Aliens are abducting people, mutilating cattle and terrorising cities, and the world’s governments have pooled their money to fund one secret organisation to stop them. X-COM hands the player that organisation and a single base. From there it runs as two games that feed each other. On a globe that spins in real time, you build bases, hire scientists and engineers, and scramble interceptors at UFOs. When one comes down, the game cuts to an isometric battlefield where your soldiers move one at a time, turn by turn, into a farmhouse or a crashed saucer where something is waiting.
It came from a small British studio. Julian Gollop and his brother Nick designed it at their company, Mythos Games, and it began as a sequel to their Spectrum-era hit Laser Squad. MicroProse published it in 1994. PC Gamer in Britain called it “that rarest of games on the PC — simple enough for beginners and yet more than challenging enough to keep even the most experienced of players hooked for months on end”. Edge reported in 2003 that it had sold more than 600,000 copies on the PC alone, half of them in the United States, which was rare for a European game at the time.
Fast facts
- Designers: Julian Gollop and Nick Gollop, of Mythos Games.
- Publisher: MicroProse. Mythos finished the game at MicroProse’s British studio in Chipping Sodbury.
- Released: PC, March 1994 in Britain; Amiga and Amiga CD32 at the end of 1994; PlayStation in 1995.
- Titles: UFO: Enemy Unknown in Britain and Europe; X-COM: UFO Defense in North America; X-COM: Enemy Unknown on PlayStation.
- PC price: £44.99 in Britain. The Amiga version cost £34.99.
- Requirements (PC): a 386 with 2MB of memory and VGA graphics.
- Grew out of: a Laser Squad 2 demo written on the Atari ST.
From Laser Squad 2 to X-COM
Mythos had its roots in Laser Squad (1988), the Gollops’ turn-based squad wargame for the Spectrum and other machines. “The next thing we made was a demo for Laser Squad 2 on the Atari ST, which ultimately became UFO: Enemy Unknown,” Julian Gollop told Retro Gamer. “Wisely, we made the switch to the PC as soon as we could.”
The brothers wanted a worldwide publisher. In 1991, Gollop told Edge, they took the demo to Krisalis, Domark and MicroProse. MicroProse was their favourite because it had published Sid Meier’s Civilization. The demo was a fairly modest two-player tactical game, and MicroProse asked for more: set it on Earth, and make it bigger. Gollop’s answer was to add the strategic layer, “with the basic idea of an alien infiltration of earth and the need to capture and research the alien technology to defeat them”. The research tree, he said, “somewhat emulates the role of advances in Civilisation, but it also helped to develop the storyline.”
For the organisation itself he drew on SHADO, the secret defence force in Gerry Anderson’s 1970s television series UFO. The mind-control powers and the idea of governments making secret deals with the aliens came from Timothy Good’s book Alien Liaison. “After reading that I knew I was on to something good,” Gollop said.
The contract had not been easy to win. MicroProse “didn’t understand the game design I had written,” Gollop told Edge, and he had to write more documents and present it at a meeting with the publisher’s designers, producers and head of development. The last two months, January and February 1994, were spent at Chipping Sodbury, working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. “We went to MicroProse to finish the game in-house with something that was barely playable,” he said. Coding and testing had to happen at once, and he believed the game would have “benefited enormously from another couple of months”.
The project nearly ended more than once. MicroProse was in financial trouble and was about to be taken over by Spectrum HoloByte, which, Gollop said, “didn’t like the game at all”. By then it was in testing, “and the QA team really argued hard to keep the project”.
The Geoscape
The strategic half is played on a globe that can be rotated and zoomed. Time passes in steps from five seconds to a day, and Computer Gaming World noticed the sunlight moving across the planet as it did. You place bases, fill them with radar, laboratories, workshops, living quarters and hangars, and wait for contacts.
Money comes from the countries of the world, and each one judges X-COM’s performance at the end of every month. PC Gamer’s screenshots show the monthly report: some nations are pleased and raise their funding, while others “have signed a secret pact with unknown alien forces and have withdrawn from the project”. Where you build matters, CGW explained. If the aliens harass a country outside your radar cover, that country pays less.
Research drives everything. Each alien corpse, captured weapon and live prisoner can be studied, and the results unlock new weapons, armour and craft. They also reveal the plot, piece by piece. CGW’s reviewer saw two sides to that design: the story was a “carrot” pulling the player on to the end, but it would not pull as hard on a second game.
The Battlescape
When a UFO crashes, lands, or attacks a city, you send a transport, and the game switches to an isometric tactical map. Each soldier has a stock of time units, and walking, kneeling, turning, shooting, throwing and opening doors all cost some of them. Save enough and the soldier can take a reaction shot during the aliens’ turn. During that turn the screen goes black, and you hear the aliens moving about, opening doors and using lifts, and catch only a glimpse of any that walk into a soldier’s view.
