Video Games

By Patrick S. Baker

Part Three

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

Released on 20 August 2013, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is technically a prequel and spin-off of Enemy Unknown, not a direct sequel, as it was under development in 2006, before Enemy Unknown was, but the development was both lengthy and fraught with difficulties.

The game started as a collaboration between two of 2K Games development studios, one in Marin County, California and the other in Canberra, Australia. The game was conceived by the 2K Australia team as a combined mystery game and first-person shooter. Tn the game the player was tasked by a secret government agency with photographing mysterious aliens and then researching what they are and what they were doing. However, the Marin team wanted a third-person shooter that focused on teamwork with more tactical elements. 2K Australia was removed from the project because of the disagreements between the two studios. The Marin team renamed the game, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, and moved forward with their ideas.

By Patrick S. Baker

Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles

Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles (SPII:MB) was released in November 1996, just one year and two months after the release of the original Steel Panthers (now referred to as Steel Panthers I or SPI).  Grigsby had two main goals while developing the new game; one was to improve the animation and the other was to let the players simulate most of the armed conflicts, both major and minor, historical or hypothetical, throughout the world, from 1950 to 1999.

SPII:MB was more than just a reskin of the first game. Grigsby retained the game engine of the original, but the database was completely overhauled with a thousand modern units from 40 different countries, and non-state actors, all modeled in great detail and having characteristics unique to each time period and nationality. For example, helicopters, both scout and attack were added to the weapons inventory and were placed under the players’ direct control.

Airplanes were still in a support mode, but were now equipped with ordinance like precision-guided weapons, napalm, and/or cluster-bombs. Ground forces were kitted out with an assortment of heat-seeking and radar-guided Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) to counter the air threat, and so on.

By Patrick S. Baker

Wars and soldiers are similar across time and space.  So, it is also that war games are similar across time and space. Often the best war games are not the most innovative, but rather present the familiar elements of simulated war in a way which is compelling and engaging. The ones that are both familiar and gripping give us, the players, those rare war games which are both easy to play and understand, but hard to master. The Steel Panthers games fit right in that hard-to-find sweet spot.

Steel Panthers started development in May 1994 and was released in September 1995. The game was designed and programmed by Gray Grigsby and Keith Brors and were produced and marketed by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI).

X-COM Franchise Retrospective (Part Four)

By Patrick S. Baker

Intellectual property (IP), licensing and copyright laws are complex and confusing, especially when it comes to properties that were created under contract, or created by one party for a second party, or developed by multiple entities. Further, the video game industry was like the Wild West in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with companies starting up, closing, buying and selling other companies, and also trading, assigning and purchasing IPs at a furious rate. All of which begs the question of how did the IP that was X-COM get from MicroProse in 2001 to Firaxis Games?

By Patrick S. Baker

X-COM: Interceptor

MicroProse and Mythos stopped working together, but MicroProse ended up with the X-COM license. Dave Ellis was assigned as chief game developer for MicroProse’s X-COM games. Ellis was the company’s in-house guru on the franchise, having worked in quality assurance and also, he had written strategy guides for the first two games. Inspired to expand the X-COM Universe by LucasArts’ Star Wars games, Ellis determined to create a game using a flight simulator engine and set the new sequel during one of the previous X-COM games. The idea was to let the player experience the events of an earlier game from a different viewpoint. This concept would become X-COM: Interceptor.

Throughout the development process Ellis and his team received fan input from what they referred to (perhaps not so politely) as the “Cult of X-COM” through an open online form and public e-mail. When fans learned that the game was going to be a flight simulator and not a turn-based squad-level combat game, accusations flew that MircoProse was just slapping the X-COM name on something as a marketing gimmick. MicroProse strongly denied this.

By Patrick S. Baker

X-COM: Terror from the Deep

With copies of the first X-COM game flying off the shelves, MicroProse, now merged with Spectrum Holobyte to form MicroProse, Inc., wanted a sequel to the game in just six months. The Gollop brothers hesitated at this proposal, declaring that all could be done in this timeframe was changing sprites and re-using the original code.

