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 aneurysm.

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.

Then there was the entertaining and potentially-litigious-hence-short-lived Game Tester Space Invaders that I probably really shouldn’t go into. Suffice to say that it was great fun for all involved save for perhaps the Game Testers…

Powermonger was released and we got to have a nice big party ‘round at Peter’s house. It was awesome – there was a bouncy castle and it was great fun. At least, it was great fun until Gary Whitta threw up all over the thing and ruined it for everyone.

Our next office was certainly a step up - the fabled environment that is the Surrey Research Park no less. No cracks in the ceiling, no filthy ashtrays and no cramped desks. Well, that last part’s not entirely true as, for a short while, my desk consisted of a shelving unit and my chair was a new toilet that Peter had bought for his house but hadn’t taken home yet.

For some reason, this era was marked by the introduction of the BB gun. In fact it was quite the arms race with people getting bigger and more powerful guns as we went on. People would keep their weapons close at hand – usually next to their keyboard – and every so often someone would reach out and pick their gun up… which meant that everyone had to pick their gun up. Next would follow our own version of the Mexican stand off at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as everyone is trying to keep an eye on everyone else to see who would make the first move. Then you’d hear the tell-tale “kerchack” as someone would arm their weapon and all hell would break loose. People would hide behind desks, tip chairs over or anything to get themselves a bit of cover from behind which to strike. The chaos would go on for a few minutes before people started running out of ammo and have to make a dash into no-man’s land to replenish their supplies. This invariably resulted in pain. It was at times like these that I fondly recalled my deal with the evening cleaning lady who’d pick up all of the pellets lying around the office and leave them in a little plastic cup on my desk for the morning…

This was the best time ever. We were making Syndicate and man were we having fun doing so. As with practically all Bullfrog games, Syndicate was created as a multiplayer game first. The idea is to get something that everyone can play quickly then work out why it was fun and try to get the AI opponent to do that sort of thing. It’s a pretty sound policy and one that modern developers shouldn’t overlook. Anyhow, Sean and I would get our friends in of an evening and we’d stay in the office, playing the game. After each game we’d have a bit of a bitch about things we didn’t like or an enthusiastic “wouldn’t it be cool if…” session and then Sean would bang out a new version with those changes in for us all to play again. We’d repeat this sequence quite often until someone would realise that it was, in fact, light again outside and we’d been there all night. Okay, so it was hardly the most socially enriching period of my life but it really was good fun.