Trivia / The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: General MacArthur never actually said the page quote.
• Prop Recycling: Some of the civilian vehicles were lifted from Mafia II, which was also published by 2K.
• Troubled Production: The game began production as a First-Person Shooter revival/reboot of the franchise, with early development beginning under Irrational Games before shifting to 2K Australia due to the former studio deciding to focus solely on Bioshock at the time. However, development would stall due to 2K Australia being brought in act as a support studio for both Bioshock and Bioshock 2, leaving only a small team available to continue work on the pitch. By 2010, production began in earnest, but timezone differences meant communication between 2K Australia and the California-based 2K Marin (acting as a support studio) was difficult, and attempts by parent company 2K Games to foster better cohesion by merging both studios under the latter's name not only failed to address the communication problems, but also led to creative clashing due to the original 2K Marin now desiring more creative input due to the merger. None of this was helped by the game's E3 2010 reveal getting a cold reception from longtime fans, including the infamous "BETRAYAL" rant that Noah Antwiler gave during the Blistered Thumbs coverage of the event.
  • Later on, Christoph Hartmann, the President of 2K Games gave an interview tried to frame the Genre Shift as necessary and deemed the strategy genre archaic ^note Hartmann basically stated that strategy games are not contemporary (outdated) and gave an analogy that Ray Charles would have updated his music style to that of Kanye West rap to keep up with the times. Within the hour, everybody on the internet pointed out that 2K Games was a publisher for Civilization, a series that gave a nice profit, and that Turn-Based Strategy games were thriving on consoles and handhelds courtesy of Disgaea, Nintendo Wars, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and others. The Ray Charles and Kanye West analogy pretty much pissed off everybody, even making those who didn't see why the fans were angry over the Genre Shift finally understand why.. The fan outrage was so thorough that 2K quickly backpedaled, getting Firaxis Games to put together XCOM: Enemy Unknown; meanwhile, The Bureau ended up getting delayed when production had a complete restart to have it act as a Third-Person Shooter prequel to the Firaxis title, with the California team now serving as the lead developers before becoming the sole developers.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game's three separate iterations are documented here.
  • The initial enemies had a very cube-based design - disintegrated humans had cubes of their flesh digitized/deleted, their energy takes the form of a roiling mass of cubes...
  • According to Spoony of The Spoony Experiment, his "BETRAYAL!" meme was meant to be referenced in the game, but ultimately wasn't.
  • According to Jon Bailey, the voice actor for the council representative in XCOM, he recorded some lines for the game but his role was cut.

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