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The Truth is Out There, Part 2: The Power of Belief

Chris Carter.

When I was sitting in my office in my surf trunks, barefoot, playing ball with the dog every twenty minutes, writing the pilot for The X-Files, I never imagined that they would be making X-Files underwear and that 10,000 people a week would be logging onto the Internet to talk about the show…

— Chris Carter, 1995

Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, couldn’t have been more different from your stereotypical scrawny, pasty-skinned, basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist. Born in 1956 in a suburb of Los Angeles, he was more like your stereotypical beach bum, who learned to surf almost before he learned to walk. Upon graduating from university with a degree in journalism, he went to work for Surfing magazine, rising to the post of senior editor while still in his mid-twenties. “I went around the world surfing,” he says. It was in every way a charmed life for a young man.

Not long after getting married in 1983, however, he started to think about finding a less travel-intensive career, one that might be able to sustain him even after his hardcore surfing days were behind him. He decided to try his hand at screenwriting; he was certainly living in the right part of the world for it, after all. And once again, he proved lucky or talented at his chosen profession — or, more likely, both. He broke into the business in remarkably short order, writing scripts for various TV movies along with other piecework. His longest-lasting gig was in the writers’ room of Rags to Riches, a quirky but wholesome hybrid of musical, sitcom, and family drama that ran for two seasons on NBC in 1987 and 1988. Such light-hearted, borderline saccharine material gave no hint that he had something like The X-Files in him. “I actually became known as a comedy writer,” he says. “That’s what people kept wanting me to write.”

It’s a longstanding truism in television that every workaday writer in the field dreams secretly — or not so secretly — of having a show all his own. Chris Carter was no exception. He thought his best chance of fulfilling his dream lay at Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox network, an upstart that was trying to claw out a space for itself alongside CBS, NBC, and ABC, the Big Three in American broadcast television ever since the era of the idiot box began. Fox had enjoyed its greatest success to date with programming that was a little too edgy for the stodgier established networks, but which the advertiser-coveted younger demographics adored. Shows like the rapier-witted adult-oriented cartoon The Simpsons and the decidedly non-wholesome family sitcom Married… with Children were the necessary antidote to NBC’s sugary-sweet Cosby Show, the biggest program of all on American television. Carter thought that a horror series might fit in well with the Fox lineup.

As has been recounted many times over the years since, the inspiration that started Carter down the road to The X-Files was a television obscurity from 1974, a series called Kolchak: The Night Stalker that had been allowed just one season of twenty episodes on ABC before it was cancelled. Despite its short run, its tales of a lone Chicago journalist exploring an underworld of vampires, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night, whilst dealing with an almost equally unfriendly city government that didn’t want any of his horrifying discoveries to come to light, had struck a deep chord in the young Chris Carter. “Basically, I just wanted to do something as scary as I remembered The Night Stalker being when I was in my teens,” he says. “I remembered being scared out of my wits by that show as a kid, and I realized that there just wasn’t anything scary now on television.” It seemed like a gap that Fox, which reveled in boundary-pushing content, might be thrilled to fill.

There were no aliens in The Night Stalker, nor in Carter’s earliest vision of The X-Files. Soon enough, though, a friend clued him into the underground world of ufology. Perusing the reams of poorly xeroxed newsletters, badly dubbed videocassettes, and obscure Usenet newsgroups that were the loosely organized cult’s primary means of communication, Carter realized that here was a whole ready-made milieu and mythology for his show, which could make it more than just a series of one-off encounters with the creepy and paranormal. For he wasn’t such a fan of The Night Stalker that he couldn’t see its limitations: “I think having a ‘monster of the week’ reduced the longevity of its storytelling capabilities.”

Soap operas had been indulging in long story arcs that spanned many episodes or even seasons for decades. Other genres of shows, however, had generally felt compelled to return the situation to a status quo at the end of every episode. Only recently had that begun to change. Still unsure how much they could get away with asking of their audience, most shows that were experimenting with longer story arcs were hedging their bets by mixing them up with more traditional, strictly episodic storytelling. The X-Files would be no exception. It would wind up producing “mythology” episodes about the alien menace only about one-quarter to one-third of the time, then rounding out the rest of its seasons with mostly self-contained “monster of the week” episodes.

The truth or fiction of the conspiracy theories from which Carter borrowed so liberally was not so much unknown as irrelevant to him. A child of the Watergate era for whom distrust of authority came naturally, he was drawn to write aliens into his show for the same reason that, one has to suspect, so many other people were writing newsletters about them: because they felt so simultaneously dangerous and alluring, in such marked contrast to most government scandals. Whatever else you could say about them, the Roswell crash, flying saucers, alien abductions, and the government coverups surrounding them all were a hell of a lot more fun than the Iran-Contra affair, the current White House’s scandal du jour.

As if that wasn’t grounds enough, Carter also had good reason to believe that the presence of aliens would make it easier to sell The X-Files to the suits at Fox. In the fall of 1991, just as he was beginning to put his pitch together, Fox debuted a program called Sightings, at first as a series of sporadically appearing specials. When these became unexpectedly popular, it was turned into a regularly scheduled weekly show in April of 1992, “investigating” all of the usual suspects: crop circles, cattle mutilations, alien-abduction accounts, and of course Roswell. Sightings was, in other words, the seed from which eventually sprang the alien-autopsy “documentary” — the start of a thriving cottage industry of cheaply made pseudo-documentaries dealing with aliens, conspiracies, and the paranormal that carefully avoided making claims to incontrovertible Truth but that always displayed a bias toward the believers’ rather than the skeptics’ side of the ledger. “Marketed correctly, these productions managed to be simultaneously authentic and phony, news and anti-news, without that feeling like any kind of contradiction,” writes television historian Emily Nussbaum. A scripted show dealing with the same subject matter, thought Chris Carter, might do even better.

Any such program could all too easily have become as kitschy and ephemeral as the likes of Sightings. It was the range of other influences which Carter brought to bear on The X-Files that would allow the show to transcend its humble origins, to become a shaper of the zeitgeist rather than a mere symptom of it. All were unusual to see on network television of the time: the Universal monster movies of the 1930s; film noir of the 1940s; the sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s; the cinéma vérité documentaries of the 1960s; the cynical post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. To this list can be added blockbuster movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Silence of the Lambs (The X-Files liked its serial killers almost as much as it did aliens), and especially David Lynch’s heavily serialized, surrealistic television series Twin Peaks, which in its eight-episode first season in 1990 seemed to demonstrate that you could get away with asking a great deal indeed of your audience before it fell off the tightrope it had been walking and tumbled messily to earth during season two. Additionally, the television critic and historian Emily St. James makes a case for the influence of, of all things, the romantic “dramedy” series Moonlighting, which had a habit of upending all of its own formulas and indulging its experimental side for entire episodes at a time, taking “sidelong swerves into absurdism.” (I think St. James makes a reasonable case, although I do also think that these qualities are more in evidence a bit later in The X-Files’s run than they are at the beginning.)

