J
ulian Gollop has always been interested in a
certain kind of game. Over the course of his
career, he’s continued to riff-on, experiment
and evolve a series of key concepts, refining
his ideas around turn-based battles, squad systems,
and role-playing with each release, giving birth to the
legendary X-COM series along the way.
“It comes from my interest in wargaming and board
games,” Julian explains. “I was pretty heavily into the
board games that were published by SPI and Avalon Hill.
By and large, these games didn’t exist on the computer.
That’s what I wanted to do. To recreate some of the
things I was experiencing in the board games and make
use of what the computer can do. A computer can
check lines of sight, it can do all the calculations for you,
which I thought was awesome.”
This manifested in the early games that Julian
worked on while at secondary school and college at the» [ Z X Spectrum] In Laser Squad, you can see some of the
systems that would go on to make UFO such a success.We’ve captured
cofounder Julian Gollop
for interrogation; time to
reverse engineer the story
of Mythos Games,
the strategy giant
that gave birth to the
legendary X-COM
Words by Paul Walker-EmigLondon School of Economics, such as Chaos: The Battle
Of Wizards and Rebelstar, released in 1985 and 1986
respectively, where board game influences are evident
in the use of action points, morale and encumbrance
systems. Given that Julian had put most of his energy
into developing these games rather than studying
at LSE, he decided to drop out and form his own
company, Target Games.
“We set up in 1987 with a friend of mine called
Ian Terry, and my Dad,” Julian tells us. “Ian left the
company after a year, my brother [Nick Gollop] joined
me and then we decided to set up a new company,
Mythos Games, which was now me, my brother
and my Dad.” During Target Games brief history, the
company finished development on Rebelstar II and
began work on what would become Mythos Game’s
first release: Laser Squad.
“Laser Squad was a follow up, really an evolution,
along a similar path from Rebelstar Raiders to Rebelstar
and Rebelstar II,” Julian explains. Indeed, Laser Squad
was, like Rebelstar II before it, another game where you
controlled a squad, had to manage your action points,
make judgements based on the percentage chance of
your shots hitting and so on. However, it also began
playing with ideas that would come to define the kind of
strategy games that Mythos made.
“What I wanted to do with Laser Squad was bring
more RPG elements into it,” Julian tells us. “The fact
that you can equip your squad this time, before going
into battle, and have a sequence of missions which
roughly followed a story. Although, you couldn’t carry
your characters over from one battle into the next,
which would have been really cool – that’s something
I did for Lords Of Chaos that was a bit too much of a
stretch for Laser Squad. The intention was that it had
stuff that kind of made it into X-COM – the idea that
you’ve got this squad, they’re fighting battles and you’re
improving them as you’re going on. That didn’t quite
make it into Laser Squad but we still had the multiple
scenario format, we had the equipping system, the line64 | RETRO GAMER