The Biggest Moments In "XCOM" History

Image via Complex Original

XCOM started as a sequel to a popular, but regionally distributed, game from England called Laser Squad created by Julian Gallop. Julian and his company, Mythos Games, had produced a series of revolutionary and one-of-a-kind turn based fantasy and sci-fi games. Laser Squad, Rebel Star and Lords of Chaos all had a hand in the evolutions on the way to creating the first XCOM game. Mythos’ big break happened when they partnered with MicroProse to release a game, which as of that time, didn’t even work.

UFO: Enemy Unknown was finished in a rush in Mythos’s first major publisher-backed release. Julian Gollop, the game’s creator, discussed the stresses of partnering with Sid Meier’s company.

“We went to MicroProse to finish the game in-house with something that was barely playable. We had to finish the coding and do all the testing at the same time, and so were making changes right to the end. It’s definitely not the right way to do things, and the game would have benefited enormously from another couple of months of testing and tweaking without major changes to the code.”

In 1994, UFO: Enemy Unknown was released for MS DOS and Amiga in the UK while MicroProse, in a genius PR move, renamed the game X-COM: UFO Defense for North American release. Selling 600,000 copies worldwide and even being ported to PlayStation.

XCOM was a hit and MicroProse wanted a sequel in six months. Mythos, seeing that there was just no way to make a sequel that fast, allowed the publisher to license out its code. X-COM: Terror From the Deep Took a year to make and kept gameplay the same, but changed the settings of the battles, to beneath the sea.

X-COM: Terror From the Deep was what would be would now consider a DLC than a new game. Using the excuse that the alien technology captured in the first game couldn’t be used underwater, players had to use the same tech-grab and develop mechanic of the first. Yet the game held up and the new version of the original sold very well.

Because of a bug at the time of shipping in the original X-COM: UFO Defense no matter what players set their difficulty level to, ialways remained at the lowest setting. Players used to the flow and player domination of the first game were shocked with the challenge that Terror From the Deep offered; it left a lasting impression on many gamers.

Terror From the Deep was also ported to PlayStation and the now forgotten 3DO console.

X-COM Apocalypse was to be the “true” sequel to X-COM UFO Defense. The title got a bigger budget and larger staff than Terror From the Deep, but mix-ups between the developer and publisher led to poorly conceived and executed artistic style.

The game strayed from its origins and left many gamers confused. Despite this, Apocalypse released to critical success in 1997.

X-COM’s creator, Julian Gollop walked away from the franchise after Apocalypse.

He sold his stake, never to return to the series. Now MicroProse owned the franchise and wanted to quickly capitalize on it new property by creating two new games.

X-COM Interceptor was created by Dave Ellis, a QA tester made designer who saw the X-COM franchise as rich a property as Star Wars. It was this same theme which made Interceptor feel like X-Wing. The space combat simulation was incredibly hard to master, with a learning curve through the ceiling.

Strategy still played a roll in the game as resources had to be efficiently managed, but the title centered around a kind of intense action that fans of the series just weren’t used too.

X-COM Alliance had been in development for years. It was conceived as a first person shooter with strategic squad management in 1999, but languished in development hell as programmers tried to find a way to balance the first-person combat with squad strategy.

This would later become the central theme and mechanic in the latest entry in the XCOM Franchise, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

X-COM: First Alien Invasion was a budget-priced, loose reboot of the first game.

Released in 1999 as a turn-based email game (does anyone besides us remember playing these). It seemed to have been thrown together, and no one seems to know just how it made it out in the first place. While XCOM Genesis, a true reboot of the original, was supposed to return to the strategic combat roots, but was axed during XCOM’s parent company acquisition.

In 2000 Hasbro, which had acquired MicroProse, shoved the promising FPS X-COM Alliance under the rug. T

he team was forced to create a completely new title; X-COM Enforcer. When Enforcer was released in April of 2001 it received mixed reviews and, again, seemed to be the opposite direction for the franchise.

The last death rattle of the original X-COM series took place in 2002. An X-COM Alliance website went live for two days before being pulled down. Fans were told it was an accident and Alliance was quietly canceled without any formal announcements.

Four years later, in May 2006, Irrational Games stepped in.

Creators of the critically acclaimed System Shock 2, and then in development BioShock, put out a job listing. The ad stated it was looking for developers to work on “the sequel to one of the best loved PC franchises of all time.”

In 2007 leaks suggested the creation a new XCOM title. It wasn’t until 2010 at E3 that it was revealed that a related company, 2K Marin, was working on a XCOM FPS.

The Internet reaction was swift.

It looked like, yet again, another company was taking XCOM down the wrong path. Trying to bring something new to a tactical game that was the first and best in the business. 2K Marin took these comments to heart scrapped the game and spent over three years remaking it into less of a run-and-gun affair and more of a tactical squad based experience.

That same year, something magical happened.

In total secret Firaxis, under the personal direction of gaming god Sid Meier-the original the head of the first company that made X-COM famous, MicroProse-had been developing a full-on reboot of the original game.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown had been in development since 2008 under serious tight lips and under the direction of lead designer Jake Soloman. As a huge fan of the series and the game, he says, was the reason behind his career in gaming.

The rebooted XCOM: Enemy Unknown launched to critical and commercial success showing that X-COM’s original model of turn based alien action was still compelling. The game was recently ported to mobile phones and tablets producing one of the best mobile games ever made.

On August 20 2013 the long awaited and much troubled XCOM FPS was finally released.

The prequel, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, has gotten positive reviews and most impressively held much back and stuck to the strategy style that XCOM fans love best. The game digs deeper into the XCOM canon but with a faster play-style that brings gamers down to the soldier’s size, something XCOM Alliance had never been able to do.

On August 21, a day after the release of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified it was announced that at Gamescom 2013 that XCOM: Enemy Unknown would receive a huge update in Enemy Within. The game will include new technology to continue the war and new mechs featuring the heavy guns of the first and second titles that allowed players to destroy half the map in one glorious blast, if they so desired.

Like any other franchise that has lasted over 20 years XCOM had its fair share of hard times and canceled games.

Incomplete ideas and the 1990s gaming bubble didn’t help. But it’s proof to Mythos’ original concept and Julian Gollop’s design that a turn-based squad shooter is able to survive and thrive alongside the graphically heavy shooters of this gaming generation.

With teams working on classic reboots to the tried and true success of XCOM: Enemy Unknown to the completed vision of the XCOM FPS in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the future of series has never looked brighter. As a gamer that spent a sizable chunk of his childhood battling the forces of underwater evil in XCOM: Terror From the Deep I can attest to the power of immersion in a series that changed how I, and many others, look at games.