The history of the creation of X-COM: Enemy Unknown (1993)
Last year, a remake of the 1993 game XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released on PC, MAC, XBox 360 and Playstation 3, and in June of this year also on iPhone and iPad. The history of its creation can be traced since the advent of the first generation of home computers, which coincided with the peak of the popularity of strategic and role-playing board games. For almost any military conflict in the history of mankind, there was a corresponding war game, and games in the fantasy genre went far beyond the role-playing game "Dungeons & Dragons": there were also adventures in deep space, such as "Traveler" and even games whose main characters there were adapted characters of literary works, such as, for example, “John Carter of Mars” from the book of Edgar Rise Barrows. Transferring such games to a computer screen was only a matter of time.
The first was able to do the Americans, armed with HEX-cards, but many residents of the UK for the first time met with computer strategies, the author of which was Julian Gollop (Julian Gollop). Before creating the fame and glory of the game “Chaos” and “Rebelstar Raiders” that brought him in 1984, he worked on the design of two games at Redshift, then participated in the development of the third, called “Nebula”. Then Julian, together with his brother Nick, founded Blade Software, the two of them working on the Laser Squad game released in 1988, which successfully developed the idea of ​​the step-by-step fantastic strategy of Rebelstar.
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For Gollops, if not the main strategy, then at least a very profitable area of ​​activity has become military strategies. And so profitable that after the success of Laser Squad and their next game Lords Of Chaos, the brothers almost completely switched to managing their business. But when it came time to start working on the continuation of the game Laser Squad, they decided to focus their efforts on development.
In 1991, the brothers, armed with the initial demo of the game Laser Squad 2, which later became X-COM: Enemy Unknown, turned to Krisalis, Domark and finally to MicroProse. The latter company attracted them the most, as it had valuable experience with Sid Meier and his Civilization strategy.
The initial demo version was a fairly straightforward tactical game for two players. In MicroProse, the brothers were asked to transfer the scene of the game to Earth and develop the initial concept in more detail so that it does not fall out of the general direction of the company's strategic games. “This prompted me to add a strategic component to the plot, which was that aliens attacked Earth, and in order to defeat them, you need to capture and study alien technologies. In many respects, it was a rather non-standard concept, but we tried to implement it on such a scale that it could compete on an equal footing with the concept of “Civilization”. In fact, the “research and technology tree” to some extent plays a role similar to that of progress in “Civilization”, but at the same time it helped in the development of the plot. ”
“The idea of ​​an organization engaged in this kind of activity came from the organization SHADO (General Directorate for Combating Alien Threat) from the television series UFO (UFO), directed by Jerry Anderson (Gerry Anderson), as well as the book by Timothy Good (Timothy Good)“ Contact with aliens ”(Alien Liaison). “After reading it, I had the realization that I was on the right track. The whole situation with the alien conspiracy, as well as their ability to subordinate to the will described by the author, has goosebumps, ”says Gollop,“ This book told about some of the alleged attempts by the US government to seize and replicate alien technologies sort of secret deals with aliens. All this is somehow reflected in the game. "
Despite this, the game essentially continued the tradition of turn-based military strategy, begun in the games Laser Squad and Rebelstar. Although the artificial intelligence system used was based on previous games, Gollops refined and refined their own algorithms for the principles of movement and behavior of the characters.
