

As he grew up, Gollop made the same realization that many of his peers did: The growing power of personal computers would be perfect for simplifying and streamlining some of the complexities of tabletop gaming. Family night centered around the board game and around the age of 14, Gollop found himself getting into the more complex fare published by Avalon Hill, and Dungeons and Dragons. Like many who would find themselves designing strategy games in the 1980s, Julian Gollop had a childhood filled with board games. As with any story, we are going to start at the beginning and dive into Julian Gollop’s life as a young game developer. You have the dark times after Apocalypse, and then you have the Current Age, with the 2012 reboot. You have the original series, starting with the release of the game from 1994, through Apocalypse.

You have the pre-history, which consists of Julian Gollop’s early life and career as a Game Dev. There are four distinct eras in the history of the XCOM franchise. Welcome to Arcadology: The History of XCOM. Today we are going to journey through the history of the X-Com franchise, beginning with Julian Gollop’s earliest inspirations and works, through the original series, up to the War of the Chosen. UFO: Enemy Unknown, or as most would eventually know it: X-Com: UFO Defense was the result of an iterative development process for Julian Gollop and his brother Nick, spanning a decade of prior work, and the game kicked off a cherished, though oft-mishandled franchise. The games both touch on a primal emotion however, defense against the unknown and fear itself. With the exception of aliens, Julian Gollop’s strategy game, UFO: Enemy Unknown has absolutely no gameplay commonalities with Eugene Jarvis’s arcade side-scrolling magnum opus, Defender. Protecting something precious from attack is much more visceral…” -Eugene Jarvis “The idea of defence as opposed to offence is so much more emotional.
