Actually, Cooper tells us, Syndicate once had eight on-screen charges for players to control. With all but himself and Trowers apparently finding this large number of heavily armed cyborg agents unwieldy, the decision to reduce the number of agents was to prove pivotal. "The eight players versus the four... that was a big transition," Cooper admits. "It didn't feel that good with eight, but we reduced it to four and, all of a sudden, it really worked. And you could set them up differently - you didn't really have time to do that with eight."
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.
