Bullfrog: God Games, Dungeon Keepers and the Molyneux Years

Bullfrog is the most inventive studio most people have half-forgotten. Peter Molyneux and Les Edgar founded it in Guildford in 1987, and across a single golden decade it kept inventing whole genres and then wandering off to invent another. It made you a god shaping the land in Populous. It made you the villain building a dungeon in Dungeon Keeper. It made you a corporation running a squad of cyborgs in Syndicate, and a tycoon building a theme park, a hospital, a flying carpet. No studio of its era took more strange, brilliant swings.

This is the whole run: the god games, the management sims, the cyberpunk of Syndicate, and the deranged joy of playing the bad guy. Here is the map.

Playing god, and playing the villain

Bullfrog's genius was point of view. Most games put you inside the world as a hero. Bullfrog kept pulling the camera back and handing you stranger roles: the god above the clouds, the corporation behind the agents, the dungeon lord waiting for heroes to walk into your traps. Molyneux chased grand, systemic ideas and usually landed them, and the studio's run of originality between 1989 and 1999 is one of the best in British games.