X-COM Series Interview

Eurogamer has published a three-page interview with Julian Gollop, the original creator of X-Com: UFO Defense, about the series’ history as well as the two Laser Squad titles that he and his brother have worked on over the years. If you’re a fan of the turn-based strategy/RPG hybrids, this Q&A is a great read:

Eurogamer: How many platforms did X-Com reach?

Julian Gollop: The PC, Amiga, the CD32 and PlayStation. It didn’t do too badly on the PlayStation, which surprised me I was sceptical. I thought it wasn’t the kind of game that was good for a console. The total physical sales were around the half a million mark. But of course many more people have played the game than that. A lot of people I meet played X-Com, but they didn’t necessarily buy it!

Eurogamer: And the sequel, Terror from the Deep, came next?

Julian Gollop: Microprose wanted us to do a sequel in six months. We told them the only way we could do a sequel in that timeframe would be to change the graphics and tweak a few bits. Eventually we came to a compromise: they’d license our code to make a direct sequel, and we’d do the third one in the series in two years. TFTD was made entirely by Microprose; we had no input apart from giving them our code. They managed to do it in a year, but they had a much bigger team. A shockingly large team, I thought at the time, 12-15 people.

We earned lots of cash from X-Com, so we hired more staff at Mythos. But the deal that Microprose wanted was that they did the Apocalypse graphics. It was a disastrous relationship from the start. They had some very fancy, rather expensive ideas: they hired some relatively famous artist who made physical models of the aliens, which were then scanned into their software. It didn’t work very well. The Microprose artists couldn’t quite understand how isometric graphics worked. It was enormously difficult, and I think overall the artwork was done pretty poorly on that game.

It was a disaster area. Apocalypse was quite a sophisticated and ambitious game, but it was a big mistake from our point of view. In retrospect, we should have originally agreed to do a sequel in six months, and spent a year doing it, like they did! It would’ve been a lot better!