Gollop recalls the last two months of game development, January and February 1994, as a particularly difficult and stressful period of time. After moving to a new job at the MicroProse branch in Chipping Sodbury, a seven-day work week and a 12-hour work day became the norm. “We came to MicroProse to complete work on the game on its territory, and we had what we could call the game only with a big stretch,” Gollop admits. “We also had to finish the work on the program code and testing, so the changes were made until the very last moment. Of course, this is wrong, and if we were given a couple more months to test and debug without major changes to the code, the game would have been even better, and it would have been significant. ”
“It’s just a miracle that everything ended so well, although one bug was slightly annoying: changing the level of complexity did not change anything. When you save and restart the game, the difficulty automatically returns to its minimum. But this was not a serious problem, because the game itself used balancing mechanisms, thanks to which it was far from easy to pass. Another bug was that soldiers could acquire superhuman abilities — sometimes it came to the fact that these abilities exceeded all permissible values ​​and were reset to zero, making Superman completely useless in an instant. ”
Given the financial difficulties that MicroProse had before it was taken over by Spectrum Holobyte, even the fact that the game went on sale was already a miracle. “We were completely unaware of the problems of MicroProse and only later found out that a couple of times our project was almost mothballed. We were, of course, worried about absorption by Spectrum Holobyte, but our producer constantly assured that everything would be all right. We also knew practically nothing that Spectrum Holobyte did not like our game in principle. At that time, testing was already under way and our quality assurance team had to wage an active struggle to preserve the project. ”
The game has gained wide popularity, it has sold more than 600 thousand copies, and it is only for the PC (and in fact there were also versions for Amiga, CDTV, CD32 and even PlayStation). Half of the sales accounted for the United States, which at that time was a rarity for a game created in Europe. Gollop believes that the name played a big part in this: while the European version was originally called “UFO: Enemy Unknown,” the name of the American version sounded like “X-COM: UFO Defense”. “I think that to some extent the success of the X-COM: Enemy Unknown game was promoted by the release of the X-Files television series a year before its appearance. Although at that time we had not yet watched the X-Files, in the game we turned to the same topic about UFOs as the series, and it hurt the Americans for a living. "
The real trouble began after the joy of the success of the first X-COM game. “As soon as MicroProse realized that they had a money machine in their hands, they wanted to continue and have more influence on the project. We had the feeling that we lost control of our creation. ”MicroProse obtained a license for the program code to release a sequel of the game called X-COM: Terror From The Deep, and Gollopy worked on the last part, X-COM: Apocalypse, after what they left work on this game series. Having established Mythos Games, they released the game “Magic & Mayhem”, but the next game already faced the opposition of another publishing company. Mythos closed, and Gollops founded Codo Technologies, released the game Laser Squad with e-mail management and used new ways to distribute it.
“We realized that we can easily publish and distribute Laser Squad Nemesis over the Internet at minimal cost, relying on the fact that our customers will help in selling the game, offering to play it to friends and other people who are not our subscribers,” explains Gollop, - Today it is called “viral marketing,” but in essence it’s just word of mouth on the Internet. ” In 2005, after the Laser Squad Nemesis, Gollops released Rebelstar: Tactical Command for the Nintendo GBA, but they no longer participated in the work on their favorite strategy game. Meanwhile, X-COM continues to live its life. Its original versions can be purchased on services such as Steam and Direct2Drive. And now Firaxis has brought back to life an incredibly complex, but at the same time bringing to the spirit of the original spirit, releasing a remake of the game last year - do not forget that since 2005, the rights to X-COM belong to the publisher Take Two. Be that as it may, but its initial version not only set the tone for other games of its generation, but has not yet lost its connoisseurs.
The first was able to do the Americans, armed with HEX-cards, but many residents of the UK for the first time met with computer strategies, the author of which was Julian Gollop (Julian Gollop). Before creating the fame and glory of the game “Chaos” and “Rebelstar Raiders” that brought him in 1984, he worked on the design of two games at Redshift, then participated in the development of the third, called “Nebula”. Then Julian, together with his brother Nick, founded Blade Software, the two of them working on the Laser Squad game released in 1988, which successfully developed the idea of ​​the step-by-step fantastic strategy of Rebelstar.
')
For Gollops, if not the main strategy, then at least a very profitable area of ​​activity has become military strategies. And so profitable that after the success of Laser Squad and their next game Lords Of Chaos, the brothers almost completely switched to managing their business. But when it came time to start working on the continuation of the game Laser Squad, they decided to focus their efforts on development.
I remember the time when our office was littered with stacks of extensions for the Laser Squad and lots of boxes, we had to work in cramped and not very comfortable conditions, Gollop recalls, our business was developing quite well, but we wanted to go global. We needed to cooperate with a major publisher of computer games.
In 1991, the brothers, armed with the initial demo of the game Laser Squad 2, which later became X-COM: Enemy Unknown, turned to Krisalis, Domark and finally to MicroProse. The latter company attracted them the most, as it had valuable experience with Sid Meier and his Civilization strategy.
We were very pleased to conclude the first contract with MicroProse, but worried about what conditions we would be offered. In the beginning, we had some differences, because they did not understand the concept of the game that I had invented. They could not imagine what the process of the game would look like. It cost me a lot of effort to explain this to them, I had to develop some more documents and attend a large meeting with their staff designers, producers and head of the development department, Gollop says.