As it evolved in its creator’s mind, The X-Files came to center on a tiny branch of the FBI whose assigned beat is “unusual” — read, apparently paranormal — cases. The two agents assigned to the branch were to be named Fox Mulder — the sort of name that could exist only in fiction, whose first part was an apparent homage to the network that would hopefully deign to permit him to exist — and Dana Scully. It was hardly unusual in network television at the time to throw an attractive man and woman together in a working relationship replete with will-they-or-won’t-they sexual tension — see the aforementioned Moonlighting — but Carter did defy gender stereotypes by making the male Mulder the credulous member of the pair and the female Scully the hard-eyed skeptic. Together, they would take on the sorts of cases that none of their colleagues would touch, which would often place them in conflict with shadowy forces inside their own government and their own agency who would prefer that any Truth that happened to be Out There remain hidden.

In December of 1992, Fox gave Carter a fine Christmas present indeed by ordering a pilot episode of the show. Now the pace increased exponentially.

And now Chris Carter got very, very lucky, by finding two stars for his show that were absolutely perfect. “We lucked out getting the chemistry we did,” he says. If anything, this is understating the case. For it really is difficult to overstate how important David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were to The X-Files’s success. They were the special sauce that the show’s imitators would never be able to duplicate.

The 32-year-old David Duchovny, who earned the part of Fox Mulder, was an up-and-comer in Hollywood who was then best known for Red Shoe Diaries, a soft-core erotic series of the sort that flourished on late-night cable television in those days before the Internet put pornography on tap for everyone at the click of a mouse. He was almost scarily good-looking, the living embodiment of the phrase “tall, dark, and handsome,” but his secret weapon was his way with a desert-dry one-liner that undercut his Homecoming King face and figure. Like the character he played, Duchovny was smart as well as beautiful. He had been hard at work on a Yale PhD in English literature when he had stumbled into a casting call for a beer commercial at age 27 and emerged with a full-blown case of the acting bug.

The X-Files writing staff would have great fun with the contradictions in Duchovny’s alter ego in the years to come, making Mulder a guy who lived from paycheck to paycheck in a shabby little apartment, with no social life and no women in his orbit beyond his platonic partner Scully — unless you counted the actresses who starred in the pornography that, it would be slyly hinted more and more, he consumed voraciously when not trolling the Internet for tales of alien abductions. Many an X-Files guest star would shake his head that a guy who looked like that could live like this. Duchovny himself, whose choice of projects before and after The X-Files make it clear that he wasn’t afraid of indulging the id, kind of thought the same. “I’d like to see Mulder die one day,” he said once to a journalist. “Not soon, but one day. He should get laid, and then die.”

Gillian Anderson, who was cast as Dana Scully, was even less experienced than her counterpart, being just 24 years old at the time, newly arrived in Hollywood with a freshly minted acting degree from DePaul University and only a few theatrical credits to her name as a professional. A certain superficial resemblance to Jodie Foster, who had played a young FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs, may very well have been a factor in her casting. Even if so, though, she quickly proved herself to be much more than just another pretty face. Granted, she was a bit stiff on occasion in the early episodes — the other cast and crew speak tactfully of a “learning curve” on the set for this actress who had hardly ever stood before a camera before — but she would find her groove as Scully soon enough. Gender dynamics being what they are, it would have been easy for the relentlessly logical and scientific Scully to come off as a shrewish spoilsport, but this is seldom the case. Anderson learned to make Scully her own, finding deep currents of warmth and humor beneath her scientific surface. A 2022 survey of American women with careers in STEM fields found that an extraordinary 63 percent of those of them who grew up during the heyday of The X-Files saw Dana Scully as a role model.

By a few seasons in, it would be obvious that these two characters who rarely touched one another and never called one another by their first names nevertheless loved one another in a far more believable way than the vast majority of couples who were doing the horizontal tango with regularity on television screens. They made a great team on and off the job. As the academic critic Erin Siodmak has written, “Scully kept it together while Mulder was overemotional, his judgment clouded by his obsessive search for the truth. She eye-rolled his quirks and most absurd theories, and she mocked his masculinity and bravado. Mulder respected Scully’s intellect, valued her work as a scientist, and offered the safety to be vulnerable without judgment.” I can’t emphasize enough how important this relationship was to The X-Files; it was the grace note the show needed to transcend its ripped-from-the-tabloids formula. I like to think it might have proved enlightening to some of the many young male fans of the show, by demonstrating how vibrant and exciting a relationship of equals between a smart man and a smart woman can actually be, whether they’re having sex or not. Be that as it may, Mulder and Scully are widely and deservedly numbered today among the most iconic onscreen couples in television history.

Needless to say, though, Fox had no idea what the series and its stars would become in these, their formative stages. The network’s big bet for the fall 1993 season was The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., a big-budget, high-concept, tongue-in-cheek steampunk Western crafted in the spirit of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The X-Files, by contrast, was envisioned as little more than a quickie spinoff from Sightings and its ilk. The budget Chris Carter was given to film his pilot reflected this.

“We came to Canada for the forests,” Carter would later say. In reality, that was only the smaller part of its appeal; the bigger draw was the money that could be saved. The pilot’s script involved, inevitably, an alien abduction, which it described as taking place in a forest in Oregon. Unable to find a spot that fit the bill in Southern California, and unable to afford a location shoot in Oregon, Carter hit upon Vancouver as the solution to his problem. The unbalanced exchange rate between the American and Canadian dollar would work hugely to the show’s advantage, even as the city government of Vancouver was offering a lot of other perks and incentives in a bid to attract productions just like this one. In this case, they worked better than those who initiated them could ever have dreamed; having come to Vancouver to shoot a pilot on the cheap, The X-Files would remain there for five seasons, 117 episodes, and one feature film. By the end of those five years, it would be difficult to find a place in the city where The X-Files hadn’t filmed at one time or another. “Around every corner I come upon an image from the show,” mused Chris Carter during a return visit in 2018. “Alleys we shot from every angle. Remarkably, from one high vantage, I can scan at least twenty locations where I directed David and Gillian in episodes and a movie.” To this day, the show’s hardcore fans continue to descend upon Vancouver to scope out the street where this chase scene took place or the building where that monster prowled.

