Trivia / X-COM: UFO Defense

• Defictionalization: There's a page on Instructables detailing how to make an electro-flare.
• Development Hell: The original game was almost killed twice. The first time was the Gollop brothers' fault when they submitted a confusing, short design document to MicroProse. The second time, Spectrum Holobyte outright cancelled it, but MicroProse UK more or less ignored them; when the publisher was looking for a March 1994 release title, MicroProse UK stated, Hey, look what we've got! (The Gollop brothers themselves were not told of the cancellation. Julian Gollop only learned of it two decades later at GDC!)
• Dummied Out:
  • Certain enemy types (such as the bug alien from the original box cover) were removed during development, as were The Men in Black, who went unused due to MicroProse's (aborted) plans for a MIB-themed standalone game.
  • One of the many unused artifacts is the "Alien Reproduction" item and research line. Funny considering the resultant Half-Human Hybrids wound up playing a key part in Apocalypse.
• Follow the Leader: Many of what would become X-COM's staples came from an executive mandate by Pete Moreland, head of MicroProse UK. The Gollop brothers were originally going to make a sequel to Laser Squad, but Moreland requested they borrow elements from Microprose USA's smash hit Civilization, namely research trees and the Civipedia (which led to the Monster Compendium known as UFOpedia), as well as rooting the game on Earth. He also wanted to deepen the tactical elements. Lastly, because he was such a fan of the British TV show UFO (1970), he suggested that they make it about an alien invasion.
• Good Bad Bugs: Older versions of UFO Defense will refill partial ammo clips that have been ejected from their weapons.
• Porting Disaster: X-COM: UFO Defense for the Amiga AGA, partly due to using a joypad instead of a mouse. The main issue, however, is the fact that the CD32 only had 1 KB of memory available for save data. Not only is the player limited to building a single base(!), the save data takes up all your memory, preventing the player from creating a new save file without deleting it.
• Science Marches On: X-COM makes use of a Mineral MacGuffin called Elerium, an otherwordly element which forms in yellow crystals and has an atomic number of 115. Among other interesting properties, it is vital to the construction of anti-gravity drives. This was probably based on claims made about element-115 in the 1980s by a UFO enthusiast with the splendidly appropriate name of Bob Lazar. These claims were considered exceedingly dubious even at the time, but it wasn't until element-115 was successfully synthesised that they were fully debunked.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As mentioned above, the game was originally going to be a pure tactical combat game set on an alien world. Executives demanded the addition of a larger strategical game to tie things together (which birthed the Geoscape and research/engineering segments, among other things), and asked that it be set on the familiar setting of Earth.
  • Among Julian Gollop's original draft of alien species list, of which only the Sectoids actually made it into the game, was a The Men in Black type enemy, which Microprose nixed because they wanted to make a separate game about the Men in Black. The concept was recycled somewhat as the Thin Men for Enemy Unknown.

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