Bullfrog in the Dungeon

Summary

In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had build the studio’s reputation on the back of his “god game” Populous six years earlier, woke up the morning after the contract was signed with real money to spend for the first time in his life. For him and his colleagues, the new situation was gratifying, but also vaguely unsettling. The acquisition came with all of the expected rhetoric from EA about “letting Bullfrog be Bullfrog.” Inevitably, though, the nature of the studio’s output changed in the years that followed. EA believed — and not without evidence — that series and brands were the key to long-term, sustainable success in the games industry. So, it encouraged or pressured the folks at Bullfrog to connect what they were doing now with what they had done before, via titles like Magic Carpet 2, Syndicate Wars, Populous: The Beginning, and Theme Park World. Iteration, in other words, became at least as prized as the spirit of innovation for which Bullfrog had always been celebrated. And where the spirit of innovation refused to die, you could always do some hammering to make things fit. The most amusing example of this is one of the two best remembered and most beloved games to come out of this latter period of Bullfrog’s existence. What on earth could be meant by a “theme hospital?” EA couldn’t have told you any more than anyone else, but the name sounded pretty good to it when one considered how many copies Theme Park had sold the year before the acquisition. Theme Hospital was born as one of about a dozen ideas that Peter Molyneux wrote on a blackboard during the heady days just after the acquisition, when Bullfrog had a mandate to expand quickly and to make more games than ever before. This meant that some of t...