The city became far more than just a way for the show to save money. The look of Vancouver — outside of its short but glorious summer, that is — became the look of The X-Files. “From September to late spring,” says Carter, “you can count on gray days in low light.” Even though the episodes were ostensibly set across the width and breadth of North America, as carefully explicated by a caption at the beginning of each one, they too were always marked by gray days and dark nights. An inordinate amount of rain followed Mulder and Scully around, regardless of where they went, enough so as to make you wonder if they were reincarnations of the “Rain God” Rob McKenna from Douglas Adams’s So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. The murky visuals served to emphasize the show’s murky truths and moralities. (Ironically, the one type of landscape that was hardest for the show to simulate from wet and rainy British Columbia was the parched desert of the American Southwest, home to both Roswell and the second favorite site of UFO conspiracy buffs, the top-secret Air Force base known as Area 51, where the military supposedly test drives the technology recovered from extraterrestrials at Roswell and possibly elsewhere. In thus forcing the show to shy away somewhat from some of the most overtly obvious plot lines and locations suggested by its premise, this may have been no bad thing.)

The pilot episode which Chris Carter delivered to Fox in the spring of 1993 was compromised, as pilots usually are, by the need to do too much at once. It needed both to set up the conditions and characters of the weekly series that would hopefully follow and to demonstrate how a more typical episode would play out from week to week. On the whole, though, it did a serviceable job under the circumstances of bringing Mulder and Scully together at the FBI and sending them out on their very first case of hundreds to come. It even introduced the otherwise anonymous figure who became known as “Cancer Man” or the “Cigarette-Smoking Man” to fans, thanks to the bad habit in which he is constantly engaged; he would become the show’s most longstanding recurring villain, shadow-boxing against the protagonists’ efforts to uncover the truth about the American government’s contact with aliens and much else besides throughout its lengthy run. The pilot ended on what would become a very typical X-Files note, when all of the evidence Mulder and Scully had collected about the alien abduction at its heart literally went up in smoke, the victim of a mysterious fire back at their hotel. In time, this sort of thing would become intensely frustrating, a transparent dodge on the part of the writing staff to keep the wheels of the conspiracy plot lines spinning without ever actually moving them forward. This early on, though, it felt bracing in a television ecosystem where neatly wrapped-up happy endings were still the norm.

By way of further cementing the connection to tabloid programming like Sightings, the pilot episode of The X-Files opens with the claim that it is based on “actual documented accounts.” Strictly speaking, that means nothing whatsoever in terms of veracity; if I tell you a lie and you write it down, that is an “actual documented account.” Still, the show was probably wise not to show this card again after the first episode. I suspect that its existence here was largely at the behest of Fox — the network, that is, not the FBI agent.

Fox pronounced itself satisfied with the pilot. It agreed to fund a full season, albeit at a cut-rate budget of less than $1 million per episode.

So, the pilot was broadcast with little fanfare on September 10, 1993, followed by 23 more episodes over the next months. In a testament to Fox’s relatively low expectations, the show was relegated to Friday nights. Friday was, along with Saturday, one of the two most undesirable evenings of the week, a traditional dumping ground of shows whose potential was considered limited, since so many of the young adults who were most coveted by advertisers tended to be anywhere other than at home sitting in front of their televisions on those evenings. (This rule of television programming had held true for decades; students of Star Trek history will remember that it was NBC’s decision in 1968 to move that show to Friday nights that sealed its fate after just three seasons.)

The X-Files attracted only scattered, usually lukewarm reviews during its first year on the air. It was often described as a sort of low-rent copy of Twin Peaks, which was perhaps a partial truth but by no means a complete one. (To add grist to this mill, David Duchovny had actually had a small role in Twin Peaks, playing against his looks in a different way as a transgender law-enforcement agent.) The show put up mediocre ratings against weak competition in its inauspicious time slot.

In truth, it’s hard to argue that the critics were overlooking any deathless art in that first, comparatively little-watched season of The X-Files. Looking back on those early episodes from the perspective of today, I see a show that’s just good enough to make me wish it was a little bit better. Our current streaming era has, whatever its own infelicities, served to underline the weaknesses of the old broadcast-network formula all too plainly. Every X-Files episode has to wrap up in exactly 45 minutes, meaning that its scripts occasionally feel bloated and meandering, more often compressed, deprived of the space they need to breathe. Meanwhile the sheer quantity of episodes that the network demanded in a season meant that new ones had to be churned out at a tempo of one every eight to ten days. An uneven standard of quality is a virtual guarantee under such conditions. “When I was doing 24-episode [seasons],” says X-Files scriptwriter Glen Morgan, “we knew that three were going to suck, just because you couldn’t focus that much. People get annoyed with me for saying this, but, in all honesty, four [episodes] were great, most were okay, and some of them sucked. And that’s just how it goes!”

The first season was the phase when The X-Files was taking its core premise most literally. There’s little of the daring willingness to break its own rules that would come to mark the show in later years. In keeping with Chris Carter’s original mission statement, the show mostly just wanted to scare you in the beginning. And yet I must confess that I find its parade of aliens, monsters, and preternatural serial killers rather less terrifying than they want to be. It may be telling that my favorite episode of the season, the one called simply “Ice,” is largely a rewrite of John W. Campbell’s wonderfully creepy 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”

A stalemate in an Arctic research station in “Ice.” This early psychological thriller of an episode was unique for the way it turned Mulder and Scully against one another, something that would become almost unimaginable a little later in the show’s run.

To my mind, the first season stands out more for its visual aesthetics than for its writing. With so little money in the budget for shiny visual effects, the creators counted on the viewer’s imagination to fill in blanks that were hidden beneath an awful lot of rain and fog and smoke and darkness. The show used jittery photography to fine effect, a living embodiment of the nervous mood of the scripts; tight closeups in claustrophobic spaces were the norm. The X-Files may have been only dubiously good in the broad strokes at this stage, but it certainly had its own personality right from the start.

The show was saved from going down in history as a one-season wonder like its inspiration Kolchak: The Night Stalker by a happy coincidence involving a different, newer form of media than television. The very same month that the pilot episode was broadcast, Marc Andreessen of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Illinois, released the first version of his NCSA Mosaic Web browser for personal computers running MacOS and Microsoft Windows. Mosaic was the most effortlessly usable browser to appear to that point, with a killer feature that would transform the look and feel of the nascent World Wide Web forever: it could display pictures on the screen alongside text. The arrival of Mosaic marked the moment when the Web went from being an esoteric tool for scientists and hackers to a revolutionary communications medium for everyone. In its wake, new websites sprang up in unprecedented numbers, as the first rumblings of what would become the dot-com explosion of the later 1990s began to make themselves heard. An inordinate number of these sites dealt with The X-Files, which was perfectly pitched to appeal to the legions of brainy, plugged-in, usually male university students who were Mosaic’s most prominent early adopters. There was a time when it seemed that every tenth site on the Web was an X-Files site.

