X-Com: UFO Defense

What did Firaxis leave behind when adapting alien-invasion strategy for the modern world?

- JEREMY PEEL

Nobody rushed to disagree with Julian Gollop when, in 2017, he declared that XCOM had become its own genre. By that time, after all, Ubisoft and Nintendo had backed the XCOM blueprint, while Gollop himself had raised $760,000 to develop his own spiritual successor. Months later, Xbox would announce Gears Tactics. Yet Gollop, a mild-mannered Brit who had seen his fair share of failure, was no egotist. The designer placed credit firmly with Firaxis, the studio which had revised his formula for the modern age. Gollop himself was happy to follow in Firaxis’ slipstream, incorporating the friendlier touches of the rebooted XCOM into his own work. “I am really excited for the future,” he wrote in a PC Gamer column. “I am not alone any more.”

Thirty years ago, it was a different story. Not only was XCOM not a genre, but game genres were amorphous, lacking the focus brought by a budding PC platform and the rise of PlayStation. Games were unidentified objects, and few were stranger than the project that mixed boardgame battlefield simulation with Civilization’s global sweep.