The History of XCOM

[Music] with the exception of aliens julian gallops strategy game UFO enemy Unknown has absolutely no gameplay commonalities with Eugene Jarvis's arcade side-scrolling magnum opus defender the games both touch on a primal emotion however defense against the unknown and fear itself UFO enemy Unknown or as most would eventually know at XCOM UFO defense was the result of an iterative development process for Julian Gollop and his brother Nick spanning a decade of prior work the game kicked off a cherished though off mishandled franchise today we're going on a journey through the history of the XCOM franchise beginning with julian gallops earliest inspirations and works through the original series up to were the chosen welcome to archaeology the history of XCOM like many who would find themselves designing strategy games in the 1980s Julian Gollop had a childhood filled with board games family nights centered around the board game and around the age of 14 gob found himself getting into more complex fare published by Avalon Hill and Dungeons & Dragons as he grew up Gallup made the same realization that many of his peers did the growing power of personal computers would be perfect for simplifying and streamlining some of the complexities of tabletop gaming Julian gallops first two computer games were complex to say the least Time Lords in Islandia were both published in 1983 by redshift limited for the BBC microcomputer while Julian was still in secondary school designed by Gallup they were programmed by his friend Andrew Greene both games begin with instruction screens pages and pages of instructions Time Lords is a space and time strategy game loosely modeled after Doctor Who it uses the concept of companions from the famous BBC show Islandia is a more traditional strategy game about using resources to take control of islands surrounding the player starting point both use a time unit or action point based system which would be common in many of Julian's games going forward Julian would go on to teach himself programming for his next game titled nebula nebula was another complex strategy game again published by redshift limited it was released in early 1984 for the ZX Spectrum through his first three games much of Julian's efforts were focused on broad civilization based strategy all that would change with his next title rebel star Raiders released in the middle of 1984 could be considered the first version of XCOM the sci-fi infused game featured basic squad based tactics and like many of galip's initial games was multiplayer only compared with later releases the game feels crude but the seeds of gallops future designs are evident not long after the release of rebel star Raiders scallop and several other programmers would leave redshift and join a programming cooperative called slug run by Games Workshop the publisher that is today best known for the Warhammer 40k franchise it's here that Gallup would release his next game titled chaos which itself was influenced by a Games Workshop game titled warlock the game allowed up to eight players to control wizards against the computer while working with slug gallop would also provide assistance on the slug produced game titled battle cars julian worked with Simon Clarke to create the first sequel to rebel star Raiders which would be released in 1986 and published by Firebird titled rebel star it only consisted of a single mission and marked a big change for Gollum featuring a single-player mode against the computer in his GDC post-mortem of XCOM Gallup mentioned that it was this game that forced him to learn the pathing algorithms needed to create single player squad based tactical campaigns the game was published as budget title costing only one pound 99 compared to the price of rebel star Raiders at nine pounds 95 after the release of rebel star gallop started his first official development studio called target games the first game released under this moniker would be laser squad released in late 1988 for the ZX Spectrum among the gameplay mechanics that were introduced with laser squad some of which would become very important for XCOM were line of sight weapon and armor loadout changes and destructible terrain it would be the first game that would be published through blade software target would release another rebel star sequel in early 1989 but despite coming after laser squad it did not have any of the improvements found in laser squad the reason why was found in this issue of advanced computer entertainment rebel star 2 had been written some time to work beginning on laser squad target at the time was busy working on a 16-bit port of laser squad target games would rename itself to mythos games and Julian would be joined by his brother Nick for the creation of Lords of chaos a sequel to chaos and their final game before starting on laser squad two blade software their publisher owed mythos games money so they wrote a short list of companies that they wanted to work with for the sequel to laser squad from that list they ended up approaching Microprose and their head of development Pete Moreland laser squad 2 was a go however Moreland wanted something bigger out of it civilization railroad tycoon these were what microprose was looking for among the requirements were the game must be set on earth he needed to have a research tree and something equivalent to civilizations civil offense Agustin the result was mythos games taking inspiration from several sources the style and theming came from the British TV series UFO and the claims made by Bob Lazar about area 51's practice of reverse engineering alien technology has written in Timothy Goods book alien liaison the ultimate secret the concept behind the exocomp organization in the game came from the shadow organization in the UFO TV show several of the game design ideas were inspired first by gallops previous tactical games tabletop games such as sniper and freedom in the galaxy and a sci-fi RPG called traveller the gallop brothers crafted a design document with ideas of having two separate layers of the game the command layer which had base building and research and the tactical squad base layer this element of the game was in part inspired from freedom in the galaxy which Gallup has mentioned allowed him to appreciate having more than one scale in a game Moreland and Microprose loved it Julian and Nick Gallup would be responsible for the coding and design of the game - artists named John Wright C and Martin Somali were loaned to mythos by Microprose there