The X-Files became the first example of a new phenomenon in traditional media, the first television show whose popularity was almost entirely a credit to the new medium of the Internet. On their personal websites and in the freewheeling discussion forums of Usenet, the self-proclaimed “X-Philes” declared their love, stated their opinions, and argued endlessly over matters large and small. The monster-of-the-week episodes were all well and good, but it was the mythology episodes that really got them revved up. These were dissected on an almost frame-by-frame level of detail — far more detail, if we’re being honest, than they deserved, given the extent to which the writing staff was winging it as they went along. Some of the hardcore fans were disposed to believe in actual government conspiracies, while some were not. But all of them relished the ones seen on the show, wanted to believe as badly as Mulder did that there was a detailed master plan to the mythology locked up in some office at Fox. In truth, of course, no such thing existed then nor ever would.

The obsessive tendencies of the most devoted fans could be almost as disconcerting as they were gratifying to the people who made the show. David Duchovny remembers stumbling into a heated discussion of why the petite Scully is never shown adjusting the car seat after taking over driving duties from the tall and lanky Mulder. “That was probably the last time I ever looked at the Internet, because that kind of frightened me,” he says, only half in jest.

Buzz over The X-Files gradually spilled over to other groups whose Venn diagrams overlapped with that of the early Web denizens. One of those with the biggest overlap, and thus another of the groups where the show made its presence known first, happens to be a special interest of this website: computer-game players and developers. Before the show’s first season had even concluded, the first game to bear the stamp of The X-Files had already appeared on American store shelves.

The Britain-based brothers Julian and Nick Gollop and their tiny studio Mythos Games had started working on a strategy game they called UFO: Enemy Unknown, about a full-blown alien invasion of Earth, a good year and a half before the show made its debut. But by virtue of drawing from many of the same underground ufological sources as The X-Files writing staff, they ended up with similar-looking extraterrestrials and an almost uncannily similar brooding, ominous atmosphere — this despite the fact that the Gollops had never even seen the show, which wouldn’t air in their homeland for the first time until six months after their game was released. Nonetheless, the Gollops’ publisher MicroProse played the similarities up for all they were worth in the United States, going so far as to rename the game there to X-COM; suffice to say that the shared “X-” prefix was not a random happenstance.

Hints of The X-Files would continue to show themselves in many games for the rest of the decade, from the Tex Murphy series to Fallout. And small wonder: Friday-evening X-Files viewing parties became a bonding ritual at countless games studios, the perfect way to celebrate the conclusion of another working week. The same ritual was enacted by millions of ordinary gamers.

The early fan enthusiasm, combined with a rock-bottom budget and the lack of anything else to put into its Friday-night time slot, were enough to get The X-Files renewed by Fox for a second season that began in September of 1994. (Poor Brisco County, on the other hand, had seen its ratings collapse after a strong start and was cancelled after its first season.) Yet the moment when it became clear that The X-Files was really breaking through didn’t arrive until that December, when the show was unexpectedly nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the category of Best Television Drama. And then, even more incredibly, it won the award the following month, beating out such prestigious critics’ darlings as ER and NYPD Blue. To this day, nobody can quite explain how this happened. At the time, nobody was more shocked than the people who made The X-Files. “When we won, you could hear a pin drop,” says the show’s co-producer Paul Rabwin of the reaction in the auditorium. “It was like the longest shot in the world coming in, and everyone was dumbfounded.”

Suddenly The X-Files had a serious buzz about it. By the end of season two, it was regularly winning its time slot. While the numbers it put up still weren’t huge in the abstract, they were an advertiser’s wet dream in terms of demographics. The prototypical X-Files viewer was described as “male, 25 to 34 years old, college educated, residing in the northeastern United States, a moderate television viewer but also a Star Trek fan, and an Internet user.” Millions of people who resembled at least some parts of this description were willing to plan their Friday evenings around catching the latest episode of the show. The pump had been well and truly primed for the alien-autopsy special that aired on Fox that August.

Whatever was fueling the show’s growing popularity, it certainly wasn’t a case of full-scale reinvention. Going into the second season, Chris Carter had made it clear that his core vision was unchanged. “Ultimately,” he said, “my goal [is] the same that it’s always been: to create 22 to 24 really scary shows. I just want to scare the hell out of the audience. That’s all.”

Unsurprisingly, then, the second season of The X-Files isn’t hugely different from the first in style and spirit. The Cancer Man is still smoking in the shadows in the mythology episodes, and serial killers are still the monsters of the week as often as not. That said, there are some signs that the show is changing. The episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt” is a slightly tongue-in-cheek story of a cabal of Satanists who double as a local school board. It draws more from the farcical, partially Dungeons & Dragons-fueled Satanic panics of the 1980s than it does from more respectable Satanic horrors like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Fox had once been all over that stuff, much as it was all over the UFO stuff now. More and more as time went on, The X-Files would be sending up the tackier tendencies of its parent network.

Mulder and Scully about to be sacrificed by a clean-cut cabal of suburban Satanists.

But the episode that really threw open a window to let some fresh air into the show’s hermetically sealed world appeared two months later. The script for “Humbug” was the first to be credited solely to Darin Morgan, who would go on to become one of The X-Files’s standout writers. Its setting, an encampment of carnival sideshow performers, was plainly inspired by the unnerving 1932 B-movie Freaks. In this context, however, it was used in the service of something perilously close to full-on comedy. This was a first for the show, one which had prompted much debate and soul-searching among the production staff and at the network before the episode was green-lit. The circus performers spend most of their time taking the piss out of Mulder, this mental Hephaestus in the body of an Adonis. And when the script isn’t making fun of him through them, it’s making fun of some of the core premises of the show itself. By no means were all of the fans pleased by this development; it seemed to some of them a slippery slope from mocking the show that they adored to mocking them. Even the fact that the episode aired the night before April Fool’s Day, thus indicating that a comedy installment might become no more than an annual indulgence at worst, wasn’t enough to mollify all of the viewers who liked their X-Files dark and po-faced.

