On February 16th, 1999 Eidetic, Inc., now known as Bend Studio, would release Syphon Filter: a super-spy shooter that blended stealth mechanics alongside a variety of weaponry and a revolutionary targeting system that spawned five additional titles and a core trilogy still talked about to this day. The small team’s transition from much-maligned 3D platformer Bubsy 3D to multi-million copy selling Greatest Hits entry (alongside one of my favorite games of all time) was anything but easy. I got to virtually sit down with designer Richard Ham and artist/writer John Garvin to discuss how 989 Studios approached Eidetic, nailing the feel of the game, what they did when the game finally went Gold, and everything in between. Many thanks to John and Richard for their time!

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For the uninformed, the story of how Syphon Filter came to be is quite an interesting one. Bend Studio, at the time known as Eidetic, Inc., was approached by 989 Studios with nothing but a one page elevator pitch for a stealth-action game. Eidetic had zero prior genre experience, but they possessed the technology and game engine to put faith into creating what was envisioned. What goes through the collective mind of a studio tasked with making something they’ve never made before, especially at such a tonal and genre shift with Eidetic’s previous titles being puzzle games and platformers?

Richard Ham: It’s funny because Bubsy 3D at the time was one of the first games to strive for High Definition quality on Playstation which contributed to a lot of the shortcomings that ended up making the game the “Worst of All Time.” But seeing what the engine was capable of once the team pulled back from HD quality, which couldn’t really be appreciated outside of plugging in and playing your Playstation through a computer monitor, and providing a “Bubsy 4” demo of sorts to showrooms is what laid the foundations to how Syphon Filter came to be.

John Garvin: When I started work at the studio they already had a rough demo up and running: Gabe Logan running around the track area of a large urban subway station shooting bad guys. While it was rough, Richard already had the basic ideas about the game mechanics worked out: the third-person camera, the way the character would be controlled, target lock and damage and health. One interesting note is that the game design was initially, “one hit and you’re dead,” i.e. no health bar at all. We played it that way for a long while and could see his vision and why he wanted it to be that way: it made all the “pop and shoot from cover” mechanics really visceral – you REALLY did not want to get shot. In the end, though, he decided, correctly I think, to go with a more traditional health bar and healing mechanics. One-shot deaths were just too stressful to be fun.

Also, in that one page pitch it describes what, by name, Gabe Logan is (not really “who” because it focused mostly on his job and today Gabe is the only character I did not create from scratch), the basic premise, the tone, etc. Really, the heart of what Syphon, as a GAME, is all contained in that one-page pitch. It was written by an AP named David Gracia for his producer, Connie Booth. Connie was a huge fan of espionage fiction and I think the franchise was kind of her baby from the start.

Gabriel Logan, Lian Xing, and other characters are still considered iconic among the Playstation’s back catalog of protagonists. What type of “feel” were you and your team going for when building the foundations of The Agency and their antagonistic rivals in PharCom, Jonathan Phagan, and Erich Rhoemer?

JG: A lot of the work I did back then, in terms of writing and storytelling, was just intuitive. While I have a Masters in English and had done a fair amount of writing – which is probably how I got the Syphon writing gig at Eidetic in the first place – I hadn’t done a lot of creative writing. At Dynamix I had written the short cartoons for Bouncers and I remember thinking in terms of “making it visual” – telling the story with animation and setting and action as much as dialogue. And working on Cyberstorm, I remember wanting to come up with new and interesting ideas for world building: The “HercForce” universe was in place but there wasn’t a lot of material on the pilots, so I came up with “Bioderms” – genetically mutated humans and animals that could be programmed to pilot the Hercs. But I also wanted to keep it “realistic”; as a huge sci-fi fan, I believed in extrapolating what’s possible today, into what COULD be possible in the future. All three of these things – a desire for visual storytelling, interesting and surprising world building, and extrapolated realism – made their way into Syphon Filter.

RH: It was definitely much more light-hearted at first, but when Mike Berlin (co-founder of Eidetic) left the company and ultimately writing duties to John, John was very very passionate about storytelling. At the time he was a huge fan of the X-Files, I mean everybody was a huge fan of the X-Files at the time, so he really made a push for that “creepy forces plotting in dark rooms” feel. We had to pull from inspirations from all over into actually putting it together because there was little to no budget at the time in the industry so storytelling was not a high priority in games at all.

JG: I think I was far more influenced by my reading and films than I was other games. As for the specific characters and organizations: I was also heavily influenced by the Bond films, who also had no shortage of evil organizations bent of world domination. Again, keep in mind that Metal Gear and the Clancy games had not come out yet, so the first Syphon Filter was developed at the same time. Some critics give us credit for co-inventing the stealth-action genre of games, which I guess might be true.

