By 1989, Amiga was once again the ascendant faction, and with one port and an original title under their belt, Bullfrog was well on its way to treading water as an Amiga developer. Enter the Amiga A500 in 1987, a cheaper, home consumer-targeted device built with games in mind. The Amiga hardware had wowed select audiences at the 1984 CES show but was pre-empted by the Atari ST’s release in 1985, setting the stage for a rivalry that would last for a (tech) generation. in particular) would emerge as a critical site for Commodore’s home gaming machine. As new audiences were being sought internationally to move gaming from the pricey purview of a handful of hobbyists to a mass pastime, Europe (West Germany and the U.K. But the story was different in Europe, which experienced no such crash and where many companies lived out a kind of alternate history of healthy development away from the unstable fortunes and strong personalities of the U.S. In the late-1980s, the Amiga was still known more for its paint programs and video software than its gaming prowess with prohibitively expensive, ‘professional’ versions such as the A1000, and the continuing slump brought on by the 1983 industry crash in the U.S., things did not look good for Commodore – or anyone else for that matter. I am a firm believer in the idea that technical limitations are often a good thing rather than a problem.” Glenn Corpes, interview with Now Gamer But more importantly, through a healthy mix of luck and cunning, they eventually got on to what they were after all along: games. The fledgling company which would become Bullfrog Productions really did have to put up or shut up, and it managed to weather the storm of misunderstanding by producing (somewhat) functional business software to make good on their promise to Commodore. Still, it’s a rousing tale one way or another, with a core deceit that saw Molyneux’s team through its early years.
So while the call from Commodore executives was unexpected, it was not implausible: walking into Commodore’s offices, Molyneux & Edgars would have thought their meager databases had somehow gotten picked up by the big boys. Furthermore Torus, rather than doing any kind of ‘networking’, was a drain inspection company, whose data analysis Commodore wanted to see extrapolated and represented graphically on their Amigas. The company had actually been founded when Molyneux befriended business partner Les Edgars through the Guildford Computer Centre that Edgars ran, and its main premise was, in Edgars words, “anything to do with computers” (with other schemes, like food distribution, presumably on the side). According the to the book Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World, Taurus Impex’s “bread-and-butter income ”was none other than “contract work for databases” (p. It is a cocktail story Molyneux tells at almost every interview and retrospective on the early days at Bullfrog.Įxcept that there are other versions of this story, blurring the line between truth & apocrypha with that typically Molyneux-ian ease that earned him his own dedicated Twitter parody account. And the rest was history: due to his quick thinking (or lying, as Molyneux is happy to admit), the team were miraculously thrust into game design when the Amigas arrived shortly after. Mistaking Taurus Impex for Torus, a company apparently known for its robust networking software, Commodore invited Molyneux & co. There was always this sort of joke between everyone – the bullshit in the press again…But it wasn’t really bullshit – it was more stretching the truth.” Sean Cooper, creator of Syndicate, Kotaku interviewĪs Peter would have it, he was running a company called Taurus Impex, which exported not software but baked beans to the Middle East. That day, when Molyneux walked out of Commodore’s offices having secured the Amigas on the basis of a confusion over his company’s name, marks an important turn in his own personal bildungsroman. It was here that the seed (or acorn, if you will) of Molyneux’s later grandstanding was born, and it would go on define both his relentless vision and reckless behavior as a designer. But before Fable’s out-of-control PR, before the artificial hype around the non-game “ Milo“, or Godus Kickstarter nightmares entered the picture, Molyneux was the passionate ringleader of a small company hustling its way into the industry with shoddy ports and famously, ten ill-gotten Amiga A1000s.
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