Jeff Gamon, an executive producer at EA Partners, confesses that he didn’t learn the etymology of Syndicate’s exotic-sounding codename until just recently. “The name Project RedLime came from the first page of the rough draft of the script,” he says. “A side character was heard on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor saying: ‘Sell RedLimes at 157’. And that’s it. The name stuck.”
He is happier to call RedLime by its real name – Syndicate – a reboot of Bullfrog’s 1993 isometric tactical shooter. A game Gamon loves. Critics praised the original Syndicate for its graphic depictions of violence and novel sci-fi premise: in the future, big business rules, and agents – controlled via satellite by these ‘syndicates’ – disrupt the competition with violence.
What better time than now, with growing discontent with Wall Street and The City, to produce a bloody, anti-corporate shooter? But the reality is that EA’s Syndicate reboot has been a long time coming. Leaked concept art pins the idea’s genesis to as early as 2005.
“I’ve been at EA UK for 15 years now,” Gamon says. “The people who made Syndicate were here when I joined. There’s always been, within EA UK, a desire to bring Syndicate back. It’s always been loved. It’s classic.”
What EA needed most was to meet the right developer, a team willing to partner in Syndicate’s creation (as Gamon notes, ‘partner’ is the operative word in EA Partners). The publisher fielded a number of pitches, but nothing materialised.
In 2007, developer Starbreeze Studios was the new pretty girl in class. During the mid-2000s, the Swedish developer carved its own niche, adapting B-grade properties like The Chronicles Of Riddick and The Darkness into slick firstperson shooters.
Both Riddick and The Darkness eschew the habits of traditional adaptations. Where competitors venerate their source material, Starbreeze deviates wildly, modifying the plot and art it’s been provided as it sees fit. It makes room for brutal melee moves, a mechanic that has quickly become its hallmark. The results are ambitious, unusual and critically admired.
EA wasn’t the only publisher courting the hot developer at this time. According to a June 2011 profile on 1UP.com, it was during the tail-end of The Darkness’s development cycle that Starbreeze signed a contract with publisher Vivendi (which would later merge with Activision) to create two games: the first an expanded remake of Riddick, and the second a new IP entitled Polaris.
Polaris never made it out of the gate, failing to gel as a marketable game, so the developer and publisher agreed to a compromise. Starbreeze would focus on improving and expanding the Riddick game. This it did, adding an entire new campaign and subtitle, Assault On Dark Athena.
However, even with the bonus content, the game was still a last-gen game remade for a current-gen console. Though Assault On Dark Athena received positive reviews, it only managed to sell 100,000 copies in North America during its first month on sale.
EA announced its partnership with Starbreeze in 2008, a year before the remake’s flop. The partnership echoed the Vivendi contract in that once again Starbreeze would make two games. The first would be based on Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne franchise, and the second, a reboot of one of EA’s most acclaimed classic franchises. EA called it Project RedLime.
As Gamon describes it, “[EA and Starbreeze] kind of came together as a marriage.” The honeymoon was short-lived, however. In September 2008 the global economy fell into a recession, and EA’s stock declined. Wedbush-Morgan analyst Michael Pachter had this to say in a December 2008 note to investors: “With the stock hovering near a seven-year low, management continued its recent history of disappointment. We are no longer confident that EA is taking the steps necessary to achieve its FY:11 goals of $6 billion in revenue and $1.5 billion in operating profit.”
Starbreeze’s problem was the polar opposite. It was growing too fast. The company currently has around 80 employees, along with the aegis of EA Partners, a smattering of co-workers that visit on a weekly basis.
Some employees were yearning for the way things used to be, the Starbreeze that forged the first iteration of Riddick. In 2009, seven senior employees, including Starbreeze founder Magnus Högdahl, left the company to form MachineGames, also based in Sweden.
In February 2010, EA announced plans to focus more resources on internally developed titles. According to COO John Schappert during an analyst conference call: “While we have great relationships with our partners, we are modelling a reduction in our distribution business as we concentrate on higher-margin EA-owned titles and digital initiatives.”
A number of EA Partners’ games were cancelled over the months that followed, including Starbreeze’s Jason Bourne adaptation. The decision was made by EA. The deal again calls to mind the Vivendi contract; the cancellation of one game, the renewed focus on another.
In November 2010, Bethesda Softworks acquired MachineGames, which had recently taken on at least 15 more former Starbreeze employees. And in February 2011, CEO Johan Kristiansson left Starbreeze to take a job outside of the videogame industry entirely.
As these staff members made their exits, the company trod onward. Gamon confirms that around Kristiansson’s departure the team began prepping a playable demo, a crucial step towards introducing Syndicate to the public. Tentatively, the developer and publisher planned to pull back the curtain on what was still publicly being called Project RedLime at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference in March 2011. That plan fell through, as did plans to announce the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June and Gamescom in August.
“Time adds up, I guess,” Gamon says in reference to the delays.