“Well, why should I take offense? Just because it’s human nature to make assumptions about people purely on the basis of their physical appearances? Why, I’ve done the same thing to you, for example. I’ve taken in your all-American features, your dour demeanor, your unimaginative necktie design, and concluded that you work for the government… an FBI agent. But you see the tragedy? I have unconsciously reduced you to a stereotype, instead of regarding you as a specific, unique individual.”
 
“But I am an FBI agent…”

For my part, though, I say it was about time. After all, The X-Files is a pretty ridiculous show on the face of it, riven from top to bottom with cognitive dissonance. Mulder and Scully are simultaneously the two busiest and the two most incompetent agents in the history of the FBI, who have apparently never heard that most important piece of advice for anyone trapped in a horror movie or in a law-enforcement training course: Don’t split up! They’re constantly rushing alone into danger without bothering to tell each other what they’re doing, much less telling any of their other colleagues, and constantly getting themselves almost killed, being saved only by the plot armor provided by their place at the top of the credits list.

Unanswerable questions abound. Why does a government whose conspiratorial tendrils reach into every conceivable aspect of life not just kill these two rogue agents in its midst? Why does Scully insist anew at the beginning of every single episode that, no, this latest case surely doesn’t involve anything supernatural, when by the end of the episode it almost always does? Isn’t her perverse resistance to extraordinary evidence in some way the opposite of the scientific method?

By slyly cluing us in to the fact that the show’s own creators were aware of all of this — that they were actually much smarter than the likes of Sightings — “Humbug” gave us permission not to take the show so seriously. We know it’s silly and you know it’s silly, it seemed to say, so feel free to laugh if you want to. Or, if you like, feel free to take the show seriously but still not quite literally. Vintage television is sometimes described as a character- rather than a plot-driven format. We watch mainly in order to hang out with characters that we know and like; what they actually get up to there on the screen is just the excuse for giving them a show. Happily, and despite the novel ambitions of the mythology plot lines, The X-Files had two leads strong enough to make the show work on this level. Mind you, this would not keep some fans from trying to slot every little anecdote into some master canon of an X-Files universe — and more power to anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. But it was and is a nice message for the less literal-minded among us to hear. As the first episode willing to unabashedly embrace the “meta,” “Humbug” might just be the most important — not the best, but the most important — episode of The X-Files ever made.

By the third season, more X-Files episodes — especially the ones written by Darin Morgan — were abandoning the usual formulas to begin mining richer veins of myth and magical realism. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” for example, gives us a man who has been cursed to foresee the whens and hows of the deaths that await every single one of us someday. One of the most touching moments in the show’s history comes when Scully asks him how she will die. “You don’t,” replies veteran character actor Peter Boyle in a voice touched with mercy, with an expression on his face that tells us all too clearly that he’s lying. Such are the lies that we all tell ourselves and one another in order to get through this thing called life.

And then there’s “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” a suitably odd name for an incredibly odd episode. Here The X-Files goes full-on postmodern avant-garde for the first time, wrapping truth and fiction and the liminal spaces in between into a hopeless tangle that’s shot through with allusions to everything from Star Wars to Close Encounters to Twin Peaks. Jose Chung himself is a riff on Truman Capote, writing a version of In Cold Blood involving aliens. His presence, along with a cameo by Alex Trebek, the host of the television game show Jeopardy!, is an elaborate callback to David Duchovny’s turn on Celebrity Jeopardy!, which he lost to author Stephen King in the final round when he couldn’t remember the name of Capote’s novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And so it goes, and so it goes, around and around in a fashion guaranteed to delight any post-doc in postmodern literary theory.[1]The first full-length academic book deconstructing The X-Files appeared already in 1996, while the third season was still airing. The contents are sometimes insightful, sometimes hilariously banal in that special way that only academic writing can be. A sample of the latter type:

“These episodes not only establish a comparison between Mulder and various tragic truth seekers but also reveal the erotics of the search through repeated imagery of penetration. The extraterrestrial energy-being of ‘Space’ painfully possesses Colonel Belt, the silicon-based parasite erupts from the throats of its cave-explorer victims like a phallus, the subatomic particles ‘come into’ Banton’s body. The ‘penetrating answer’ turns upon, penetrates, and destroys its finder. The logic of the show repeatedly represents the object of desire, the much-cited truth, as itself a phallic power with a will of its own.”

You heard it here first, folks: the Truth that is Out There is really a giant penis just waiting to skewer you like a pig on a spit.

In this episode, The X-Files comments for a second time in the course of a single season on the real-world alien-autopsy sensation for which it itself had laid the groundwork. The moment when Scully conducts her own autopsy on an alien, only to snag her scalpel on a zipper — it turns out that it’s just a dead guy in an alien suit — is as hilarious as it is subversive. Ditto the way the show, just one year removed from its first tentative steps in this direction in “Humbug,” now dares to directly and unabashedly mock a portion of its most hardcore audience, personified as a young man living in his parents’ basement who wants desperately to be carried away by aliens so that his dad will stop hounding him to get a job. “Roswell! Roswell!” he shouts apropos of nothing when all other words and logic have failed him.

“There are those who care not about extraterrestrials, searching for meaning in other human beings,” Jose Chung tells us at the end. “Rare or lucky are those who find it.” It’s strongly implied that they are the most enlightened ones, regardless of their ultimate success rate — a strange message for a show invented to exploit interest in UFOs to convey, but by no means an unwise or unwelcome one.

At the beginning of the fourth season, Fox finally saw fit to move The X-Files out of the Friday graveyard slot and over to Sunday evenings. The twelfth episode of that season aired just after the Super Bowl on January 26, 1997, becoming thereby the most-watched single installment of the show ever, seen by almost 30 million American households. From its humble roots, The X-Files had grown up to become a show that absolutely everybody at least knew of. “You cannot get an issue of TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly or People without someone referring to the show,” marveled Paul Rabwin. “There have been political cartoons, references in the funnies, and newspaper headlines. It’s no longer something that needs explanation.”

Yet the show definitely wasn’t dumbing itself down to please the masses. Foucault’s Pendulum has nothing on the conspiracy theorist’s magic brownie that is the fourth season’s “Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man,” in which we learn that Cancer Man not only personally carried out the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King but has been fixing the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl all these years as well. (He has a special dislike for the Buffalo Bills.) We even see him watching the pilot of The X-Files approvingly, implying that the whole show we’ve been viewing is yet another piece of government misinformation. The mind boggles…

It turns out that Cancer Man is a frustrated author who has a vendetta against the world because he can’t get a story published.