were several ups and downs during the course of development during the middle of production spectrum holobyte acquired a controlling stake in Microprose and the game was nearly canceled in fact it later came out that the game was officially can't by spectrum holobyte according to Gallup in an interview with PC gamer comm while he was interviewing people to prepare for a GDC post-mortem on the game in 2013 he discovered that spectrum holobyte had given the cancellation order however Microprose executives such as Peter Moreland decided it would be best to ignore the cancellation notice and allow mythos to complete the game the last three months of development were all in crunch time as the Gallup brothers worked 12 hour days for seven days a week Gallup stated that the game was finally finished in March of 1994 with a final development cost of around $180,000 UFO enemy Unknown would be well received upon release and I remember sinking a fair number of hours into it between the ages of 10 and 14 the opening sequence of the alien attack was incredibly stylish for those that have played the newer iteration of XCOM however the gameplay of the original might seem a little overwhelming at first the user interface is littered with a number of buttons that if you are missing the instruction manual could cause some confusion however with some patience it still feels like a rewarding game to play with some elements like multiple bases that would be cool to see in the new series Julian Gollop believes the initial success of the first XCOM game to be caused by a few coincidences the x-files had become very popular and much of the show's mythology was based on the same folklore and source material that Gallup had used for the game also the PC strategy market was growing and evolving in a number of ways Gallup was never quite happy with the fact that the tactical missions had a randomly generated element to him feeling that some of the game was definitely greater than his parts as of 6 years after its release XCOM had sold around 470 thousand copies across all platforms including PC Amiga and PlayStation following the success of UFO defense microprose now owned by spectrum holobyte wanted to get a sequel for the game out in only six months the Gallup brothers balked at this idea stating that nothing could be done in six months other than swapping sprites and reusing the original code they agreed to license the code to Microprose who had produced the first sequel to terror from the deep in-house after a year of production Gallup on terror from the deep I didn't really play it that much to honest the graphics were quite impressive but I think they made a mistake trying to expand the scope of the game by making the missions bigger and longer when you fire up terror from the deep you are treated to a pretty cool for 1995 CG cinematic however once you get into the game you quickly realize that it's literally just a reskin of the original game obviously for fans of the first game this was not necessarily a bad thing more XCOM with a new locale the depths of the ocean to battle it out with the alien menace unfortunately any and all issues one might have had with the original game including the overly complex user interface were translated directly into terror from the deep while microprose worked on terror from the deep mythos games worked on its next installment the game titled XCOM apocalypse would be the final game in the franchise that Julian Gollop would have any involvement in the core concept from the game arose from a Judge Dredd game that gob had conceived years prior featuring a city in which the players had to deal with different corporations and factions by the way this sounds like an awesome idea apocalypse though never quite clicked the game had a lot of concepts but the vision was unclear mixing real-time and turn-based combat led to both feeling unfulfilled and there was constant friction between mythos and Microprose over the art style for the game according to Gallup in an interview with Eurogamer Microprose wanted to control the art style even going so far as hiring a famous artist to create models of the aliens that would be used in the game and then scanning them into microprose a software unfortunately the microprose art team never quite grasped how to translate those models into sprites that would work in an isometric perspective Gallup stated in another interview on the final artwork apart from the guy who designed the vehicles who did a very good job the alien City and buildings didn't look good after the acrimony over the handling of XCOM apocalypse Nick and Julian Gollop decided that mythos games would no longer be working with Microprose in addition to the poor relationship Microprose was undergoing a bit of a transitional period as spectrum holobyte its parent company was being purchased by Hasbro mythos ended up signing a development deal with virgin interactive but could not bring their most valuable intellectual property with them Gallup stated to Eurogamer that there was some dispute about who owned the license in those days companies weren't terribly good about intellectual property protection our lawyers said that if it went to a court battle we'd probably lose and have to hand over the XCOM name but strangely their lawyers were telling them the same thing we eventually struck a deal that we would get increased royalty rates for ex-con apocalypse and they would take the license XCOM continued on after this split between microprose and mythos the first game to be developed was XCOM interceptor Dave Ellis would take the seat formerly filled by Julian Gollop as the game's designer Ellis began his career at Microprose in the early 90s working first in their customer service department and then transferring to Quality Assurance after a few months he was in a unique situation heading into the development of interceptor as he had previously been moonlighting as the strategy guide author for UFO defense and terror from the deep with a split between microprose and mythos occurred there was no one more knowledgeable at the company than Dave Ellis who mentioned in an interview with the website the last outpost that he was an appointed XCOM guru part of the inspiration for pushing XCOM beyond the boundaries of its initial genre was LucasArts experimentation with the Star Wars games as Ellis outlined it the goal was to use one of the flight simulator engines and to set the game during one of the earlier XCOM games so the player would experience similar events from a different