Alex Trowers worked alongside Peter Molyneux at Bullfrog from the early days developing Syndicate through to the takeover by EA. In part 1 of a 2 part feature, Alex looks back at life at Bullfrog.
Our story begins last century. 1990, to be precise. A young lad leaves school with nary a clue about what he will do with his life. Something to do with computers perhaps. Or cartoons. Ooh, or spaceships! Spaceships and dinosaurs! Ahem.
Through a series of highly improbable (and entirely inadvisable) events, he finds himself at a young computer games developer called Bullfrog Productions Ltd.
At this point, Bullfrog consisted of 8 people – Peter (thinning on top, used to stand cigarette butts on people’s keyboards), Les (mysterious being in charge of paycheques, owned half of Guildford), Glenn (hippy coder / artist, huge ghettoblaster), Kevin (IT type, wore shades indoors), Sean (coder, model), Gary (artist, punk, industry veteran), Simon (artist, er…) and myself (fresh-faced youngster). We were in a tatty office above a Hi-Fi shop on what would later become Guildford’s infamous “strip”. The office was split over 3 floors – Les had a small office at the bottom, Simon had a much larger one the next floor up and everyone else crammed into the top floor. Office space was at a premium and chairbacks clashed on a regular basis. Sean and Glenn in particular would occasionally come to blows over their shared space whilst I had Peter’s back and the fish for company. My first desk was a piece of wood with holes in, balanced precariously by the fishtank. A Health and Safety department would have had an aneurism.
Bullfrog had had a couple of titles released beforehand but it was obviously Populous that plonked them squarely on the map. As with many big titles, there are tons of myths and legends associated with its conception and development but that’s for other people to ratify. Suffice to say that, thanks to Populous, Bullfrog was doing “okay”.
After Populous came Flood, which was predominantly used to teach Sean how to program. As I joined, work was already underway on Warmonger – a strategy game about bending the population to your will and waging war against a bunch of other people with similar ideas.
My duties on the project were to test the game, design the levels and generally fetch things from the local Bejam (as a mum would do before Iceland) as and when required. Then there were the trips to the petshop when journalists came over so that the Piranha’s would have something to eat and the journos something to entertain themselves.
I think one of my fondest memories from this office was the Joystick-In-Space episode. Zero magazine used to run a Highest Joystick feature that had readers send in photos of joysticks in particularly high places. We took it upon ourselves to fake sending a joystick into space thereby Winning and proving ourselves Kings Of Everything. The feat was accomplished by taping our intrepid ‘stick to a big, cardboard tube, climbing out onto the roof and taking a few photos up against the sky. Then, thanks to a judicious application of black paint (Photoshop wouldn’t be invented for years…), the illusion was complete.
190 days ago
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The second part of Alex’s feature will be posted next week.