One thing I personally enjoyed about Syphon Filter was how engaging the plot was and how it unapologetically took time to be a “thinking man’s” story. On several occasions I’ve gone back to watch the cutscenes on YouTube and relished the care and interest to make an intriguing plot and provide the “why” for Gabe’s trials and tribulations instead of just giving him a gun and letting him loose on terrorists. The debriefings within The Agency were some of my favorites because it gave you a real “fly on the wall” introduction as to what you were about to play. Going through the plot of the original title, what point got you most excited to dive in and show off what was being made?

JG: I really put a lot of effort into “making everything make sense.” I can’t tell you how many times, in the early days, I had to fight the “it’s just a game” battle, where if it was FUN it went in, regardless of whether it made sense or not. Again, thankfully, Ham and I were on the same page back then. Games like GoldenEye had proven that you can be completely realistic and still be FUN.

RH: John and I agreed that the drive for the game was to make Syphon Filter the video game equivalent of a John Woo Hong Kong action flick with all the melodrama and high stakes. I was very big into storytelling too and so it was great to have a partner like John who cared about it just as much as me and who was capable of putting it all together in record time.

JG: As far as plot goes, it was built on a LOT of intuition. I just wanted things to make sense and not jump around. If we’re going to go from a park in DC to a cathedral in Eastern Europe, there had to be a REASON for it, and not just because it looked like a cool place to go!

RH: For the longest time I think Washington Park was the first level of the game. I know I certainly made John’s life miserable because it was his responsibility to come up with a storyline that made sense but I was constantly tweaking not just gameplay of the game but the actual order of levels!

JG: I actually built about half the levels in the first Syphon myself as my background was art and I was a 3D Max “master” at the time. So I built and textured that cathedral myself, without really having ANY idea how it would fit into the story. “Artist JG” could get “Writer JG” into trouble like that all the time. 😊

Most of the voice actors were first timers, with the late Doug Boyd being one of the only main voice actors to continue a voice acting career. What was the process in selecting those actors and what was the experience of working with first time actors on a “first time” game for the studio like?

JG: Back in those days we, and all of 989 Studios so far as I know, were Pre-SAG (Screen Actors Guild, the actors union.) For Syphon Filter, the sound guys in Foster City cast anyone they could get their hands on. John Chacon, who voiced Gabe, was a local truck driver. Other characters were voiced by anyone and everyone, including folks working in the 989 office! Chacon was great as the character, but he wasn’t a pro and “Gabe” wasn’t his real voice, so it caused a lot of stress on his vocal chords for some lines. Sometimes it took a lot of takes to get the lines I needed. If I ever did another Syphon Filter I’d definitely look into bringing back Chacon because he’s such a fan favorite!

The targeting system used for Syphon Filter’s combat is a pretty ingenious way of providing quick and accurate actions within a 3D environment without needing to utilize analog sticks, which wouldn’t become a mainstay on Sony consoles until 2000. What was the process of getting to that finalized system and working the gun combat around this system?

RH: I remember going to E3 in 1995 or 1996 and it was the first time the world got to see Tomb Raider and I was blown away by it. I thought it was just about perfect at the time except one thing that bugged me about it was when Lara Croft started shooting her guns would automatically aim at bad guys as long as they were somewhere within 180 degrees in front of you and that was a big breakthrough and an important step in the idea of third-person 3D combat shooting. But you had no control over what Lara was going to shoot at and you just had to kind of hope that you’re shooting at the thing that’s close instead of the thing that’s farther away or whatever and the game did a good job but I always felt it was a missed opportunity not to give players control.

I wanted this game to feel very much like a John Woo movie so I wanted a lot of dramatic camera angles and all that kind of stuff that was unheard of at the time and so when I saw what Tomb Raider was doing I thought, “Yes, let’s do that system but give players control by introducing a target lock.” The interesting thing about that E3 was I was walking by and I saw Shigeru Miyamoto also playing the playable demo of Tomb Raider and talking excitedly with the people he was with. I would bet you money that he was inspired at the same time at the same show I was because he ultimately went on to do a target lock system for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

We basically had two completely separate control schemes for the d-pad: normally you’re in what I like to call “tank mode” where right rotates the camera right, left moves the camera left, and up and down just move the character forward and backwards because that was the standard at the time. I was not happy because you’re not fast and nimble even with additions like double tapping down on the d-pad instantly 180-degree turning you. I wanted to go with screen relative controls but we didn’t have analog sticks at the time as you pointed out so it was tricky to try to get the camera to behave because nobody had really messed with 3D cameras. Mario 64 had kind of introduced a free roaming 3D camera and it was such a weird idea at the time so I wanted to have something akin to that all the time but through all the trials and tribulation it was just very very difficult to ensure players could always tell where they were going and what they were doing.

So we went ahead with tank controls being standard, but then as soon as you hit the target lock – Boom! The controls become screen relative because then you’ve locked on whatever your target is and you’re focused entirely on that, so that was how I could have my cake and eat it too. It worked out okay but looking back I wish we had spent more time and gotten the screen relative controls to work 100% but we ultimately ended up taking that out because it was just too problematic for corridors and we were a small team of just a dozen people working on this game, we were just trying to figure stuff out as we went.

