lots of answering the phone and chatting to adults which as a shy boy was exhilarating and I got to go up with an IFR student in heavy cloud with perhaps the most exciting landing I’ve ever experienced.
> My other week was with a flight school at Bristol Airport which was equally fun in a different way. Lots of answering the phone and chatting to adults which as a shy boy was exhilarating and I got to go up with an IFR student in heavy cloud with perhaps the most exciting landing I’ve ever experienced.
This is a little uncanny. In the 6th form I did work experience in flight operations at a firm called FR Aviation, based out of Bournemouth International Airport (may still have been known as Hurn Airport back then). They did a lot of exercises with the Navy so I too got a flight. Mine was in a Falcon, although not the F-16 kind: it was more of a Learjet type thing - just a very small passenger jet with twin engines. Still, my first time in any kind of jet and pretty cool as I got to sit in the jumpseat between the two pilots.
I am however eternally jealous of getting a flight in a small jet.
It's also worth pointing out that whilst they didn't let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.
I do understand that your parents acted the way they did. As someone who grew up with games, I would have gone the extra mile to support the venture.
But am happy to hear that things worked out after all.
I was hunting for retro games in a charity shop in our old hometown. I didn't notice him come in but we recognised eachother pretty much straight away and had a good chat outside.
He didn't go to work for Bullfrog. In fact neither of us went into the games industry at all. But he did find his way into programming, and had spent a few years before we bumped into eachother doing a lot of fairly close to the metal work in C.
Godus could have been a great game, looked fantastic but ended up with a complete lack of purpose except fleece people via micro-transactions or sit through ad views to actually progress.
I always associate Bullfrog with Syndicate which is still up there as one of my favourite games.
To me, Bullfrog equaled Syndicate Wars, and even just that is reason enough to praise them. I never played the other games, and I'm sure they were great too.
But if you got to that stage, you had enough of a clue to go shopping about for other compilers / assemblers.
Bullfrog made some great games. My favourites were Powermonger and Dungeon Keeper. The author of article seems pretty critical of the fact that their games were procedurally generated and became rote too quickly but I personally preferred those sorts of games. Too many games nowadays are highly scripted with a story that goes exactly the way that the designer wants it to. I'm more of a fan of a game world with a few simple rules, where the gameplay is an emergent property of those rules.
But thanks for the heads up.
The single player "campaign" has a couple of very tedious cavern and maze levels though.
Especially for the lesser platforms of the time that were competing for attention, this was a lesson in frustration. At least you had magazine tutorials. All I could have done, and did, back then, was learn how to disassemble ROM routines, by FIRST writing a disassembler - in BASIC.
So yeah, they were very motivating days.
Molyneux tried to sell a game years earlier but failed so instead started a baked bean export company called Taurus Impex Limited. Commodore International mistook it for Torus, an established networking software company, and offered to provide Molyneux with ten free (still unreleased) Amiga systems. Taurus then designed a database system for the Amiga and the profits let Molyneux and Les Edgar found Bullfrog Productions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux#Early_career
[1]: https://www.filfre.net/2016/06/peter-molyneuxs-kingdom-in-a-...
I'm not following this part, and a similar comment with Magic Carpet. I completed both games and never had this feeling at the time. There's enough new stuff and variety in the missions to keep it interesting until the end.
> At bottom, Theme Park is a nasty, cynical little game, amoral if not actively immoral — a game where your concern isn’t with the happiness of your guests at all, but strictly with the amount of money you can extract from them; a profitable theme park with miserable patrons is not only possible but the only practical road to success. This is the kind of game where you over-salt the patrons’ fries to get them to buy more soda, which cups you stuff to the brim with ice to… well, you get the picture.
I just took it as silly fun as opposed to some kind of social commentary.
Magic Carpet also has the same vibe. Once you start playing against other wizards it becomes a race to get certain spells and enough power to start leeching mana until you can rain down lightning storms, meteors, and volcanoes; all the while annihilating flocks of birds, hordes of bees, lakes filled with kraken, monstrous crabs, griffins... and wyverns.
I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Some levels had enemy snipers. The last level had gauss gun enemies. That's it as far as level variety goes in that game.
(In Theme Hospital you send patients with unknown diseases to an 'auto-autopsy'. That is, you kill them, in order to learn a cure)
Complaining that a simulation of a theme park is cynical is rather missing the entire point.
edit: eMule, Bullfrog, Monkey Island, Winamp skins, is it nostalgia week on HN ? ;)
But capitalism bad!
