The Syndicate Games That Never Were

Syndicate fans, this one’s for you. After posting a little something on former Bullfrog boss Peter Molyneux’s love of the series, we were contacted by a former Bullfrog and EA UK employee. This guy was nice enough to let us know that a new Syndicate game wouldn’t be anything new. Indeed, over the years he says there have been “quite a number of attempts to get a new Syndicate game into production”.

He says the first was another PC title, begun as soon as Dungeon Keeper 2 was wound up, though ultimately it went nowhere. There would later be several more attempts, none lasting more than a “few months”, though one iteration did get a little deeper into production than the rest: a PS2 version, which was worked on for around a year. This would have featured a “free-roaming multi-tiered city”, and would have been home to three factions: the Syndicates, a rebel group called the Freemen and the mysterious Hybrid.

While this and every other Syndicate project died in the water at EA, some remnants of them live on: our man points us towards the blog/portfolio of another former Bullfrog/EA UK employee Mike Man, who’s got some concept art for the PS2 title hosted on his site. Would certainly have been a different game to the Bullfrog Syndicate you grew up with, as you can see below.