There’s been a ”core of people” trying to get Syndicate up and running again, but they ”never set out to ‘remake’” the classic IP - it was about bringing it back ”to a new audience.”
EA ”certainly didn’t set out to upset” the original fanbase, of which Jeff Gamon counts himself. Times have changed since Syndicate’s days in 1993 on PC, and this new entry has to reflect that.
”…we’ve certainly been trying to get it made for ages, so a lot of the people who were instrumental in getting this project off the ground have been at EA UK for a long time, myself included,” Syndicate executive producer Jeff Gamon tells us in our interview. The Darkness developer Starbreeze Studio is behind the new age revival.
”There’s always been a core of people there who’ve been trying to find a way to make this happen, and some of us ended up in EA Partners, and we had this opportunity to work with Starbreeze, who have a history of taking IP and doing more than just converting it to a videogame space,” he stated.
”They capture the spirit and the essence of that IP and make a really high-quality and credible game. So they were the ideal partners for us, and we had these people over at EA Partners going “Syndicate! Syndicate!” and the planets aligned and here we are.” The original game was an isometric real-time strategy affair, not a shooter.
”Well we certainly didn’t set out to upset any of the original fanbase, I myself am one of those, but at the same time we never set out to ‘remake’ Syndicate, this whole endeavour was about bringing Syndicate back to a new audience. I mean it’s been nearly twenty years - 1993 is when the first one came out - audiences, platforms and what we can do with technology has changed a lot,” explained Gamon.
”We always set out to bring back Syndicate with all the things that made the original so classic, like the brutal world, cyber-punk, brutal weaponry… you know chip in your head. What did we want to be? Well the agents on the ground made sense and so the first-person shooter seemed to fit this.” We play a EuroCorp agent with a state-of-the-art chip.
”…in terms of being an agent, that’s where we wanted to take it but we didn’t want to remake the original, we wanted to do something different within that world, but one that would still be familiar,” he continued. ”The scope of bringing back Syndicate as a franchise is huge, with a lot of options.”
Syndicate releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC February 21st in the US, 24th in Europe. Check out our full interview with Jeff Gamon, and be sure to watch the lengthy gameplay walkthrough below, narrated by Gamon himself.