It’s clever, yes, but is it anything more than that? There’s only so far you can take this sort of thing before it becomes masturbatory — empty tricksterism for its own sake, without much to say to us beyond well-worn grad-school clichés about the “instability of truth” and the “illusion of the objective” and all the rest of that tired lot.

Enter one Vince Gilligan, who had started writing for The X-Files already in the second season but didn’t really begin to come into his own until the fourth, when he claimed the title of the show’s most consistently interesting scriptwriter from Darin Morgan. As if to highlight this passing of the guard, the latter stepped in front of the camera to star in Gilligan’s “Small Potatoes,” playing a schlubby loser named Eddie who has the power to take on the appearance of any man he wishes to be. Predictably enough, he uses this power to seduce women left and right. Inevitably, he winds up becoming Mulder, and is closing in for the kiss with Scully which we’ve been waiting the better part of four seasons to see when the real Mulder bursts in on the two. Like so many of Gilligan’s scripts that are still to come, it’s funny and thought-provoking but also warm and sweet and a little melancholy, operating almost on the level of parable, a million miles removed from the gritty horror which the show was always trying to project in its earliest days. I think I see a kindred soul in Vince Gilligan: someone who is less fascinated by the plot machinery of the show’s myriad conspiracies than he is by this man who’s decided to devote his life to chasing chimeras and by this woman who, it’s pretty clear by now, loves him deeply and is loved by him in return. “I was born a loser, but you’re one by choice,” says the once-more schlubby Eddie to Mulder at the end. “You should get out and live more.”

Pre-coitus interruptus.

More extreme incarnations of people like me and perhaps Gilligan were becoming prominent in X-Files fandom by now. They were called the “shippers,” as in “relationshippers.” The most obsessive analyzed every stray glance that Mulder and Scully cast at one another every bit as exhaustively as another type of fan pored over fleeting shots of aliens and every randomly dropped aside by Cancer Man. Some shippers preferred to keep to the terrain of speculation, while others wrote exactly how it would go down once Scully finally agreed to give Mulder’s sadly underused but doubtless impressive manly member a good solid shakedown trial. The majority of the shippers were women, who were flocking to the show in increasing numbers now.

Indeed, by the end of the fourth season, The X-Files was at its zenith of popularity and cultural influence. It was the biggest show on Fox by a wide margin and the fourth most popular drama on all of network television. (Within that category, it trailed only ER, Touched by an Angel, and NYPD Blue.) Its tag lines — “The Truth Is Out There”; “I Want To Believe” — were being repeated everywhere, sometimes in earnest and sometimes in jest, much as on the show itself. Chris Carter’s Millennium, a semi-spinoff from The X-Files about an FBI agent who could read the minds of criminals, had just finished its own first season to positive reviews and solid ratings. Never a man lacking in ambition, Carter was making plans to conquer a whole new realm by shooting an X-Files feature film between the fifth and sixth seasons.

And oh, yes… there was to be an X-Files game as well — a game, that is, that wasn’t just influenced by the show but actually sported its name on the box.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 The first full-length academic book deconstructing The X-Files appeared already in 1996, while the third season was still airing. The contents are sometimes insightful, sometimes hilariously banal in that special way that only academic writing can be. A sample of the latter type:

“These episodes not only establish a comparison between Mulder and various tragic truth seekers but also reveal the erotics of the search through repeated imagery of penetration. The extraterrestrial energy-being of ‘Space’ painfully possesses Colonel Belt, the silicon-based parasite erupts from the throats of its cave-explorer victims like a phallus, the subatomic particles ‘come into’ Banton’s body. The ‘penetrating answer’ turns upon, penetrates, and destroys its finder. The logic of the show repeatedly represents the object of desire, the much-cited truth, as itself a phallic power with a will of its own.”

You heard it here first, folks: the Truth that is Out There is really a giant penis just waiting to skewer you like a pig on a spit.

 
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Posted by on September 20, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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X-COM

X-COM seemed to come out of nowhere. Its release was not preceded by an enormous marketing campaign with an enormous amount of hype. It had no video demo playing in the front window of Babbages, it wasn’t advertised twelve months in advance on glossy foldout magazine inserts, it had no flashing point-of-purchase kiosks. It didn’t come in a box designed by origamists from the school of abstract expressionism. It featured no full-motion video starring the best TV actors of the 80s; it had no voice-overs. It offered neither Super VGA graphics, nor General MIDI support. It wasn’t Doom-like, Myst-like, or otherwise like a hit game from the previous season; it didn’t steal the best features from several other successful games. It wasn’t even on a CD-ROM!

In short, if you plugged X-COM’s variables into the “success formula” currently in use by the majority of large game companies, you’d come up with a big, fat goose egg. According to the prevailing wisdom, there’s no way X-COM could survive in today’s gaming marketplace. And yet it sold and sold, and gamers played on and on.

— Chris Lombardi, writing in the April 1995 issue of Computer Gaming World

In the early days of game development, there existed little to no separation between the roles of game programmer and game designer. Those stalwart pioneers who programmed the games they themselves designed could be grouped into two broad categories, depending on the side from which they entered the field. There were the technologists, who were fascinated first and foremost with the inner workings of computers, and chose games as the most challenging, creatively satisfying type of software to which they could apply their talents. And then there were those who loved games themselves above all else, and learned to program computers strictly in order to make better, more exciting ones than could be implemented using only paper, cardboard, and the players’ imaginations. Julian Gollop, the mastermind behind the legendary original X-COM, fell most definitely into this latter category. He turned to the computer only when the games he wanted to make left him no other choice.

Growing up in the English county of Essex, Julian and his younger brother Nick lived surrounded by games, courtesy of their father. “Every Christmas, we didn’t watch TV, we’d play games endlessly,” Julian says. From Cluedo, they progressed to Escape from Colditz, then on to the likes of Sniper! and Squad Leader.

Julian turned fifteen in 1980, the year that the Sinclair ZX80 arrived to set off a microcomputer fever all across Britain, but he was initially immune to the affliction. Unimpressed by the simplistic games he saw being implemented on those early machines, which often had as little as 1 K of memory, he started making his own designs to be played the old-fashioned way, face-to-face around a tabletop. It was only when he hit a wall of complexity with one of them that he reassessed the potential of computers.

The game in question was called Time Lords; as the name would imply, it was based on the Doctor Who television serials. It asked two to five players to travel through time and space and alter the course of history to their advantage, but grew so complex that it came to require an additional person to serve in the less-than-rewarding capacity of referee.