The initial demo version was a fairly straightforward tactical game for two players. In MicroProse, the brothers were asked to transfer the scene of the game to Earth and develop the initial concept in more detail so that it does not fall out of the general direction of the company's strategic games. “This prompted me to add a strategic component to the plot, which was that aliens attacked Earth, and in order to defeat them, you need to capture and study alien technologies. In many respects, it was a rather non-standard concept, but we tried to implement it on such a scale that it could compete on an equal footing with the concept of “Civilization”. In fact, the “research and technology tree” to some extent plays a role similar to that of progress in “Civilization”, but at the same time it helped in the development of the plot. ”
“The idea of ​​an organization engaged in this kind of activity came from the organization SHADO (General Directorate for Combating Alien Threat) from the television series UFO (UFO), directed by Jerry Anderson (Gerry Anderson), as well as the book by Timothy Good (Timothy Good)“ Contact with aliens ”(Alien Liaison). “After reading it, I had the realization that I was on the right track. The whole situation with the alien conspiracy, as well as their ability to subordinate to the will described by the author, has goosebumps, ”says Gollop,“ This book told about some of the alleged attempts by the US government to seize and replicate alien technologies sort of secret deals with aliens. All this is somehow reflected in the game. "
Despite this, the game essentially continued the tradition of turn-based military strategy, begun in the games Laser Squad and Rebelstar. Although the artificial intelligence system used was based on previous games, Gollops refined and refined their own algorithms for the principles of movement and behavior of the characters.
We made it so that in the behavior of artificial intelligence there was always some element of unpredictability and this often led to the fact that it seemed more reasonable than it actually was.
Gollop recalls the last two months of game development, January and February 1994, as a particularly difficult and stressful period of time. After moving to a new job at the MicroProse branch in Chipping Sodbury, a seven-day work week and a 12-hour work day became the norm. “We came to MicroProse to complete work on the game on its territory, and we had what we could call the game only with a big stretch,” Gollop admits. “We also had to finish the work on the program code and testing, so the changes were made until the very last moment. Of course, this is wrong, and if we were given a couple more months to test and debug without major changes to the code, the game would have been even better, and it would have been significant. ”
“It’s just a miracle that everything ended so well, although one bug was slightly annoying: changing the level of complexity did not change anything. When you save and restart the game, the difficulty automatically returns to its minimum. But this was not a serious problem, because the game itself used balancing mechanisms, thanks to which it was far from easy to pass. Another bug was that soldiers could acquire superhuman abilities — sometimes it came to the fact that these abilities exceeded all permissible values ​​and were reset to zero, making Superman completely useless in an instant. ”
Given the financial difficulties that MicroProse had before it was taken over by Spectrum Holobyte, even the fact that the game went on sale was already a miracle. “We were completely unaware of the problems of MicroProse and only later found out that a couple of times our project was almost mothballed. We were, of course, worried about absorption by Spectrum Holobyte, but our producer constantly assured that everything would be all right. We also knew practically nothing that Spectrum Holobyte did not like our game in principle. At that time, testing was already under way and our quality assurance team had to wage an active struggle to preserve the project. ”
The game has gained wide popularity, it has sold more than 600 thousand copies, and it is only for the PC (and in fact there were also versions for Amiga, CDTV, CD32 and even PlayStation). Half of the sales accounted for the United States, which at that time was a rarity for a game created in Europe. Gollop believes that the name played a big part in this: while the European version was originally called “UFO: Enemy Unknown,” the name of the American version sounded like “X-COM: UFO Defense”. “I think that to some extent the success of the X-COM: Enemy Unknown game was promoted by the release of the X-Files television series a year before its appearance. Although at that time we had not yet watched the X-Files, in the game we turned to the same topic about UFOs as the series, and it hurt the Americans for a living. "
The real trouble began after the joy of the success of the first X-COM game. “As soon as MicroProse realized that they had a money machine in their hands, they wanted to continue and have more influence on the project. We had the feeling that we lost control of our creation. ”MicroProse obtained a license for the program code to release a sequel of the game called X-COM: Terror From The Deep, and Gollopy worked on the last part, X-COM: Apocalypse, after what they left work on this game series. Having established Mythos Games, they released the game “Magic & Mayhem”, but the next game already faced the opposition of another publishing company. Mythos closed, and Gollops founded Codo Technologies, released the game Laser Squad with e-mail management and used new ways to distribute it.
“We realized that we can easily publish and distribute Laser Squad Nemesis over the Internet at minimal cost, relying on the fact that our customers will help in selling the game, offering to play it to friends and other people who are not our subscribers,” explains Gollop, - Today it is called “viral marketing,” but in essence it’s just word of mouth on the Internet. ” In 2005, after the Laser Squad Nemesis, Gollops released Rebelstar: Tactical Command for the Nintendo GBA, but they no longer participated in the work on their favorite strategy game. Meanwhile, X-COM continues to live its life. Its original versions can be purchased on services such as Steam and Direct2Drive. And now Firaxis has brought back to life an incredibly complex, but at the same time bringing to the spirit of the original spirit, releasing a remake of the game last year - do not forget that since 2005, the rights to X-COM belong to the publisher Take Two. Be that as it may, but its initial version not only set the tone for other games of its generation, but has not yet lost its connoisseurs.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/189080/
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