The Audio and Enemy Design of XCOM: Enemy Unknown

The latest features published by GameInformer on Firaxis’ X-COM strategy reboot XCOM: Enemy Unknown are a video interview about the game’s sound design and the a write-up about the enemy designs, and it’s worth noting that among them are some classic X-COM enemies such as the Sectoids and Mutons.

Here’s a snippet from the latter:

Foertsch: The first thing we tackled was the Sectoid. Everyone knows what it is, because it’s the first alien that you run into in the game. We knew that if we got that right then as we got further into the game and the aliens got a little crazier and more whacked out then I think people were going to buy into our universe a lot more.

Foertsch: We looked at the original character design and then put it away and started designing the character. These are the first images we got back. We were originally thinking about making him about seven feet tall. I was going for this really elongated look.

Foertsch: I was watching Aeon Flux at the time, and that influenced a lot of our decisions. Eventually, we came back to making him smaller. We really wanted to go with this emaciated look. At one point we talked about putting armor on him, because the one thing that is weird about him was the gun and the fact that he’s naked with a gun.

Solomon: I think it’s scarier that he’s naked. If you see naked dudes with guns, clearly there’s something not right there. That man is insane!