BOARD GAMING
QThe influence of tabletop gaming in the titles Mythos
produced is huge and clear to see, especially in the studio’s
isometric titles. The interest in strategy, squad-based
combat, the use of action points, morale systems,
encumbrance systems, and so on: these are all things taken
from the world of Dungeons & Dragons, and the games
produced by SPI and Avalon Hill.MULTIPLAYER
QMultiplayer has always been important to Mythos, partly because of the
influence of tabletop gaming. This is evident in Mythos’ early games: though
it supported single-player, it was always anticipated that Laser Squad would
be played in multiplayer and Lords Of Chaos supported up to four human
players. In its last game, Magic & Mayhem, that commitment to multiplayer
remained, with focus placed on its LAN multiplayer.ROLEPLAYING
QThe desire to mix role-playing elements into the strategy
formula is something Mythos experimented with from its
outset. This includes the ability to create, upgrade and carr y
over characters into each mission, which began with Lords
Of Chaos and was carried over into UFO: Enemy Unknown,
the implementation of faction systems in X-COM Apocalypse
and the experience points system in Magic & Mayhem.FROM THE ARCHIVES: MYTHOS GAMES
I thought the real-time system was quite cool and
worked quite well. It was a mix.”B
y the time of Mythos Games next title, the
interesting Magic & Mayhem, the studio was
with a new publisher in Virgin Interactive and
again found itself being pushed in directions
that it wasn’t comfortable with. “Again, this was
supposed to be an evolution of the Chaos/Lords Of
Chaos systems, Julian explains. “You were a wizard,
you’re casting spells, a lot of it involved summoning
creatures. We started work on it in 1995 before X-COM
Apocalypse finished, but the whole team wasn’t on it
until Apocalypse had finished and then it was released in- By that stage, turn-based games were nowhere.
Everything was RTS games. The PC games market
was saturated with them. So, we felt we had to make
a real-time game. We wanted to evolve the role-playing
game aspect of it a lot more, but Virgin pushed back
very heavily. They said, ‘No we want to market this as
an RTS game, role-playing games don’t sell, there’s no
way in hell’. This, of course, was before Baldur’s Gate
was published, which proved that role-playing games do
sell, if they’re done right.
“The other focus of Magic And Mayhem, which
was a big thing for us, was network-based multiplayer,
which was a very important feature of RTS games
at that stage. I think I focused a bit too much on the
multiplayer stuff. I think the single-player suffered a bit
from a number of problems: the AI of your companion
characters, the level design being a bit repetitive in
places, a slightly incoherent story which we had to try
and get together rather quickly. It had problems.”
Mythos briefly began work on Magic And
Mayhem 2 , but given that the first didn’t sell well,
decided to return to what they did best with its next
project. The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom’s Ridge
was conceived as a PC and PS2 successor to X-COM.
You would take control of an X-COM-style organisation
fighting against an alien force that had conquered the
earth. Unfortunately, it never saw the light of day.
“The problem we had was that we signed a four-
game deal with Virgin,” Julian explains. “They had
a sequence of disasters: first they sold Westwood
Studios to EA, so they lost a major part of their
development effort; then they were sold to Interplay;
Interplay folded and sold to Titus Interactive. Titus
Interactive were not interested in Dreamland. If
the publisher decides we are not going to fund the
development of your game, we are not going to release
you from the deal, you are stuck in limbo. You can’t do
anything. We can’t go to another publisher and sell the
company. We can’t finish the game we are working
on because we’ve run out of money. The only situation
there is to liquidate the company. That was the sad end
of Mythos Games.”
Though Mythos is long gone, its legacy is not. The
studio’s approach to strategy was incredibly influential
and the formula it established has held long-lasting
appeal, as demonstrated by the success of Firaxis’
rebooted XCOM series. On his part, Julian continues
the Mythos legacy at Snapshot Games, where he
is working on Phoenix Point, the spiritual successor
to X-COM that Dreamland Chronicles never had the
chance to become.» [PC] Magic & Mayhem was My thos’ first at tempt at a true real-time strategy game.WHAT’S
OLD IS NEW
Julian Gollop explains how his new
title, Phoenix Point, will revitalise
some of Mythos old ideas“There are some elements from Dreamland Chronicles
in there. In particular, the free-aiming mode which is
an important feature of Phoenix Point where you can
shoot from the point of view of the soldier. You can target
individual body parts, like a VATS style system. What I
wanted to evolve from X-COM Apocalypse, which I thought
was cool but a bit underdeveloped, was you have this alien
threat which is overhanging the future of humanity and
yet you have different human factions which are kind of
suspicious of each other or even directly hostile to each
other. In the case of Phoenix Point, we have these three
main factions and they each have their own ideology,
structure and technology. They each have their own
solution to how to deal with the alien threat. The problem is
that the solutions they have are mutually exclusive. I can’t
reveal exactly what the endings are, but it gives the player
an interesting choice.”RETRO GAMER | 69