Was Syndicate actually sold in the US?

[rhester72]

Follow on to:

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=111243

Surprising question, but was Syndicate _actually_ retailed in the US?

It does *run* on NTSC machines (20% faster, as expected, though the sound seems to be correct in pitch and duration based on video comparison between PAL and NTSC), but was it *meant* to?

The only known dumps are clearly M3, and prompt for language selection at the beginning.

I had a *ahem* 'borrowed' copy in here in the US back in the day, and I don't recall it prompting for a language (though I'm depending on nearly 30-year-old memories here).

I also found a copy for sale on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115369677663

from Rhode Island that may or may not have been purchased as an import, but it's clearly marked as 'distributed in Europe'.

Was there ever a English-only/NTSC release, to the best of anyone's knowledge? I'd be VERY surprised if such a major title _wasn't_ sold here (the DOS version sold like crazy in the US, and was also available here for the PlayStation), but I can't say with certainty. (It was reviewed in Amiga World, the only major US-based publication I'm aware of, and also mentioned in AC's Guide to the Commodore Amiga, but the latter means little as I've discovered). eBay, being a somewhat reasonable measure of US title availability, also currently only shows that _one_ copy for sale here...whereas at least a dozen are currently for sale in the UK, so there's that.

This all comes down to my effort to try to identify games that were *definitely* available at retail to US players (without importing), and it's going to complicate things immensely if (especially after the end came for Commodore US) games were ultimately retailed here unchanged from their European master copies. LOL

P.S.: For those in the 'aspect ratio is the key' camp, I doubt it. The Bullfrog circle on the map screen is only round with rectanguar-pixels NTSC-full-screen-stretched PAR. It's very obviously 'squished' in PAL...yet was absolutely developed by Bullfrog with no PAL-specific release that I'm aware of. In fact, it's one of the few European-created titles I'm aware of like that.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by rhester72

P.S.: For those in the 'aspect ratio is the key' camp, I doubt it. The Bullfrog circle on the map screen is only round with rectanguar-pixels NTSC-full-screen-stretched PAR. It's very obviously 'squished' in PAL...yet was absolutely developed by Bullfrog with no PAL-specific release that I'm aware of. In fact, it's one of the few European-created titles I'm aware of like that.

Establishing whether game was released on US soil based on some concrete evidence is a reasonable goal, but trying to divine it from the visuals is a bit of gazing in tea-leaves, for me at least.

Yeah, Bullfrog was an European company, initially commited to Amiga, but with Syndicate they shifted to PC-first dev cycle. And that game was made on PCs. So now we're looking at VGA monitors, where a circle might have been squashed, stretched, or neither, depending on how you tweaked the H & V.

[jmmijo]

Pretty sure Syndicate was released in the US under the EA label for Amiga.

I remember purchasing it for me and my brother back in the day and also on PC as well.

[rhester72]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Yeah, Bullfrog was an European company, initially commited to Amiga, but with Syndicate they shifted to PC-first dev cycle. And that game was made on PCs. So now we're looking at VGA monitors, where a circle might have been squashed, stretched, or neither, depending on how you tweaked the H & V.

That makes it make even less sense - VGA has a 1:1 PAR, very close to that of PAL (and very far from NTSC). LOL

[rhester72]

Originally Posted by jmmijo

Pretty sure Syndicate was released in the US under the EA label for Amiga.

I remember purchasing it for me and my brother back in the day and also on PC as well.

Per HoL (and boxes on eBay from the UK LOL), EA appears to have been the distributor worldwide - I understand, it's another one of those "when did they start crossing over?" things. (Mindscape is another one that started doing this later in the Amiga's lifecycle.)

[rhester72]

Looked at this a bit more - the boxes seem identical (i.e. M3), but the disks are not, and the label stuck over the end of the box of the one in the US says 'English', as if the other two languages were indeed not present (which jives with my very loose memory from back in the day). Hrm.

[Matt_H]

I have a US DOS CD version of Syndicate and I believe it asks for language selection upon startup, so that’s not a unique indicator of distribution.

Tons of Amiga games sold in the US were simply European versions brought over by retailers. Good chance Syndicate was one of them.

[rhester72]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

Tons of Amiga games sold in the US were simply European versions brought over by retailers. Good chance Syndicate was one of them.

I thought the same, but actual research (into at least Amiga titles) doesn't show much of that happening outside of mail-order retailers (i.e. it wasn't the publisher's doing, it was individual distributors) and only towards the tail end of the Amiga's lifetime (at least as it was seen in the US, which ended a LOT earlier than things did in Europe).

One of the reasons for that, I suspect, is the 20% (really 16.7%) speedup that would make a game that was challenging in the UK borderline unplayable/impossible in the US except for the expertly skilled. I honestly expected many later titles to be PAL/NTSC autoswitching (for speed) based on system detection, but I've yet to find a single actual example of that in a retail Amiga game.

[grelbfarlk]

The best version of Syndicate for Amiga was on Shapeshifter, which ran quite well at the higher resolution.

Of course now I run it on Dosbox on my A4000, which is about the same.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by rhester72

That makes it make even less sense - VGA has a 1:1 PAR, very close to that of PAL (and very far from NTSC). LOL

Indeed. Some DOS games used VGA at 320x200 (the same resolution as NTSC on the Amiga) and would have had a similar aspect as a result, but Syndicate wasn't one of those, running at 640x480 on the PC.