By this point, it was 1982, and a friend of Julian’s named Andy Greene had acquired one of the first BBC Micros. Its relatively cavernous 32 K of memory opened up the possibility of using the computer as a referee instead of a bored human. Greene coded up the program in BASIC, staying faithful to Julian’s board game to the extent of demanding that players leave the room when it wasn’t their turn, so as not to see anything they weren’t supposed to of their opponents’ actions. The owner of the tabletop-games store where Julian shopped was so impressed with the result that he founded a new company, Red Shift Games, in order to publish it. They all traveled to computer fairs together, carrying copies of the computerized Time Lords packaged in Ziploc baggies. The game didn’t take the world by storm — Personal Computer News, one of the few publications to review it, pronounced it a “bored game” instead of a board game — but it was a start.

The two friends next made Islandia, another multiplayer strategy game of a similar stripe. In the meantime, Julian acquired a Sinclair Spectrum, the cheap and cheerful little machine destined to drive British computer gaming for the next half-decade. Having now a strong motivation to learn to program it, Julian did just that. His first self-coded game, and his first on the Spectrum, appeared in 1984 in the form of Nebula, a conquer-the-galaxy exercise that for the first time offered a computer opponent to play against.

The artificial intelligence disappeared again from his next game, but it mattered not at all. Rebelstar Raiders was the prototype for Julian Gollop’s most famous work. In contrast to the big-picture strategy of his earlier games, it focused on individual soldiers in conflict with one another in a Starship Troopers-like science-fictional milieu. Still, it was very much based on the board games he loved; there was a lot of Sniper! and Squad Leader in its turn-based design. Despite being such a cerebral game, despite being one that you couldn’t even play without a mate to hand, it attracted considerable attention. Red Shift faded out of existence shortly thereafter as its owner lost interest in the endeavor, but Rebelstar Raiders had already made Julian’s reputation, such that other publishers were now knocking at his door.

Rebelstar Raiders, the first of Julian Gollop’s turn-based tactical-combat games. Ten years later, the approach would culminate in X-COM.

It must have been a thrill for Julian Gollop the board-game fanatic when Games Workshop, the leading British publisher of hobbyist tabletop games, signed him to make a computer game for their new — if ultimately brief-lived — digital division. Chaos, a spell-slinging fantasy free-for-all ironically based to some extent on a Games Workshop board game known as Warlock — not that Julian told them that! — didn’t sell as well as Rebelstar Raiders, although it has since become something of a cult classic.

So, understandably, Julian went where the market was. Between 1986 and 1988, he produced three more iterations on the Rebelstar Raiders concept, each boasting computer opponents as well as multiplayer options and each elaborating further upon the foundation of its predecessor. Game designers are a bit like authors in some ways. Some authors — like, say, Margaret Atwood — try their hands at a wide variety of genres and approaches, while others — like, say, John Cheever — compulsively sift through the same material in search of new nuggets of insight. Julian became, in the minds of the British public at least, an example of the Cheever type of designer. “It could be said by the cruelest among us that Julian has only ever written one game,” wrote the magazine New Computer Express in 1990, “but has released various substantially enhanced versions of it over the years.”

Of those enhanced versions, Julian published Rebelstar and Rebelstar 2: Alien Encounter through Firebird as a lone-wolf developer, then published Laser Squad through a small outfit known as Blaze Software. Before he made this last game, he founded a company called Target Games — soon to be renamed to the less generic Mythos Games — with his father as silent partner and his brother Nick in an active role; the latter had by now become an accomplished programmer in his own right, in fact surpassing Julian’s talents in that area. In 1990, the brothers made the Chaos sequel Lords of Chaos together in order to prove to the likes of New Computer Express that Julian was at least a two-trick pony. And then came the series of events that would lead to Julian Gollop, whose games were reasonably popular in Britain but virtually unknown elsewhere, becoming one of the acknowledged leading lights of strategy gaming all over the world.



The road to X-COM traveled through the terrain of happenstance rather than any master plan. Julian’s career-defining project started as Laser Squad 2 in spirit and even in name, the next manifestation of his ongoing obsession with small-scale, turn-based, single-unit tactics. The big leap forward this time was to be an isometric viewpoint, adding an element of depth to the battlefield. He and Nick coded a proof of concept on an Atari ST. While they were doing so, Blaze Software disappeared, yet another ephemeral entity in a volatile industry. Now, the brothers needed a new publisher for their latest game.

Both of them had been playing hours and hours of Railroad Tycoon, from the American publisher MicroProse. Knowing that MicroProse had a British branch, they decided to take their demo there first. It was a bold move in its way; as I’ve already noted, their games were popular in their sphere, but had mostly borne the imprints of smaller publishers and had mostly been sold at cheaper price points. MicroProse was a different animal entirely, carrying with it the cachet that still clung in Europe to American games, with their bigger budgets and higher production values. In their quiet English way, the Gollops were making a bid for the big leagues.

Luckily for them, MicroProse’s British office was far more than just a foreign adjunct to the American headquarters. It was a dynamic, creative place in its own right, which took advantage of the laissez-faire attitude of “Wild” Bill Stealey, MicroProse’s flamboyant fly-boy founder, to blaze its own trails. When the Gollops brought in the nascent Laser Squad 2, they were gratified to find that just about everyone at MicroProse UK already knew of them and their games. Peter Moreland, the head of development, was cautiously interested, but with plenty of caveats. For one thing, they would need to make the game on MS-DOS rather than the Atari ST in order to reach the American market. For another, a small-scale tactical-combat game alone wouldn’t be sufficient — wouldn’t be, he said, “MicroProse enough.” After making their name in the 1980s with Wild Bill’s beloved flight simulators, MicroProse was becoming at least as well known in this incipient new decade for grand-strategy games of or in the spirit of their star designer Sid Meier, like the aforementioned Railroad Tycoon and the soon-to-be-released Civilization. The emphasis here was on the “grand.” A Laser Squad 2 just wouldn’t be big enough for MicroProse.

Finally, Moreland wasn’t thrilled by all these far-future soldiers fighting battles in unknown regions of space for reasons that were abstract at best. Who could really relate to any of that? He wanted something more down to earth — literally. Maybe something to do with alien visitors in UFOs… that sort of thing. Julian nodded along, then went home to do some research and refine his proposal.

He quickly learned that he was living in the midst of a fecund period in the peculiar field of UFOlogy. In 1989, a sketchy character named Bob Lazar had given an interview for a Las Vegas television station in which he claimed to have been employed as a civilian contractor at the top-secret Nevada military base known only as Area 51. In that location, so he said, the American Air Force was actively engaged in testing fantastic technologies derived from extraterrestrial visitors. The interview would go down in history as the wellspring of a whole generation of starry-eyed conspiracy theorists, whose outlandish beliefs would soon enter the popular media zeitgeist via such vehicles as the television series The X-Files. When Julian first investigated the subject in 1991, however, UFOs and aliens were still a fairly underground obsession. Nevertheless, he took much from the early lore and legends of Area 51, such as a supposed new chemical element — called ununpentium by Lazar, elerium by the eventual game — which powered the aliens’ spaceships.

