The Gollop Chamber – Julian Gollop’s New PC Gamer Column

Snapshot Games’ Julian Gollop who is currently working on Phoenix Point, an XCOM-like game with a Lovecraftian twist, now also has a column at PC Gamer. According to the man, he intends to post his musing on games and the games industry, as well as progress reports for Phoenix Point there. The inaugural installment of The Gollop Chamber column is introductory in nature and goes over the history of strategy games and the evolution of the X-COM sub-genre. An excerpt:

Phoenix Point was first announced at the PC Gamer Weekender event in March last year, where I argued that XCOM is now an established genre, thanks to the tremendous success of the Firaxis games. Ever since I signed over the X-COM rights to MicroProse back in 1997 I have been trying to build a new X-COM-style game, but I never quite succeeded, despite releasing several turn-based games over the last 15 years. The XCOM genre is something special and distinct, and diverging too far from its fundamental design pillars results in something less than satisfactory.

MicroProse/Hasbro learned the hard way when they attempted to attach the X-COM name to games that weren’t really X-COMish enough, such as X-COM Interceptor (a space sim) X-COM Enforcer (an FPS) and the cancelled X-COM Alliance (a team-based FPS). Publishers, it seems, were no longer confident in the old school strategy/tactics style of X-COM. In the heyday of grand turn-based strategy games we had Civilization (1991), Master of Orion (1993), Master of Magic (1994) and the first X-COM (1994). All of them were highly successful games, and they were all published by MicroProse.

Then something dramatic happened—the RTS genre became the dominant game genre on PC, thanks largely to Warcraft (1994) and Command & Conquer (1995). Although Dune II established the genre on PC, it took a while for the seed to grow. By 1996 it seemed like every developer was working on some kind of RTS game.

At the Game Developer’s Conference in 1996 sessions on pathfinding for RTS games were packed with hundreds of developers with standing room only. The Dune II seed had become a forest. It’s fair to say that this turn of events did influence me to give X-COM Apocalypse a real time tactical mode (but with an option for turn-based battles). However, in no way could the game be called an RTS, as it was defined by Dune II.

[…]

In 2005 Take-Two purchased the rights to sci-fi strategy franchise X-COM from Atari (formerly Infogrames) after Atari had lost interest in the X-COM franchise following the cancellation of X-COM: Alliance in 2002. Reorganised under the 2K umbrella, the former Bioshock 2 studios, 2K Marin and 2K Australia, began development on a new XCOM game.

When it was finally announced to the public in April 2010 it was presented as a “Mystery-filled first-person shooter from the creators of BioShock 2.” The E3 trailer portrayed a 1950s setting with amorphous ink blob aliens and shapeshifters. A camera was used to collect evidence that then had to be ‘researched’. It looked like it could be an interesting game, but it just wasn’t X-COM, and unsurprisingly the reaction from X-COM fans wasn’t very favourable.

Christoph Harmann, president at 2K Games, explained that “the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing—strategy games are just not contemporary.”

I felt dismayed by these comments, and it spurred me to put a team together with the idea of raising funds on Kickstarter to make my own spiritual remake. At that time there was also another X-COM-like game in development by a small indie collective called Xenonauts, but I felt there was room for both of us.

However, when Firaxis announced that they were going to release their own X-COM game everything I planned for seemed superfluous. If anyone could do X-COM properly, then it would be Sid Meier’s studio.

But here we are five years after the success of the Firaxis remake and Phoenix Point is a thing. We raised $760k in March through fig.co, and my own take on an XCOM style game is well under way. There is such a thing as ‘the XCOM genre’, and I am really excited for the future. I am not alone any more.