perspective Ellis defends the game from the idea that this was just an attempt to slap XCOM onto anything the intention was to take XCOM and turn it into something grand because Ellis and other Microprose management felt strongly about his potential this never quite happened during the course of interceptors development Ellis and his team felt strongly about calming fan concerns and attempted to do so by allowing the cult of XCOM to be able to contact the team through both a forum and an open email address the game would stick to the retro-futuristic stetic that the microprose art team had established with XCOM apocalypse despite the team's desire to distance themselves from Apocalypse itself by setting the game in the years leading up to the third XCOM game interceptor ended up with middling reviews despite the efforts of Ellis and team and only sold about 30,000 copies the side effect of interceptors 18-months and development was that many at microprose were suffering from XCOM fatigue leaving de velas to be the only champion for his next idea for an ex calm title called Genesis it would be six months before development began on Genesis but when it started the team became populated by many who had worked on interceptor Genesis was intended to be a game designed in the mould of the original XCOM with strategy research and tactics layers but with real-time battles in place of turn-based unfortunately none of it would come to pass as Dave and team were working on Genesis it became clear that Hasbro's purchase of spectrum holobyte would not end well given Hasbro's history of trouble with video game development the Microprose Chapel Hill office which is where the team working on Genesis was housed was shut down on January 17 2001 in concurrent Lee with the development of Genesis was another doomed project XCOM Alliance alliances roots predated those of Genesis and the game survived a few more years prior to getting the axe the development of Alliance was troubled so the Hunt Valley office put the game on hold in favour of developing XCOM enforcer microprose have been wanting to use the Unreal Engine which was planned for Alliance but with alliances issues they flipped many of the art assets that were designed for it and then just used them for enforcer instead enforcer is barely what one might consider an XCOM game a third-person action shooter it received mixed reviews shortly before enforces release hasbro which had had enough the video game world sold off Hasbro interactive and all its properties to Infogrames Alliance and XCOM in general were in stasis after Hasbro interactive was sold XCOM and the Atari name were held by Infogrames shortly thereafter Infogrames rebranded itself as Atari and in the late 2000s sold the XCOM IP to take two which then transferred it to its subsidiary 2k games to eventually be developed by its own subsidiary fire axis the responsibility for the development would fall on the shoulders of Jake Solomon as a high school student Jake Solomon could not get enough of XCOM UFO defense when it came out you would play it every night for hours before falling asleep going to school only to come home and do it all again this was 1994 and Jake was on the precipice of going off to college the mid 90s were a transformative era for gaming and much like the Golden Age of the arcades leading many to become game designers XCOM led Jake Solomon into the field of computer science where he had only one goal make a new XCOM game Jake Solomon started at fire axes right out of college around the year 2000 sid meier took Solomon under his wing mentoring him through those early years of being a designer Solomon refers to Meyer as his professional father demonstrating a very strong bond between the two Solomon's obsession over XCOM never waned whenever the discussion came up at fire axis as to which games should be made next XCOM was often Solomon's suggestion in 2003 he would get his first chance from what I gather fire axes had not acquired the right to make the IP yet however that hadn't stopped others from playing within the confines of the genre Julian Gollop had just designed laser squad nemesis in 2002 keeping it very much in the same vein as XCOM Jake Solomon took to making a prototype of an X comm game with zeal unfortunately it was not very good Solomon in an interview with polygon stated I made one of the shittiest shittiest prototypes of a game that anyone has ever made I mean I'd only been in the industry for three years I'm lucky I even got the opportunity and it was so shitty I had so much to learn after a disaster is showing fire axes can the project letting Solomon learn from his mistakes rather than dragging it out any longer Soloman spent the next four years working at Phi Raxus doing everything he could to earn another chance at designing a game and when his turn came around it was once again a chance to design XCOM at the time Solomon was working on Civilization Revolution spending his days at the office working on that and then working on the code for XCOM at night and less than a year into the development cycle Solomon thought he had finally gotten the prototype that he meant to design several years prior except he hadn't the new proposal leaned on many things from the original that many thought could be refined time units which determine how many actions you could take in a turn large squads and random procedurally generated maps Solomon would eventually have to walk back all these ideas especially the maps after the team completed a vertical slice of the game and showed it to the rest of hyraxes they received the bad news most did not enjoy it once again it appealed only to hardcore XCOM players the vertical slice was a failure and a year of design had been wasted Solomon spent a lot of time talking to Sid Meier after that trying to work through the issues that he was having with the game looking back on it solomon realizes the issue was basically attempting to remake the original game I don't know what I was thinking it was the original game and then over the top of that I had put soldier abilities a cover system new alien abilities new weapons it was incredibly complicated not complex complex is fun complicated is bad this was a very complicated game it was more complicated than the original the first iteration of the game was completely thrown out much to the chagrin of many of the leads on the project Solomon would spend days working on a new version with his team while simultaneously developing a tabletop version with sid meier in order