Seriously, though, I wonder about folks who are incapable of imagining a duality of goals: both earning profit and maximizing guest happiness. It's not nasty or cynical to earn a profit if doing so involves improving the well being of others.
Similarly, people would build parks that were super dangerous, or create areas that set off chain reactions of visitors throwing up everywhere. It's a fun sandbox.
And yes, like with Rollercoaster Tycoon, one could do horrendous things; but that's less a reflection on the player's moral character as it is upon their curiousity and awareness of the lack of real harm.
What often happens, fortunately, is that they match well enough that the relative simplicity of the market system makes it a net positive. But to think that capitalism works wonders for society and customers is just silly.
Theme Park parodies this fact of life very aptly.
Capitalism has worked wonders for society; it has thus far surpassed all competing modes of wealth distribution in terms of life expectation, child mortality, literacy, and even technological development. Capitalist Democracies have performed so well it's sort of amazing.
And in this globally connected world one doesn't have to settle; those that don't favour capitalism can travel to a number of south american states and enjoy an alternative.
My sister in law has done just this, and is happily living off the land in Peru.
As for wealth distribution, what do you think the "one-percent" is all about?
On one hand, universal healthcare, because universal everything. Great!
On the other hand, factories were treated like objects of worship. Like, in the middle of a city, a huge factory is built, poluting all the air and water, thousands of people get cancer, the life expectancy in the region decreases by five or ten years, but hey, more factories = more progress. If you complain, you get arrested.
Also, the healthcare was a bit factory-like. For example, c-section at almost every childbirth, because it's more efficient that way. (Secret mandatory sterilizations after third child for minorities.)
Then, when the socialism was over, the universal healthcare remained, the factory in the middle of the city went out of business, people finally started complaining and some standards in healthcare were increased... and now we have the best of both worlds!
There's only one developed capitalist nation shirking the mantle of social responsibility, but the rest of the socialist democracies are enjoying the fruits of capitalism.
What is important, extremely important, but no one talks about - is equality of opportunity. In this regard, more than 50% of all americans will spend at least 1 year in the top 10% of all income. Compare that to most europe, where for example, the same 10 families in france in italy , after many centuries, still hold on to money and power...and never lose either.
That is a worthy goal to keep improving on. It doesn't matter how much anyone amasses - what really matters is that everyone has a fair shot at it, too.
https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
It was a very interesting company, full of brilliant people. Demis Hassabis wasn't there anymore, but Alex Evans was, and he was my demoscene programming idol at the time. I didn't hesitate to get both their autographs before going back home!
As I never was able to go to a democompo (rural west-coast Canadian upbringing), I have trouble picturing all these demoscene heroes of my youth as actual people...
Acme's 303 is one of my favourite demos of all time. Legend
It must have been amazing to intern with him!
So he called me out in the middle of a Friday all hands meeting and, well, kept his side of the deal :)
He actually just announced that he's going to take a break from working in gamedev for the first time https://twitter.com/mmalex/status/1301476401611145218
Tons more vids like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/
I remember Peter telling his team that if the game went well he'd take the whole team (around 40 people, IIRC) on a big yacht. It was all very exciting!
Peter came and chatted with me and the other tests (most of who were about 10, and friends of the kids of the other developers), and asked about my interest in programming. I told him I'd been working on a snakes like game, and he said he'd love to look at the code, which sadly I didn't have (no laptops back in those days, and I didn't bring a floppy).
I never ended up becoming a game developer. I discovered web development, and startups, and never looked back :)
Black and White... OK, yeah, I enjoyed them, but it always felt like the full experience wasn't developed. It talked the talk but never walked the walk.
then... Godus. Yeah. Good concept, I played > 50 hours on it. but it never delivered at all.
It's like the more able the hardware and software was to deliver Molyneux's vision, the less deliverable his vision was.
I don't think Molyneux would've created Populous if he had had the reputation he has today. He would, and did, create Godus instead.
That was a painful year or so. So many restarts and hopeful explorations only for it to.. never in any useful way ever give the game it promised.
A shame, as the basic mechanics were seemingly all there - I never could wrap my head around what went wrong.
The worst of it though is I now can't stand to listen to a childhood hero's bullshit.
It's ok, I still have Populous II and Syndicate on WinUAE
When I started seeing people talk about the personalities behind video game franchises, it made a lot more sense. We don't need all of your vision, just some clues.
"The area shown has lots of hills and valleys. Your first job is to raise and lower the land to make it flat."
"That's the game?"
