Julian Gollop

Julian Gollop is a British video game designer and producer specialising in strategy games,^[2] who has founded and led Mythos Games, Codo Technologies and Snapshot Games. He is known best as the "man who gave birth to the X-COM franchise."^[3]

Julian Gollop was born in 1965.^[4] He came of age in Harlow, England.^[5] When he was a child, his father introduced him to many different types of games, including chess, card games, and board games.^[5][6] His family played games regularly, choosing to play games instead of going to see films.^[5] When he was about 14 years old, Gollop started playing more complex games like Dungeons & Dragons, SPI board games, and Avalon Hill board games.^[5][6] After home computers became a reality while he was in secondary school, Gollop's fascination for complex strategy games helped him recognise how computers could allow him to make and play games he enjoyed.^[5][6]

In 1982, while he was still in secondary school, Gollop started designing and programming computer games.^[1][6][7] For £25, Gollop bought his first computer, a ZX81, from a school friend to learn programming.^[6] Even though the ZX81 only had one kilobyte of memory and no real graphics processing ability, he was "amazed" at its capabilities.^[6] His first published games were Islandia and Time Lords, which he made for the BBC Micro in 1983 with programmer Andy Greene, a school friend.^[7][8][9] Gollop subsequently upgraded to a ZX Spectrum and began creating video games like Nebula in BASIC.^[6] He recognised that his future involved computers.^[6]

When Gollop went on to the London School of Economics to study sociology, he spent more time creating video games such as Chaos: The Battle of Wizards and Rebelstar than he spent studying.^[1][6] He created the first Rebelstar by himself as a two-player game and brought it to a publisher that had an office near his college.^[6] They wanted it to be a single-player game, something he had not made before,^[6] so Gollop created functional path-finding algorithms from scratch, the game got published, and it ended up doing well.^[6]

In 1988, he was joined by his brother, Nick Gollop, in founding Target Games, a video game development company that subsequently changed to Mythos Games.^[6][10] Under the Mythos name, the Gollop brothers designed and developed computer games such as Laser Squad, X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Apocalypse.^[2][10][11] Up to this time, Gollop had only made computer games for 8-bit and 16-bit home computers commonly found in Europe.^[6] It was with X-COM: UFO Defense that he first beginning making video games directly for the MS-DOS and later Microsoft Windows operating system personal computers that at the time would be sold primarily in the United States.^[6] Despite the success of these and other games, Mythos Games was forced to close in 2001 after an essential publisher was acquired by a company that withdrew commitments for The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, which Mythos Games was in the process of developing.^[6][12][13]

After closing Mythos Games, Gollops founded Codo Technologies.^[13] They were disheartened by how mainstream publishers treated them at Mythos Games, so they tried a different business model.^[13] The inaugural game of Codo Technologies in 2002 was Laser Squad Nemesis, a turn-based tactics game with asynchronous, multiplayer play-by-email features which required a monthly subscription.^[13] The Gollop brothers developed only one other game, Rebelstar: Tactical Command, before he moved to Bulgaria with his wife in 2006.^[14][15]

After moving to Bulgaria, Gollop began working for Ubisoft in Sofia as a game designer.^[6] He was promoted quickly to producer, eventually leading the development of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars for the Nintendo 3DS.^[6][16] He then became the co-creative director of Assassin's Creed III: Liberation for the PlayStation Vita.^[16] Gollop left Ubisoft in 2012 with ideas to remake games from earlier in his career.^{[14][15][16][17]}

As of 2017, Gollop works in Sofia as the CEO and chief designer for Snapshot Games, an independent video game developer he co-founded in 2013 with David Kaye.^{[3][18][19][20]} Chaos Reborn, the studio's first game, was released by Snapshot Games in 2015.^[21] He then led his company's development of Phoenix Point, which was released in December 2019.^[3][22]

IGN included him among the top hundred computer game creators of all time.^[2] In the X-COM reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Firaxis Games gives homage to Gollop in the form of a "Gollop Chamber" facility in the game.^[23] Jake Solomon, creative lead for this XCOM and its sequel, XCOM 2, credits Gollop for much of his success.^[24]

• Official website
• Julian Gollop at MobyGames
• Gameography at Mythos Games website by WayBackMachine (2002)