FROM THE ARCHIVES: MYTHOS GAMES
of sight system – that was not in Rebelstar, but we put
it in Laser Squad, which was a big innovation. You could
only see enemies if your soldiers had spotted them.
That allowed for sneak attacks and deceptions and all
the rest, which was very cool in multiplayer.”
J
ulian tells us that the idea of the hidden
movement system, a core part of Laser Squad
and Mythos’ games to follow, as well as the
many titles influenced by the company’s games,
was something he first experimented with in tabletop
gaming. “I actually designed a game which was based
on hidden line of sight systems, but it required a referee.
Each player would indicate where they’re moving their
characters, the referee would take the orders from
the players, then fill in the parts of the map that they
could see and if they’d spotted an enemy. It was pretty
cumbersome as a board game but worked beautifully as
a computer game.”
Mythos’ next game, Lords Of Chaos, moved away
from sci-fi theming that was found in Laser Squad,
but it continued developing the idea of blending RPG
elements with strategy game design. “It’s a follow-up
to Chaos,” Julian elaborates on the 1990 release.
“The same basic idea that you’re a wizard casting
spells and summoning creatures. This time, definitely
a much more role-playing focus because you can carry
a wizard character over from one mission to the next.
» [PC] You can pause combat during X-COM: Apocalypse’s combat
and issue orders, blending real-time and turn-based st yles.
» [PC] UFO my thology gripped the world in the Nineties, as evidenced by the
success of the X-Files. UFO: Enemy Unknown
tapped into that fascination.It was a much more involved game and in the initial
design I wanted to create procedurally generated maps
but that was a little bit of a stretch too far for a humble
48k Spectrum. There were all sorts of objects and
items you could find around the map, you had to get
keys to unlock treasure chests and doors, you had to
find ingredients for potions and make the potions, the
creatures you summon, if they could use weapons, they
could find weapons and use them, you could enchant
the weapons, and so on. It was quite involved.”
Julian and Mythos Games’ evolving approach to
strategy was well received by critics in these early years,
but was the company rewarded financially? No, not
really,” Julian responds. “With Lords Of Chaos it took a
lot longer, because there were lots of versions, but our
publisher Blade Software had financial problems of their
own, so they were not able to produce enough units for
the distributors, who were demanding, you know, ‘we
ordered this amount and we didn’t get any’. We were
a bit alarmed by this, so we broke our relationship with
the publisher and decided to work on a prototype for
Laser Squad 2.” The decision would prove to beWHERE ARE
THEY NOW?
Juilan Gollop
QJuilan is now working
in Sofia, Bulgaria where
he has cofounded the
company Snapshot Games.
The studio’s first game
was a return to the Chaos
series: Chaos Reborn.
Snapshot’s next title, Phoenix Point, is due to
release this year. The game is a continuation of
the X-COM legacy, with Snapshot promising deep
strategic gameplay, research trees, scavenging,
huge boss monsters and mutating aliens that
evolve to respond to your tactics.RETRO GAMER | 65