In The STYLE Of…

Five games that were inspired by X-COM

huge acclaim, and the UK office wanted its own slice of the pie. And it pushed Mythos to focus their game on an alien invasion.

“Both [assistant publisher] Pete Moreland and [game designer] Steven Hand at Microprose were big fans of Gerry Anderson’s UFO series,” says Julian. “They said ‘let’s make it like Gerry Anderson’s UFO ’, so I went back and started to do some research. I bought a few video cassettes from the series, and the thing about it that struck me was they had this idea of the aliens infiltrating planet Earth, and you had these three levels of defence. So the first level of defence was these Moon-based interceptors, and then the secondlevel defence was these airborne interceptors in Earth’s atmosphere, and the third-level defence was these ground-based interceptors. So they try to intercept these flying saucers, but inevitably of course they always failed.

“I then went on to research contemporary

UFO folklore, for want of a better word, and one particular book which was very influential for me was this book by Timothy Good, Alien

Liaison. It had the idea that the government, the USA and potentially other governments, have somehow acquired or possibly captured some alien technology, including their flying saucers, and were trying to reverse engineer it. They’d also somehow captured some live alien ‘greys’ and were trying to interrogate them.

“All this stuff went into the game,” continues Julian, apart from one particular aspect of Gerry Anderson’s series. “We stripped out the Moonbased interception, because that’s just stupid. You’d think the aliens would be intelligent enough to attack when the Moon is actually on the other side of the Earth.” But the first and second levels of defence remained in the form of Interceptors and the Skyranger troop transports, and Gerry Anderson’s idea of a secret agency dedicated to fighting the invaders – Shadow – became X-COM in the game. O

nce the idea of X-COM was settled on, Julian was left with the task of dreaming up a backstory for it. “I had to think, ‘Why does this organisation exist? Who’s funding it and why?’ The logical step was it was funded by the largest countries in the world and it’s almost like a United Nations-style organisation but it’s completely secret. And if you don’t perform according to the way these countries expect you to do, then they get upset and stop funding you.”

Which leads us to the game’s curious duel names. So is it UFO or X-COM? “The game was always originally just called UFO,” notes Julian. “Microprose UK decided to add the tagline

Enemy Unknown because UFO by itself is a bit nondescript and could be confused with Gerry Anderson’s UFO. It was American Microprose that decided to rename it X-COM: UFO Defense.

I don’t know why, but that’s what they decided.”

Whatever the reason, the name stuck, and

UFO was dropped in favour of X-COM for the subsequent sequels. But in some ways it’s a miracle that even the first game made it out, considering the puzzled reception it got when Julian went back to Microprose to pitch it.

“I had to explain to them how the game works, and you have to appreciate how difficult it was because I couldn’t really reference any other game – because there was no other game like it.” Julian’s idea was a real-time ‘Geoscape’ section of the game where the player shot down attacking UFOS and built a base, coupled with a turn-based ‘Battlescape’ mode where the player fought the aliens on the ground. It was quite unlike anything else at the time – and quite a distance from Microprose UK’S request for a Civilization-alike.

“They wanted something like Civilization, so we had some things from Civilization for sure,” remembers Julian. “We had this idea of research, and that this research sort of drove your progression. And there was the idea of the Ufopedia, like a repository of knowledge that you’ve researched. But that was about it, there wasn’t really any other connection.” Still, even though they took some convincing, Microprose gave UFO: Enemy Unknown the greenlight.

I was really interested in making turn-based games feel more interactive Julian Gollop

Julian reckons that board games were a massive influence on the development of UFO/X-COM. “I came from tabletop gaming, and particularly games from SPI and

Avalon Hill like Squad Leader and Sniper. Squad Leader was just a fantastic game;

Sniper from SPI was not such a good game, but was probably more influential in the development of

X-COM than anything else. I’d probably say that particular board game is the most influential of my career. It had this concept of overwatch – or opportunity fire as

they called it and I call it up to the present day.” The idea of snapshots, meanwhile, came from a 1979 Game Designers’ Workshop game called, appropriately enough, Snapshot.

Julian wanted to capture the tactical fidelity of Sniper but without all the fiddly setting up and rule checking. “Sniper was a pain in the butt to play,” he admits, “and my motivation was that the computer can actually manage all the painful stuff that players had to do on pen and paper and make for a smoother experience.” And computers also allowed for more back and forth between opponents, he notes: “I guess I was really interested in making turn-based games feel more interactive, in the sense of the interaction between the characters during the enemy’s and your turn so it’s not like chess, basically.”

Still, when it came to actually developing the game, coding was an uphill battle. The unique combination of creating not only real-time but also turn-based sections meant Mythos had a big challenge ahead. “It was a real pain in the butt,” Julian admits. “We started with the tactical combat system, because we thought that would be the most difficult one technically to implement.” The Laser Squad II demo gave them a bit of a headstart on this, since they’d already created things like the isometric graphics and overwatch. “The things we added were the lighting system, which we wanted to use to represent battles that took place during day and night, and the procedurally generated battle environment system. We created these little map parcels of 10x10

[PC] Intercepting UFOS can be a tense affair.

» [PC] The game is split into two sections: your typical skirmishes with aliens and the Geoscape where you plan big picture stuff.

Diablo 1996 “They copied the isometric perspective of dimensions from X-COM when they were making the original Diablo,” says Julian. “Actually the first version of Diablo was turn-based. It was Blizzard that persuaded [Condor Games] to change it.”

Xenonauts 2014 This is a love letter to the original X-COM created by fans of the series. PC Gamer called it a “deeply engaging, indie version of an alien invasion that stands toe-to-toe with X-COM”. Goldhawk is currently working on a sequel.

UFO: aftermath 2003 ALTAR bought the unfinished game The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge from Julian’s Mythos Games and turned it into this homage. It was followed by two sequels, UFO: Aftershock and UFO: Afterlight.

INCUBATION: TIME IS RUNNING OUT 1997 The creators of The Settlers and Battle Isle also made this X-com-alike in 1997, one of the first strategy games to use 3D graphics. It fared well critically, but didn’t perform well sales-wise.

» [PC] Keep your soldiers equipped with good gear, or they’ll be soon be outgunned by their alien foes.

» [PC] You base soon grows to accommodate all sorts of alien-fighting facilities.

Road mutant to Year eden Zero: The BEARDED LADIES, 2018 This is one of a clutch of games inspired by the XCOM reboots. Mutant Year Zero blends turnbased tactics with real-time exploration, all set on an earth overrun with mutants.