X.COM

UFO: Enemy Unknown, or X-COM: UFO Defense as it was known in the United States, started off as a sequel to Laser Squad, Julian Gollop’s 1988 ZX Spectrum game. “I had a story set where corporations rule the world, and you acted almost like a mercenary force for these different corporations,” says Julian. It was primarily focused on MarsSec, the Mars Security Corporation, and Julian and his team at Mythos Games took an Atari ST demo of Laser Squad II to MicroProse UK in 1991. But the publisher felt it wasn’t quite right.

“What they wanted was a game that could compete with Civilization,” recalls Julian. He surmises that MicroProse UK, a subsidiary of the US company, suffered from “a bit of an inferiority complex because they were regarded as the ‘toy division’. They were doing a lot of conversions, and they want to do something more serious”. MicroProse US had released Civilization in 1991 to huge acclaim, and the UK office wanted its own slice of the pie. And it pushed Mythos to focus their game on an alien invasion.

“Both [assistant publisher] Pete Moreland and [game designer] Steven Hand at MicroProse were big fans of Gerry Anderson’s UFO series,” says Julian. “They said ‘let’s make it like Gerry Anderson’s UFO’, so I went back and started to do some research. I bought a few video cassettes from the series, and the thing about it that struck me was they had this idea of the aliens infiltrating planet Earth, and you had these three levels of defence. So the first level of defence was these Moon-based interceptors, and then the second-level defence was these airborne interceptors in Earth’s atmosphere, and the third-level defence was these ground-based interceptors. So they try to intercept these flying saucers, but inevitably of course they always failed.

“I then went on to research contemporary UFO folklore, for want of a better word, and one particular book which was very influential for