So, instead of developing the sequel the Gollops licensed the game code to MicroProse, that would produce the sequel, named X-COM: Terror from the Deep, in-house. Meanwhile, the Gollops went to work on what would become the third game in the series.

Terror was released on 1 June 1995 for DOS PCs and then ported to the PlayStation the next year. The game tells the story of the Second Alien War, some forty years after the First Alien War. Following the destruction of the Alien Brain on Mars, extraterrestrials under the Earth’s seas awaken after millions of years. These new aliens begin to terrorize ships and ports, and abducting humans. The X-COM organization is revived to fight this new alien menace from the deep.

By Patrick S. Baker

The mid-1990s was the Axial Age for personal computer games. Titles like Civilization, Steel Panthers, Panzer General and X-COM: UFO Defense (known outside North America, as UFO: Enemy Unknown) were released with staggering success. These seminal games essential created a whole entertainment genre of PC strategy games.

Perhaps the most important of all these was the first X-COM game. X-COM: UFO Defense is still considered to be one of the most influential games ever made. Further, some have argued that X-COM is not just a franchise, but is actually its own genre. In short, to say “X-COM game” is to define a game type, like “first person shooter” or “real-time strategy game”.

The first X-COM game was created by the Gollop brothers, Julian and Nick, under the auspices of the game design studio they founded, Mythos Games, in partnership with game publisher, MircoProse.  Julian had been developing games since the early 1980s, two of his earlier games are direct precursors to X-COM. 

By Patrick S. Baker

The first phase of the Close Combat game franchise came to an end in 2000 with the fifth game in the series, Close Combat V: Invasion: Normandy. Business and management issues left the franchise’s future in doubt, with only three developers still at Atomic still working on it.

Then came the United States Marine Corps (USMC) to the rescue. Militaries worldwide have used “serious games” as training tools ever since the early 19^th Century when Kriegsspiel (wargame in German) was created for the Prussian Army. The American Military was impressed by the Close Combat games, especially the realistic physiological modeling. So, in 2003 the USMC reached out to Atomic to see about building a Close Combat game as a training aid.

In 2004 the USMC and Atomic partnership produced Close Combat: Marines: “A tactical decision-making simulation of modern warfare”, the game was released in the September 2004 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. It was used as a tactical instructional tool for junior leaders. A civilian version of the game was released in 2004 as Road to Baghdad. This was the first post-World War Two entry in the franchise and the only one without Close Combat in the title.

By Mitch Reed

Last week the wargame community was saddened by the news that John Tiller passed away after his fight with cancer. I started to realize how much of an impact he had on our community and how much his games meant to me over the last 26 years. I want to go over the many titles John has brought us and how he really transformed PC wargaming.

By Patrick S. Baker

1996’s Close Combat was a roaring commercial and critical success. Based on that accomplishment, in 1997, Atomic and Microsoft released a direct sequel: Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far. This follow-on game was set during 1944’s Operation: Market Garden. Close Combat II (CC II) featured not just American and German army units, but also British, Polish and Waffen-SS units.

The game had the same mechanics and modeling as the first Close Combat game, but with better graphics. CC II was as well received as the original game. The two Close Combat titles outsold Atomic Games previous releases by a factor of ten and CC II was Atomic’s most successful game by far, to date.

The game was also favorably reviewed with one reviewer saying that A Bridge Too Far was “improved in every way over Atomic’s original Close Combat.” The game was voted seventh in GameSpy’s “Top Ten Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time”. It was an Editor’s Choice and runner-up as the Best Wargame of the Year from PC Gamer Magazine. It was also a runner-up for Computer Gaming World’s 1997 “Wargame Game of the Year” award. The Computer Game Developers Conference nominated CC II for its “Best Strategy/Wargame Spotlight Award.”