to work out some of the gameplay kinks the process worked eventually leading to a point where Meyer and Solomon both programmed a playable version of the tabletop game many of the elements of Solomon and Myers different takes on that tabletop game would be combined into what would become ex enemy unknown at launch the game had lingering bugs something that solomon and team took rather personally given the final stretch of development it was to be expected however the bugs didn't affect the critical reception for the game the first version of which hit an 89 on Metacritic what's more is that the game would go on to receive numerous Game of the Year awards reaching levels of recognition that the original game never quite achieved though without the fever pitch of nostalgia without people going back and remembering what that first hit of ex-con was like with the reboot have made quite as big of a splash possibly divining an answer to that would be pure conjecture what is not conjecture is the effect of the game had on players civilization has long been known to cause players to take quote just one more turn I even started my history of civilization by speaking that off to use mantra of strategy gamers XCOM enemy Unknown truly lived up to that phrase coined to describe sid meier's addictive game development of the game would continue with additional DLC expanding some of the gameplay elements before XCOM enemy within rewrote some of the core mechanics adding a new faction the alien friendly exalt it was overall well received but would not be so well received would be an ex comm spin-off game known as the Bureau XCOM declassified while Jake Solomon was undergoing severe growing pains at Firaxis another 2k game studio irrational would be put to the task of developing an XCOM property as well irrational had been acquired in a tape - spending spree take to being the parent company - 2k games irrational was known for being home to Ken Levine whose System Shock 2 had been considered one of the best games of the previous 10 years irrational had two Studios one in Boston and one in Canberra Australia the Boston one was the headliner with Canberra acting mostly in a support capacity for the games that were developed which would include Bioshock much like Firaxis the idea of developing an ex-con property had excited the people at irrational with Ken Levine being a huge fan the game took many forms over the years from a team based tactics game much like the original XCOM to eventually being a third-person shooter the full story into how the bureau happened is not going to be told here it bounced between three of two K studios before getting its original 2010 release date pushed all the way back to 2013 after the world had already been introduced to Jake Salomon and for axises new vision for XCOM there would be no repeat of the late 90s were a splintering grasp on what to do with the franchise spelt its doom after the failure of the Bureau the only XCOM in town was tactical in his first gallop chamber article in PC Gamer the father of the franchise Julian Gollop made a great point the ex-cons on veut is something special and distinct and diverging too far from its fundamental design pillars results in something less than satisfactory the bureau looked like it could be an interesting game but it just was an ex-con and unsurprisingly the reaction from XCOM fans wasn't very favorable for all the ups and downs of the franchise the development of XCOM 2 was comparatively normal there will be no hidden cancellations or tensions with the art department no years wasted on ultimately discarded prototypes no XCOM 2 would be more of what made the first reboot successful with some additional twists one big twist was the setting the game setting was a future after a player loss in the first game losing XCOM 1 became canon strangely enough another twist made during development would be that XCOM 2 would start as a PC exclusive this allowed for access to focus on higher end graphics as well as modding support for axis would also partner with the developers of one of the most popular mods for XCOM 1 the long war allowing them the access needed to release several mods on day 1 of the game's release the release though had some pain points many computers had issues running the game as it wasn't properly optimized for a number of graphics cards my personal experience had me dropping the settings down as low as possible for a point of comparison I would run doom 2016 released a few months later on almost the highest possible settings many of these issues would be resolved with patches in the following months the game currently sits at an 88 on Metacritic one point below its predecessor the phrase dlc gets used to describe a whole wide variety of content from the infamous horse armor of a into massive expansion packs XCOM to SDLC the war of the chosen was the latter so much so that it was discussed briefly to possibly just be XCOM 3 in an interview with polygon Jake Solomon said we definitely talked about making it XCOM 3 we have a lot of features that could have been the basis for a sequel but for us a sequel also requires an entirely new narrative so where does the franchise go from here ostensibly ex-con 3 I have a feeling that lessons have been learned about slapping the name X Connell on things that just don't fit meanwhile the genre is expanding broader than ever before 2017 saw Nintendo and Ubisoft collaborate for an ex commlite style game called Kingdom battle Mario Plus Rabbids but perhaps the most salient bit about the future of the series comes from Julian Gollop himself who is currently hard at work developing his own XCOM style game Phoenix point the first entry of his PC gamer column was titled XCOM is now a genre in it Gallup argues that the core pillars of design that represent XCOM are unique enough that simply calling a game an XCOM game should be enough of a genre descriptor to quote the closing of its column there is such a thing as the ex-cons onre and I am really excited for the future I am not alone anymore thank you for joining me on what is my longest video today my sources can be found in the description down below and if you notice any errors please note them under the pinned fact check comment if you're interested in additional histories in the same vein check out my videos on civilization and SimCity you can follow me at spoiler Kevin on Twitter or you can follow the channel at archaeology my name is spoiler Kevin and thank you for watching archaeology the history of XCOM you