The maps are generated at random, so no two crash sites are the same. PC Gamer counted ten terrain types; CGW listed desert, jungle, polar wastes and mountains, and half a dozen types of UFO in different states of wreckage. The terrain can be destroyed. CGW suggested blowing a hole in a farmhouse wall rather than using the door, and setting a wheat field alight with incendiary rounds to flush out a sniper at night. Soldiers who survive improve their skills and rise in rank, and players can rename them. The dead stay dead.
Besides crash sites there are terror missions in cities, raids on alien bases and the defence of your own. CGW counted eight alien species, and mind control among their weapons.
Reviews
PC Gamer’s Andy Butcher, reviewing the PC version in April 1994, gave it 91%. He noted that other games had tried to combine strategy and tactics without success, and thought this one worked because the two parts fitted together “seamlessly”. The tactical game was superb, he said, “hardly surprising when you realise that UFO was developed by the same people who wrote the classic Laser Squad”.
Computer Gaming World headlined its review “It Came From Britain”. Chris Lombardi called X-COM “a patchwork of the worst science fiction films and the best science fiction games you’ve ever seen”, and saw pieces of Dune II and Master of Orion in it. He warned that a game could last “well over 40 hours”, that the manual was “long on the obvious and short on detailed information”, and that most players would restart two or three times before they got the hang of it. He expected to play three games before moving on, “after 100+ hours of entertainment”. His last lines were: “It comes from Britain. It comes in peace. Its only demands are on your free time. Resistance is futile.”
The Amiga version arrived late in 1994. CU Amiga gave it 89%; the one thing that kept it from 90% was that the aliens’ turns could take minutes. On the Amiga CD32, Amiga CD32 Gamer rated it 80%: “a good conversion let down by irksome controls”.
Gollop remembered two bugs that got into the finished game. The difficulty setting went back to the lowest level whenever a saved game was reloaded, though the game’s own balancing kept it hard. Soldiers could also become so strong that their statistics overflowed to zero, which made “your supermen instantly useless”.
Three titles, one game
The original shipped under three names, and the one people use says a lot about where they played it.
| Title | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| UFO: Enemy Unknown | Britain and Europe | The original MicroProse release on PC and Amiga, and the name the British press used. |
| X-COM: UFO Defense | North America | The American title, under which Computer Gaming World reviewed it. |
| X-COM: Enemy Unknown | PlayStation, 1995 | The console version, combining the American prefix with the European subtitle. |
Gollop thought the American name, and the timing, helped. “I think the release of The X-Files the year before the launch of X-COM: Enemy Unknown helped a little,” he told Edge. “Although we hadn’t seen The X-Files at the time, we were drawing on the same UFO folklore for the game, and this hit a nerve in the US.”
The PlayStation title is easy to confuse with Firaxis’s 2012 XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The two differ by a hyphen.
The PlayStation version
Official UK PlayStation Magazine reviewed X-COM: Enemy Unknown in its first issue, November 1995. The magazine listed MicroProse as both publisher and developer and the game’s origin as the UK. The review begins by wondering whether “a review from one of those snorey PC magazines has somehow slipped into PSM”, then argues the game belonged there. “More than anything else released for the PlayStation so far,” it said, the game showed “the true potential of the machine to break away from the traditional ‘console’ fare”.
It found the conversion close to the PC original, with “little changed, except for some improved sound and the odd animated sequence”. It admitted the game was not the machine’s best-looking or best-sounding, and recommended a mouse. It scored gameplay 9 (“absorbing rather than manic”) and lifespan 9 (“it’ll outlive you”). The same issue reported that MicroProse planned to bring X-COM: Terror From The Deep to the PlayStation in 1996.
X-COM and XCOM: the series
The hyphen does the work of telling the series’ two eras apart. The hyphenated games are the originals, from 1994 to 2001. The unhyphenated ones are the reboots that Firaxis Games began in 2012.
| Title | Year | Developer | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| UFO: Enemy Unknown / X-COM: UFO Defense | 1994 | Mythos Games | The original |
| X-COM: Enemy Unknown (PlayStation) | 1995 | MicroProse | Console conversion |
| X-COM: Terror From The Deep | 1995 | MicroProse | The same engine, moved under the sea |
| X-COM: Apocalypse | 1997 | Mythos Games | One city, in 2084, with real-time or turn-based combat |
| X-COM: Interceptor | 1998 | MicroProse | Space combat with base management |
| X-COM: Enforcer | 2001 | MicroProse, for Infogrames | Third-person action |
| XCOM: Enemy Unknown | 2012 | Firaxis Games | The turn-based reboot |
| XCOM 2 | 2016 | Firaxis Games | Sequel to the reboot |
| XCOM: Chimera Squad | 2020 | Firaxis Games | Smaller spin-off |
MicroProse followed the original quickly. PC Zone reported in April 1995 that Terror From The Deep would be out the next month, with most of the game underwater, “twice as many tactical sites” and new weapons and submarines. Edge later called it too close to the original, “based on exactly the same game engine”, and “very, very tough to complete”. Gollop told Edge that MicroProse had licensed Mythos’s code to make it, and that after the first game’s success the publisher wanted “more of the same” and “more say in the project”, leaving the brothers feeling they “no longer had much control over our creation”.
