Alex Trowers worked alongside Peter Molyneux at Bullfrog from the early days developing Syndicate through to the takeover by EA. In part 1 of a 2 part feature, Alex looks back at life at Bullfrog.

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 aneurism.

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