12/16/2023 0 Comments Syphoner windows![]() ![]() A lot of games these days are going for a dark, gritty, monochromatic look, but the games I remember playing in the late 1990s were all pretty colorful and weren’t all that realistic. PSB: Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel? ![]() This kind of thing may be common now, but back then it was still all pretty new. Things players had never before experienced. Players seemed to really appreciate doing something new - sneaking around, fighting terrorists while dodging subway cars, shooting a taser halfway down a city block and making a terrorist burst into flame. I think we sold over a million units that first year. We didn’t know we had something special until after we shipped and sales took off like crazy, surpassing everyone’s expectations. Our team ended up working in crunch mode for about a year as we tried to get the game up to everyone’s standards. Our producer at 989, Connie Booth, and her boss Kelly Flock, were great though showing great faith in this new “spy genre” game. The first Syphon Filter went through a few rough patches and came close to being canceled several times as we missed deadlines, revamped mechanics, swapped levels around, changed the story, and generally tried to figure out what the heck we were doing. None of us knew anything about making realistic shooters set in a spy world. Most of the team had zero experience making this kind of game: The guys at Eidetic had just made Bubsy 3D, so they had some experience with doing a third-person action game, but Bubsy was a cartoon platformer so it wasn’t much help I was brought on after the first Syphon Filter prototype was underway (a simple shooting segment in a subway), but my experience to that point was directing strategy games like MissionForce: Cyberstorm and art directing games like Sega CD’s Bouncers. There were no, or few, games that we could draw on for inspiration. It was a hard project in terms of development, for a lot of reasons. “Syphon Filter went through a few rough patches and came close to being canceled several times” PSB: Did you know you were working on something special? What were your creative conditions as you worked on it – uncertainty, confidence, terror? Our lead designer back then was pretty heavily influenced by Nintendo’s GoldenEye, which was probably the closest you could come to finding a game like Syphon in those days. Our goal was to make the player feel like a super spy. From the beginning it was to be a “stealth action” game (in the days before there was such a genre) that focused heavily on weapons, gadgets and stealth. there was no plot, no character, and no story, just an idea for settings, mechanics and gameplay. The idea originally came from a producer at Sony’s (then) 989 Studios who had written a one page synopsis that he called “Syphon Filter” which had zero meaning, i.e. We had been in development for quite a while before we had even heard of it. John Garvin, Creative Director at Bend Studio: Metal Gear Solid actually had nothing to do with the genesis of Syphon Filter. PlayStation.Blog: What was the original base concept for the game? Was it in any way a response to Metal Gear Solid, or did the idea develop in a relative vacuum? Syphon Filter’s high-stakes story was also a sign of things to come in videogame design, merging contemporary themes (programmable viruses, shadowy terrorist networks) with a globe-trotting super spy in protagonist Gabe Logan.Īs part of PlayStation.Blog’s ongoing Behind the Classics series, we reached out to Bend Studio Creative Director John Garvin to learn more about the inspirations for this PSone classic. Enemies ducked for cover behind objects, an array of memorable gadgets gave players more combat choice, and headshots dropped most combatants instantly. Syphon Filter veered closer to the action-adventure end of this spectrum, though it too left a distinct mark on the genre with its more realistic approach to combat. A more realistic, open-ended philosophy towards combat soon spread through the action genre, permanently impacting the development of artificial intelligence, level design, and narrative - ultimately paving the way for everything from Sly Cooper to Assassin’s Creed. It’s easy to forget that “tactical espionage action” is a relatively recent innovation in the videogame medium, with trailblazers like Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter emerging in the late ’90s to great acclaim and even greater influence.
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