Mythos made one more, and it was the brothers’ last X-COM: X-COM: Apocalypse (1997), with a new engine and a single city, Mega-Primus, to defend. Edge gave it nine out of ten and called it “a landmark strategy title”. The series then moved away from its roots. X-COM: Interceptor (1998) swapped the ground battles for space combat, and Edge gave it eight out of ten while warning that “the shift away from wargaming may well enrage dedicated X-COM fans”. X-COM: Enforcer (2001) was a shooter built on the Unreal Tournament engine. Computer Gaming World called it “X-COM in name only”, and after it the name went quiet for more than a decade. The Gollops had moved on: Mythos Games made the fantasy strategy game Magic & Mayhem and then closed, and the brothers’ next company, Codo Technologies, sold its games online.
The revival came from Sid Meier’s studio, Firaxis Games, which began work on XCOM: Enemy Unknown in the spring of 2007. Edge saw it in 2012 and reported that it kept the Geoscape, the research and the ground combat, though the base had become “a bustling side-on ant farm”. Gollop had no part in it. XCOM 2 followed in February 2016, and XCOM: Chimera Squad, a cheaper spin-off set in a single city, in 2020. Gollop went back to the form himself with Phoenix Point, from his studio Snapshot Games, which Wireframe reviewed in January 2020 as the designer’s return “to the genre he helped place on the map”.
Sources
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 5, April 1994, pp. 62–63: review by Andy Butcher (MicroProse, Mythos Games, £44.99, 386 with 2MB, March release; “began life as the sequel” to Laser Squad; random map generation and ten terrains; the monthly funding report; quotations). The same issue’s cover-disk pages describe time units; the magazine’s charts in later 1994 issues give the score as 91%.
- Computer Gaming World issue 121, August 1994, pp. 108–110: “It Came From Britain”, review by Chris Lombardi (designers Julian and Nick Gollop of Mythos Games; the Geoscape, funding, combat and hidden movement; eight alien types; quotations).
- Edge issue 131, Christmas 2003, pp. 128–131: the making of X-COM: Enemy Unknown (Gollop on the Laser Squad 2 demo, approaching Krisalis, Domark and MicroProse in 1991, SHADO and Alien Liaison, finishing the game at Chipping Sodbury in January and February 1994, Spectrum HoloByte, the bugs, sales of more than 600,000 on the PC with half in the US, the titles, The X-Files, Terror From The Deep and Apocalypse, Codo Technologies; Magic & Mayhem).
- Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, pp. 49 and 51: Gollop on the Laser Squad 2 demo for the Atari ST and the switch to the PC.
- Amiga Format issue 59, May 1994, p. 53: preview of the Amiga version (“the long-awaited sequel to Laser Squad”; random mission generator).
- Amiga Computing issue 80, December 1994: the Amiga version due “very soon” at £34.99.
- CU Amiga, December 1994: review of the Amiga version by Matt Broughton, 89%, £34.99.
- Amiga CD32 Gamer issue 13, June 1995, buyers’ guide: the CD32 version, rated 80% in the magazine’s issue 6 (November 1994).
- Official UK PlayStation Magazine issue 1, November 1995, pp. 70–71: review of X-COM: Enemy Unknown (publisher and developer MicroProse, origin UK; quotations and scores); p. 43: plans for Terror From The Deep on PlayStation in 1996.
- PC Zone issue 25, April 1995, p. 10: Terror From The Deep due the following month; “the strategy game of last year”.
- Edge issue 48, August 1997, pp. 71–72: review of X-COM: Apocalypse, nine out of ten, with its account of Terror From The Deep.
- Edge issue 61, August 1998, p. 91: review of X-COM: Interceptor (PC, MicroProse, in-house), eight out of ten.
- Computer Gaming World issue 205, August 2001, p. 74: review of X-COM: Enforcer (publisher Infogrames, developer MicroProse; “X-COM in name only”; the Unreal Tournament engine).
- Edge issue 238, March 2012, p. 60: preview of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2K Games, Firaxis Games; work began in spring 2007; lead designer Jake Solomon; the base as an “ant farm”).
- Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, p. 51: the Firaxis reboot “done without Julian’s involvement”.
- Shacknews, “XCOM 2 release date pushed back to February 2016” (web, secondary): https://www.shacknews.com/article/91033/xcom-2-release-date-pushed-back-to-february-2016 ; “XCOM 2”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), giving the release date as 5 February 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOM_2
- Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, p. 94: review of XCOM: Chimera Squad.
- Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, pp. 6–9: interview with Gollop about Phoenix Point; issue 31, January 2020, p. 56: review of Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games).