The Making of XCOM’s Jake Solomon

Polygon is offering a very comprehensive and very interesting feature on XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s development, seen through the eyes of its lead designer and public face Jake Solomon.

The feature makes it abundantly clear that the game had a very problematic development, with the team starting over multiple types before hitting a design they were satisfied with (with the help of Firaxis’ almighty godfather Sid Meier), and even includes a few never-seen-before videos of the earlier designs.

Here’s a snip:

Looking back on the vertical slice now, Greg Foertsch can’t believe how terrible it was.

“It was so bad,” Foertsch says. “We made the ’94 game now. … It just didn’t feel right. We changed the movements and all that. Going back now, I just don’t remember it when I played it the first time around being quite as painful.”

Solomon admits now that the game he had envisioned was overly complicated.

“It’s hard to even describe now,” Solomon says. “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.”

Solomon and his team had reached a failure point, and after long hours spent crying in Meier’s green chair, Solomon knew what he had to do.

“I went to [Foertsch and Lead Programmer Casey O’Toole] and I said, ‘Look, we have to start over. I have a new idea. But everything we just worked on for 10 or 11 months or whatever, we’re gonna have to scrap it.'”

It’s a really fascinating journey into a fairly prominent and unique title’s development, and I encourage our reader to find space in their day to spend 10/20 minutes to read the feature from start to finish. Kudos to Polygon for writing it!