Syphon Filter wasn’t without its share of setbacks and roadblocks during what has been documented as a pretty hectic development timeline. In retrospect, what felt like the biggest “win” when you and your team got a specific facet of the game done?

RH: Midway through development I was told by my boss, Mark, that I needed to fly down to the Bay Area and do a demo of the latest build of the game for Kelly Flock, the head of 989 Studios. I went down and I showed the cave sequence where you move around in darkness with night vision goggles. Obviously I showed it in its best light and I think I was fairly honest about what was working, what we were still struggling with, and just played it straight and flew home the next day. A couple days later my boss invited me over to his house for dinner and he told me I did a good pitch and if I hadn’t the game would have been cancelled. I had no idea there was that level of pressure and he essentially said, “Yeah, I didn’t want you to know. I just want you to go and give your best pitch possible without worrying about the ramifications,” so finding that out in retrospect was I guess a terrifying win!

JG: Honestly? Shipping it. We were a very small team and working on a mainstream console action game for a huge publisher. We had no right, really, achieving what we did… so much with so little. None of us knew, at the time, that it was going to become the hit that it was.

RH: It wasn’t until we started seeing reviews that we could finally realize, “Oh my gosh we pulled it off and succeeded!” We thought we were doomed throughout but we actually made something that people like, that they think is special, that the audience responded to, and I remember that feeling very well.

Once Syphon Filter was released it was met with critical acclaim (currently the 26th highest rated PS1 game on Metacritic) and sold a more than respectable amount of units. What was your first course of action after being able to let out a sigh of relief that all the hard work was worth it? Some rest I presume?

RH: Oh, there was no rest! *laughs*

JG: We already had a few ideas in mind. Marc Blank, the owner, sent the team home for two weeks, but Richard and I kept working. Richard had a ton of ideas and I did a lot of writing. I can’t remember all the details, but I’m pretty sure I had the idea of having the sequel pickup exactly where the first game left off, with the whole cargo plane getting shot down over Colorado. Richard had some really cool ideas about spy stuff in Moscow, and the disco sequence.

RH: It was our job during that week to plot out the entirety of what Syphon Filter 2 would be because we just had to hit the ground running and have the sequel done in under a year, which I guess was a good thing because it meant Sony believed in us. For me and John there was no breathing a sigh of relief, so we just got right back to it and plotted out the entirety of Syphon Filter 2 during that week so that when the team got back we were able to hit the ground running as fast as possible.

JG: Yeah, by the time the team came back, we had a pretty much completed script and a full outline of Syphon Filter 2.

John, as you move forward in your future game development plans with Trace War, what lessons and experiences can you say you continue to utilize that came from Syphon Filter and its absorbing development cycle and unexpected success?

JG: There’s SO much Syphon DNA built into the game! One of my takeaways from Syphon, and the espionage-action genre, is that technology and gadgets are cool! That may seem obvious now, but it wasn’t then. A huge difference between writing for games and other media is that the DNA gameplay MUST be built into the story. In Syphon, it was Gabe’s target lock, head shots, taser, and later, his dart rifle and other gadgets. In Trace War, it’s Ash’s TechGen arms with all their swappable weapons and gadgets, his AI implant, and his tracking and vision modes. Finding ways to weave that stuff into the story and world so it’s not tacked on, is what makes a good GAME narrative. Almost everything else, at least story-wise, can be gleaned from and is applicable to all narratives: have interesting and visually stunning settings; create mystery and surprise by not doing the expected; create believable characters and plots by have relatable motivations.

As for the development cycle, all I can say is we were incredibly lucky. My advice to all devs currently working hard on their own games: work on each game like it’s your last; create value, however you define that; ignore the things you can’t control, and excel at the things you can; be proud of whatever you do; if you don’t have a blast doing it, find another line of work; don’t sacrifice your personal life for your career – the game will get done, with or without that extra overtime they want you to work; if you love what you do, then DO it! Not all of my games have been hits, far from it, but I’ve loved working on each and every one of them. May you be so lucky.

And Richard, As you move forward in your time with covering board games and your successes on YouTube and Patreon, what lessons and experiences can you say you continue to utilize that came from Syphon Filter and its absorbing development cycle and unexpected success?

RH: I’ve been the lead designer on a bunch of video games over the years, Syphon was my first but hardly my last, and if there’s one thing I’ve taken from Syphon and the entirety of my career: that whenever I think things are at their absolute worst or we’re doomed or the game is a piece of garbage that everybody’s going to hate with a passion…those ones tend to be the best received of all the games I’ve put out. Whether it’s Syphon Filter or Fable 2 or The Sims, you just never know, you just can’t anticipate what people are going to respond to or what they’re going to reject so the best you can do is just keep moving forward. Embrace that fear, let it push you harder and harder, don’t rest on your laurels and it’ll work out okay in the end.