"Just for the first few minutes."
I enjoyed it immensely building out a theme park at first, for a long time. I constantly didn't do well though and always end up pretty much bankrupting on my first park, let alone expanding to other cities.
One day I read some sort of cheat/guide that to have a profitable park, you build Duck Shoots, and make the prizes worth less than the cost for each play, and make the winning percentages 100%. I put the Duck Shoot right at the entrance of the park and build the rest of the park around it. Every guest who comes in plays the Duck Shoot first and is happy they won, and I make a profit from every guest, and everyone is happy with a balloon prize.
This was my first lesson about its immorality. Strangely, the game became less fun after that. I was able to make profitable parks and expand to other cities. Then I stopped playing; and over the years, every time I tried to pick back up the game again, I find myself going through the motions of setting up that Duck Shoot trick because it was the only way I know to make money running a park, and then I quickly lose interest after that because all the researches and stuff were just a lot of work and it was boring having the same 4 rides until researches complete. It was a little bit like real life...
I remember the launcher desktop icon would be a hut. But when you double-click it turns into the castle. So friggin cool. Just the sense of mystery behind it all.
a concept that is probably comatose in the current era
Not sure how it would work with RTS style movement or even turn based combat but being able to instantly teleport your units to where you needed them didn't make any sense to me in terms of game design.
When Peter Molyneux gave his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of Cube at the Unity3D Unite conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, I chatted him up afterwards and attempted to troll him by guessing that the big surprise in the box was a cow.
I don't think he got the point that I was trying to make an ironic reference to Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which is a parody of and social commentary on dopamine games.
I tried to explain the joke to him, and he still didn't get it. At least Ian Bogost had the self awareness to design Cow Clicker in the service of making a critical statement about game design, and the capacity of shame to be embarrassed when it was an accidental run-away success.
Unite 2012 : Keynote - Founders & Peter Molyneux (The BS starts at 1h 8m 21s -- It's been 8 years since I saw this live, and it's much worse than I remembered, especially now knowing how it turned out!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AY4fJ66xA&t=1h08m21s
>1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
>In the wake of a controversial speech by Zynga's president at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2010, Bogost developed Cow Clicker for a presentation at a New York University seminar on social gaming in July 2010. The game was created to demonstrate what Bogost felt were the most commonly abused mechanics of social games, such as the promotion of social interaction and monetization rather than the artistic aspects of the medium. As the game unexpectedly began to grow in popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming trends, such as gamification, educational apps, and alternate reality games.
>Some critics praised Cow Clicker for its dissection of the common mechanics of social network games and viewed it as a commentary on how social games affect people.
https://qz.com/34024/life-really-is-a-game-with-a-lot-of-cli...
>Life really is a game—with a lot of clicks—and then you die
>Curiosity is just the latest in a series of social experiments that rely on user interactions with seemingly no point. Of course, Zynga is the king of this phenomenon, providing games full of sticky and addictive action that encourage more clicks for the sake of clicks. Arbitrary value becomes real value, even when it’s not meant to. Just ask Ian Bogost, who created the satirical social game Cow Clicker that went on to such absurd popularity that he felt compelled to continue developing it, trapping himself in an ironic loop that refuses to end. In Cow Clicker, you literally click one cow every six hours to collect Mooney, which lets you buy other cows to click on.
I don't think it's fair to call a developer a `serial liar` when they say they are working on a great game and then fail.
Failing is commonplace.
>Feb 3, 2016: Serial over-promiser Peter Molyneux promises to stop over-promising. Designer breaks a year of self-imposed press exile with reflective interview.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/serial-over-promiser-...
He should have kept his earlier promise from a year earlier, and never spoken to the press again:
>Feb 13, 2015: Peter Molyneux interview: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again'. The veteran game designer is at the centre of a raging controversy over his new game Godus. He says he is finished with the press.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-mol...
Sure the guy was talented, but quite possibly a credit-hogging narcissist too. And an effective one.
* not counting blockquotes by you-know-who
I wouldn't outright call them lies tho, probably more like he was asking a little too much from that age technology.
Sound effect in question (104/107) is "FIRE, BALL - IMPACT AND LARGE FIRE BURST, RUMBLE" from The General Series 6000 Sound Effects Library
I always wondered how that happened. No copyright?
I've actually gone back and played the game and it's held up surprisingly well.
