10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,650 days ago. Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.
Syphon Filter (released February 17, 1999) was the moment of redemption for Eidetic, the studio that had previously sullied its name with the execrable Bubsy 3D. Whereas that game represented a spectacular low for the 3D mascot platformer, Syphon Filter was a dizzying high for the 32-bit third-person action game. It was the culmination of many of the console design methodologies in place at the time and stands as one of the PlayStation’s iconic titles, even if it’s not particularly enjoyable by modern standards.
Billed as an espionage thriller, the game told the story of special agent Gabe Logan’s battle against a terrorist organization and the eponymous bioweapon it sought to deploy. It’s a story that desperately wants to be a Bond plot, and it’s filled with bad science, but it keeps the action going at a fair clip. Logan likewise is an empty vessel, but he’s an empty vessel that carries a militia’s worth of arsenal so he’s a perfectly appropriate lead for this sort of thing.
The gun-heavy spy thriller game was more novel in 1999 than it is today, but even the reviewers of the time acknowledged that Syphon Filter wasn’t bringing a lot new to the table. Instead, it attempted to take the most important elements of early 3D gaming’s biggest successes and polish them into a cohesive whole: the environment interaction and movement of Tomb Raider, the shooting of Goldeneye, a great deal from Metal Gear Solid. It was universally agreed that Eidetic was successful in its goal, making Syphon Filter one of the highest scoring titles of the year.
What worked on the PSOne doesn’t work great today, of course. The controls are actually rather smoother than what the early Tomb Raider games could muster, but they’re still over-precise on digital and under-precise on analog, and this clumsiness equates to what now feels like punishing difficulty. Shooting in first-person mode feels very slow today, while shooting in third-person can get strange when the auto-targeting doesn’t play well with character movement. That said, Syphon Filter is still more playable than a lot of other games from the time period that were trying to do something similar, and it’s easy to see why action gamers would have considered it revelatory.
Syphon Filter was a huge success, and resides in the very small club of PSOne games that sold well over a million copies in America alone. It also put bread on the table for Eidetic, as Sony bought the studio, stripped it of its name, and set it to making Syphon Filter games exclusively until 2007.
But even though it started off big, the franchise went on the wane immediately. The series’ dedication to the 32-bit design tropes it refined (and to the PSOne hardware itself) went well into the life of the PS2, and players began to abandon it as the sequels became increasing archaic. A 2006 PSP revival was well received by critics, but it seems as if it came too late to breathe the excitement back into the series: the studio formerly known as Eidetic’s next game is Resistance: Retribution, its first non-Syphon Filter project in a decade.
Syphon Filter is still available as a PSOne Classic on the PlayStation Network Store. Thanks to huge supply and limited demand, original disc copies sell on the aftermarket for very, very little.
Other releases ten years ago this week: R-Types (PSX), Eliminator (PSX)
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