Real ones know that the only XCOM spin off worth its salt is Hasbro’s 1999 play-by-mail banger First Alien Invasion, although that didn’t stop System Shock 2 studio Irrational from getting to work on an FPS set in the strategy series’ universe after being acquired by 2K in 2006. If your sentiments are anything like I remember a lot of the internet feeling at the time, you may get nightmarish flashbacks to the trailer below, first shown at E3 2010. The project was eventually canceled and adapted into 2013’s The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, but Irrational co-founder and current Wild Bastards studio Blue Manchu founder Jon Chey has shed some light on the FPS’s development, and it sounds like it was once a far more ambitious project. Kaiju ambitious.
Speaking to Jeremy Peel for PC Gamer, Chey says the initial spark was “What if XCOM wasn’t a turn-based game? What if you were one of the operatives, as opposed to just clicking on a map with them?” It’s a thought that might seem risible to purists, but looking back on that old trailer with the appreciation I have for Irrational now, I can’t help but see much of the backlash as a reaction not to the game itself, but to the fact that XCOM hadn’t had a strategy entry since, well, Microprose’s 1999 play-by-email banger First Alien Invasion.
After releasing two Freedom Force games, designer Ed Orman says that they’d “realised, with the advent of first-person, that turn-based was a bit of a niche. You’re not going to hit the big numbers. And we were working on BioShock, which is a first-person shooter. So if we’re doing that, why don’t we have a crack at a first-person version of XCOM?”
An initial concept was to translate the idea of managing a squad into an FPS, says Chey.
“First-person shooters have really struggled with the notion of managing a group of people. You have your AI companions who run around in front of you and get shot, or they run off and do something else, or they kite the enemy into attacking you when you don’t want them to. It’s very, very hard to make them behave sensibly and give you a feeling that you’re managing them and not get overwhelmed.”
Another idea was the aforementioned Kaiju, he continues, though this was eventually abandoned because “we felt it was getting too far away from what XCOM was supposed to be about”.
The whole game would be about the scale disparity, that you were little human soldiers. The aliens have brought these huge creatures as part of their invasion force, and your job is to take them out. And you have to do that by actually, Shadow of the Colossus style, getting onto them and running around, planting a bomb at the base of their spine to blow their head off.
On the response to the creature designs shown in that E3 trailer, Chey says “People who loved XCOM wanted to see the same creatures from the tactical game in first-person, and duke it out with a Muton and a Sectoid. They may not be the most original monster designs ever, but they’re part of what people love.”
Chey eventually left Irrational in 2009, and the project became The Bureau. Do read the full PC Gamer piece for more. “The Bureau, swiftly stripped of its thematic threads and charm, begins with a dismal and disheartening room by room tour of dull third person shooting, sectoid bullet sponges and explosive barrels,” was wot Adam Smith thunk at the time. “As squads are introduced and tactical options expand, the game finds its feet, but they are encased in heavy workboots rather than natty dress shoes. Even at its best, The Bureau stumbles from mission to mission rather than striding”. Hey, at least some people had fun.