X-COM creator Julian Gollop discusses his most important games

Summary

Julian Gollop's PC Gamer columnsDid you know Julian Gollop has written four columns for us, including subjects like the creation of the deck builder genre? Find them all here. This article was originally published in issue 313 of Edge, an extremely good magazine about computer games. Subscribe here in print or digital. Of a generation of early British game creators, only a handful are still making games today. Still fewer have threaded their careers through so many of the tectonic shifts and revolutions in business and technology that have driven the game industry since. And even fewer also have so much still to look forward to. But Julian Gollop, designer of strategy classics Rebelstar, Laser Squad, and his most celebrated game, X-COM, can claim a career that has lived all of it.Gollop started out coding games in BASIC while at school, translating his passion for strategy board games to computers. He’s self-published games and founded several studios. He’s watched publishers rise and fall, and worked within one of its largest. He was a pioneer of DLC, has worked with launch hardware, jumped into crowdfunding, and has explored the frontiers of developing for Early Access.And through it all, as trends have waxed and waned, he has refined and polished to a sheen a personal fascination for a particular kind of game: turn-based squad tactics. As he continues that grand project with Phoenix Point, he looks back on the games that have brought him to today.Rebelstar RaidersDeveloper: Julian Gollop Publisher: Red Shift Format: ZX Spectrum Release: 1984"Rebelstar Raiders came about because I wanted to implement some of the board games that I played years earlier, like Sniper and Squad Leader, which were all about squad-based tactics and true line-of-sight shooting. I thought it’d be great for a computer to do this instead of having to calculate it by hand, but I was not the best programmer in the world. Rebelstar Raiders had a one-screen map and each soldier was a single lit...