STUDIO PROFILE

SNAPSHOT GAMES

Inspired by a close-knit dev scene, the man behind XCOM has a fresh strategy

By Paul Weedon

Having relocated to Bulgaria in 2006, Julian Gollop, the creator of XCOM, planned to take it easy, but the game-making bug eventually caught up with him. Still brimming with ideas, but realising he couldn’t realise them alone, he took a role as a game designer at Ubisoft’s then-new offices in Sofia. “They were doing some quite pioneering things where you had multiple studios cooperating on these very big projects,” Gollop remembers. “There’s a lot of innovation taking place within large companies, but very little of it [is seen by] the outside world.”

Over the next decade Gollop would lead development on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars and Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, but by the mid 2010s he was once again feeling restless. A certain crowdfunding campaign had caught his attention. “I had heard of Kickstarter before, but Double Fine Adventure got a lot of traction,” Gollop says, reflecting on the money-raising effort that would eventually produce Broken Age. When Double Fine was able to raise more than £2.41 million in a month, Gollop was inspired. “Kickstarter seemed like an ideal way to kind of bootstrap a studio, so I thought maybe I could try that.”

Armed with a vision – a new studio, where he could build on the core ideas that drove his previous projects – Gollop left the relative security of fulltime employment. He was eager to revisit XCOM, the series he had co-created in 1994, but the rights were tied up with 2K Games. So, rather than his most famous work, Gollop first turned his attention to creating a remake of Chaos: The Battle Of Wizards, the turn-based ZX Spectrum tactics title he’d developed in 1985. “As it had appeared a few times on cover tapes in the UK press over the years, the game had gained a sort of wider notoriety,” Gollop recalls. “I tentatively decided to try that.”