Channel: Arcadology

Views: 237,575

Keywords: history of xcom, xcom history, x-com history, history of x-com, nick gollop, julian gollop x-com, rebelstar raiders, xcom, x-com, lords of chaos, jake solomon xcom, sid meier, microprose, phoenix point, rebelstar, jake solomon, mythos games, target games, julian gollop, laser squad, history xcom, the history of xcom, arcadology, xcom 2, enemy unknown, the complete history of xcom, xcom documentary

Id: PxUVoWt2K78

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/voidref]

Nice!

Other than the odd audio levels at times, it was well done. The Jake and Julian impressions were a neat touch.

[u/ChubbyHippo109]

That was a great watch, thanks!

[u/Pimmelman]

that part about apocalypse stuck with me. I loved the game but imagine the same game with a different art style

I have high hopes for OpenApoc and its modability

[u/Boltgun]

Nice video, I'm on the same page about TFTD and Apocalypse.

TFTD's multi part missions were a mistake and that's not mentioning the bugs in the research tree. Unlike many, I do find the idea of fighting Cthulhu down in the sea quite exciting.

Apocalypse was simply released at the wrong era. Publishers couldn't decide between turn based, real time, 2D, 3D, Dos, Win95, etc. Its transitional period was full of indecisive grayish mess with awful art styles.

The idea to play X-Com from another perspective sound good on paper but never quite play out. The biggest problem to make sequels is simply the story. You won and smashed the aliens to bits, now what? You cannot have Earth invaded dozen of times without throwing the storyline away. Simply put, the franchise is best when short lived and not milked. Put it in the closet for a couple of years and make a reboot.

[u/Koryuu]

I can relate to the developers except for me it was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I had an emulator on a flash drive that would play on school computers. Which I did every break and lunch time where possible. Does anyone have any X-com style games they can share? other then the FF Tactics series and the Mario one mentioned no others really spring to mind.

[u/Ironcinder]

Nice!

I thought it couldn't get weirder than hearing "Zee X Spectrum" until he pronounced the Australian capital.

[u/Whit3y]

Well done. It was a fun watch and I learned a bunch of cool stuff