Long play video of the game : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EbGjm_x808
https://twitter.com/petermolydeux
https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/1287527427355410439
@PeterMolydeux: Imagine a dating sim where you answer questions about yourself but then find you’re playing as the love interest. You discover that ‘you’ are actually an amazing and wonderful person and fall in love with yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molydeux
Peter Molydeux is a Twitter account presented as a parody of the game designer Peter Molyneux. Created by game artist Adam Capone in 2009, it posts audacious game design ideas in the style of Molyneux. The account presents Molyneux as a tragicomic character with unrelenting, creative ideas that are continually received by an apathetic audience. Over time, the account evolved from a Molyneux-based persona into a list of potential game concepts. A common theme of the tweets is the untapped potential of emotional game experiences. Molyneux came to appreciate the parody, and has since met Capone in person.
I imagined him going through the supermarket with a digital recorder and coming up with ideas while shopping ... And over dinner, he's rearranging his peas and saying. 'Is this giving me a game idea?' And his wife is saying, 'Shut up, Peter. Just eat your food.' –Capone (Molydeux) on Molyneux
Some of the parody account's proposals include:
A racing game in which the player controls the road instead of the vehicle
A Kinect game in which the player must cry to open a gate
An eight-person online multiplayer game in which each player controls one leg of an octopus
The final segment of a war game, in which the player pauses in silence at the tombstone of each KIA recruit
A 3D adventure game in which the amnesiac player awakens in a museum with a room dedicated to each year of the character's life
The player holds a radioactive baby, which acts as a torch in a dark environment; rocking the baby increases its luminescence
The player pretends to be blind and must walk into objects to avoid suspicion
A bear must hug people in order to live, but crushes the people he hugs
A pigeon carries sentimental objects to businessmen to persuade them not to kill themselves
A divorced father sneaks into his family house to help with chores without alerting them
When the player kills henchmen in one game, the player sees recurring images of those henchmen's crying children in an unrelated sports video game
A version of Street Fighter in which streets fight other streets
While listening to a radio broadcast about Mongolia, I had an idea for a game. Mongolians have many horse races, and they always reward the horse. Also, Mongolian legends often pay more attention to what the horse did (rather than the rider). Isn't it a fun idea for a game? Medieval setting, you fight other knights and armed men, except you play as the horse and not the rider. The rider is more like an upgrade and AI-controlled.
This could be fun. Depends on the controls and lag. Offline mode please!
Powerhoof has some great pixel art adventure games too.
We may have Final Fantasy 15 and The Last Guardian, but who cares when mankind's greatest achievement is still nowhere to be found?
Molyneux rolled big dice and often lost. When he won, though, he won big.
If someone would please make Empire Earth III happen, it would be greatly appreciated.
Wonder what similar / modern current RTS would be close?
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions#/media/...
Its a 1v1 Wizard game where you spend the early game summoning creatures, exploring the map and picking up ingredients before brewing potions and fighting your enemy before the map explodes around you.
Check out chaos reborn on steam for a reasonable modern update.
"Micro piglets stalk your dungeon, beware!"
It seems like the perfect interface for it, and I can't understand why there wouldn't be a market for it.
Unfortunately, some of us were caught up in Molyneaux's breathless inflatory hype and thought it was going to be Populous X.
- ed
>The Game Designer Who Promised to Make a Man God. It's not going so well.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nze9gg/the-game-designer-...
>The God who Peter Molyneux forgot. For Curiosity winner Bryan Henderson, the prize inside the cube has been anything but life-changing.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who-pe...
>The god who Peter Molyneux forgot wants his cut of a new game bundle to go to charity instead. "It felt very bizarre to me."
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-26-bryan-henderso...
>The Man Who Promised Too Much
https://kotaku.com/the-man-who-promised-too-much-1537352493
>Serial over-promiser Peter Molyneux promises to stop over-promising. Designer breaks a year of self-imposed press exile with reflective interview.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/serial-over-promiser-...
>Peter Molyneux's God Game Is Looking Like Yet Another Disappointment
https://www.wired.com/2015/02/molyneux-godus-kickstarter/
>Peter Molyneux interview: 'It's over, I will not speak to the press again'. The veteran game designer is at the centre of a raging controversy over his new game Godus. He says he is finished with the press.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-mol...
>The Lesson of Peter Molyneux. “Sooner or later the bullshit has to stop.”
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
>Why Peter Molyneux's Godus is Such a Disaster
https://www.techspot.com/article/964-peter-molyneux-godus-di...
I haven't picked up PC Gamer in a while, but I remember a few years back, all the "Sim" and "Tycoon" type games were under the genre: Management