BETA | INTERVIEW // JULIAN GOLLOP Gollop reborn
XCom series creator Julian Gollop has made something of a return to his roots after bumping heads with big publishers. He tells Will Freeman about that journey, and shares his secrets to Kickstarter success
Gollop (below) says responding to backers and their reactions is the best way to drive your Kickstarter campaign
Where did your interest in video games begin, before it was a creative endeavour for you?
My first interest was in board games. They were a big focus in my family. Dad was into card games, and every Christmas we played loads of board games. My dad bought some every Christmas, and by ten or 11 years old I started designing them. Before any computer came along, board games were an important part of my life.
My first exposure to video games was in the arcades, with games like Defender and Robotron; a whole bunch of those kinds of things. They weren’t exactly my kind of games, because I was into strategy board games. Then, home computers came along, and it was a different proposition. I saw them as a vehicle for implementing new board game ideas. I thought then it would be possible that computers could be able to do things that were far more
awesome than board games. Introducing things like new line-of-sight mechanics and all that kind of stuff; it felt like more of a natural progression for me to get into than the arcade stuff. I wanted to implement my ideas for board games with computers. My first interest wasn’t even playing computer games. I wanted to make them.
So that would have been the early 1980s, right? What hardware were you using? It was. I started with a ZX81, which I bought from a friend at school in 1982. I got my 48k Spectrum when I left school in 1983, and I started programming on it straight away. I programmed my first game on it the instant that I got it.
My first interest wasn’t even playing
games. I wanted to make them.
Julian Gollop
Did you not have any interest in playing other computer games back then? I did buy and play other titles when I got my Spectrum, but I bought it to make a game on, and that was it.
What about learning coding back then? Are you entirely self-taught? Yes. I learned BASIC programming and Assembly language programming on my 48k Spectrum. In fact, I’d learned a bit on the ZX81 as well. I did make games with the ZX81, with my 16k RAM pack. I stuck it onto a big board of wood to prevent the RAM pack wobble crashing the thing. I had big problems with that though, with loading and saving games. That just irritated me. It wasn’t good enough for me to make games on. The 48k Spectrum was the machine I needed. It was a mean machine and, I think, the main impetuous behind that boom in bedroom coders.
When did your transition from hobbyist coder to professional developer happen? There wasn’t really a transition. The first game on my 48k Spectrum got a full release. It was published. That was a game called Nebula. I made it in BASIC and I programmed it in two or three months over the summer in 1983. It was published by Red Shift, which was a group of friends of mine that got together to publish games. I just went straight into making games for release. There was no distinction between hobbyist and professional for me then.
Over three decades after Nebula, you’re still making games. What keeps you
engaged and enthusiastic about games after all these years?
Today, it’s really the diversity. The array of genres, of business models, of audiences and so on is amazing. What’s happening now is phenomenal and really exciting to me. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about the industry than I am now. Things are innovating and changing in games so much. We’re on an up. There have been some real down phases in the industry over the years. There was the late ‘90s and early 2000s when the so-called ‘death of PC gaming’ was upon us. Then, there was the rapid increases in development costs and team sizes, when it seemed harder to make a living for indie developers.
But today, it feels very different, and very exciting. There will always be tough periods, of course, because there’s so much going on, and so many games. There’s only so much people can pay attention to. I like the fact there is that audience diversification today, and that it keeps happening. That means niches – and I guess I’m making niche strategy games – can still exist and hopefully do well. That alone is great; a good thing for games today. Games need that explosion of diversity to continue.
You seem very optimistic about games, but what about where you’ve struggled over time? When has it been tougher for you? Working with big publishers. That was difficult for me. I learned a lot working with publishers, working with Ubisoft. But it wasn’t a very creative time, and I didn’t feel I was achieving anything. It was difficult to get
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