Julian Gollop's PC Gamer columns Did you know Julian Gollop has written four columns for us, including subjects like the creation of the deck builder genre? Find them all here.
This article was originally published in issue 313 of Edge, an extremely good magazine about computer games. Subscribe here in print or digital.
Of a generation of early British game creators, only a handful are still making games today. Still fewer have threaded their careers through so many of the tectonic shifts and revolutions in business and technology that have driven the game industry since. And even fewer also have so much still to look forward to. But Julian Gollop, designer of strategy classics Rebelstar, Laser Squad, and his most celebrated game, X-COM, can claim a career that has lived all of it.
Gollop started out coding games in BASIC while at school, translating his passion for strategy board games to computers. He’s self-published games and founded several studios. He’s watched publishers rise and fall, and worked within one of its largest. He was a pioneer of DLC, has worked with launch hardware, jumped into crowdfunding, and has explored the frontiers of developing for Early Access.
And through it all, as trends have waxed and waned, he has refined and polished to a sheen a personal fascination for a particular kind of game: turn-based squad tactics. As he continues that grand project with Phoenix Point, he looks back on the games that have brought him to today.
Rebelstar Raiders
Developer: Julian Gollop
Publisher: Red Shift
Format: ZX Spectrum
Release: 1984
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