His other major source of inspiration was the 1970 British television series entitled simply UFO. In fact, his game would eventually be released as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe, capitalizing on the association with a show that a surprising number of people there still remembered. (I’ve chosen to use the American name of X-COM globally in this article because all subsequent games in the franchise would be known all over the world under that name; it has long since become the iconic one.) UFO the television series takes place in the then-near-future of 1980, when aliens are visiting the Earth in ever-increasing numbers, abducting humans and wreaking more and more havoc. An international organization known as SHADO (“Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation”) has been formed to combat the menace. The show follows the exploits of the SHADO operatives, complete with outlandish “futuristic” costumes and sets and gloriously cheesy special effects. Gollop lifted this basic scenario and moved it to his own near-future: to the year 1999, thus managing to nail not only his decade’s burgeoning obsession with aliens but also its unease about the looming millennium.

The game is divided into two distinct halves — so much so that each half is almost literally an entirely separate game: each unloads itself completely from memory to run a separate executable file at the point of transition, caching on the hard drive before doing so the relatively small amount of state data which its companion needs to access.

The first part that you see is the strategic level. As the general in charge of the “Extra-Terrestrial Combat Force,” or X-COM — the name was suggested by Stephen Hand and Mike Brunton, two in-house design consultants at MicroProse UK — you must hire soldiers and buy equipment for them; research new technologies, a process which comes more and more to entail reverse-engineering captured alien artifacts in order to use your enemy’s own technology against them; build new bases at strategic locations around the world, as well as improve your existing ones (you start with just one modest base); and send your aircraft out to intercept the alien craft that are swarming the Earth. In keeping with the timeless logic of computer games, the countries of the Earth have chosen to make X-COM, the planet’s one real hope for defeating the alien menace, into a resource-constrained semi-capitalist enterprise; you’ll often need to sell gadgets you’ve manufactured or stolen from the aliens in order to make ends meet, and if you fail to perform well your sponsoring countries will cut their funding.

The “Geoscape” view, where you place your bases and use them to intercept airborne alien attackers. You can find a wealth of discussion online about where best to position your first base — but naturally, most people prefer to put it in their home town. Like the ability to name your individual soldiers, the ability to start right in your own backyard forges a personal connection between the game and its player.

This half of the game was a dizzying leap into uncharted territory for the Gollop brothers. Thankfully, then, they were on very familiar ground when it came to the other half: the half that kicks in when your airborne interceptors force a UFO to land, or when you manage to catch the aliens in the act of terrorizing some poor city, or when the aliens themselves attack one of your bases. Here you find yourself in what amounts to Laser Squad 2 in form and spirit if not in name: an ultra-detailed turn-based single-unit combat simulator, the latest version of a game which Julian Gollop had already made four times before. (Or close enough to it, at any rate: X-COM, the culmination of what had begun with Rebelstar Raiders on the Spectrum, is ironically single-player only, whereas that first game had not just allowed but required two humans to play.) Although the strategic layer sounds far more complex than this tactical layer — and, indeed, it is in certain ways — it’s actually the tactical game where you spend the majority of your time, fighting battles which can consume an entire evening each.

The “Battlescape” view, where tactical combat takes place.

For all their differences, the two halves of the game do interlock in the end as two facets of a whole. Your research efforts, equipment purchases, and hiring practices in the strategic half determine the nature of the force you lead into the tactical man-against-alien battles. Less obviously but just as significantly, your primary reward for said battles proves to be the recovery of alien equipment, alien corpses, and even live alien specimens (all is fair in love and genocidal interplanetary war), which you cart back to your bases to place at the disposal of your research teams. And so the symbiotic relationship continues: your researchers use what you recover as grist for their mill, which lets you go into tougher battles with better equipment to hand, thereby to bring back still richer spoils.

The capsule description of the finished game which I’ve just provided mirrors almost perfectly the proposal which Julian Gollop delivered to MicroProse; the design would change surprisingly little in the process of development. MicroProse thought it sounded just fine as-is.



The contract which the Gollops signed with MicroProse specified that the former would be responsible for all of the design and coding, while the latter would provide the visual and audio assets. MicroProse UK did hold up their end of the bargain, but had an oddly casual attitude toward the project in general. Julian remembers their producer as “very laid back — he would come over once a month, we would go to the pub, talk about the game for a bit, and he would go home.” Otherwise, the Gollops worked largely alone after their first rush of consultations with the MicroProse mother ship had faded into the past. Time dragged on and on while they struggled with this massively complicated game, one half of which was unlike anything they had ever even contemplated before.

X-COM‘s UFOpaedia is a direct equivalent to Civilization‘s innovative Civilopedia, its most obvious single nod to Sid Meier’s equally influential but very, very different game.

As it did so, much happened in the broader world of MicroProse. On the positive side, Sid Meier’s Civilization was released at the end of 1991. But despite this and some other success stories, MicroProse’s financial foundation was growing ever more shaky, as their ambitions outran their core competencies. The company lost millions on an ill-judged attempt to enter the stand-up arcade market, then lost millions more on baroque CRPGs and flashy interactivity-lite adventure games. After an IPO that was supposed to bail them out went badly off the rails, Wild Bill Stealey sold out in June of 1993 to Spectrum Holobyte, another American publisher. The deal seemed to make sense: Spectrum Holobyte had a lot of money, thanks not least to generous venture capitalists, but a rather thin portfolio of games, while MicroProse had a lot of games both out and in the pipeline but had just about run out of money.

Spectrum Holobyte sifted carefully through their new possession’s projects in development, passing judgment on which were potential winners and which certain losers. According to Julian Gollop, Spectrum Holobyte told MicroProse UK in no uncertain terms to cancel X-COM. On the face of it, it wasn’t an unreasonable point of view to take. The Gollops had been working for almost two years by this point, and still had few concrete results to show for their efforts. It really did seem that they were hopelessly out of their depth. Luckily for them, however, Peter Moreland and others in the British office still believed in them. They nodded along with the order to bin X-COM, then quietly kept the project on the books. At this point, it didn’t cost them much of anything to do so; the art was already done, and now it was up to the Gollops to sink or swim with it.

X-COM bobbed up to the surface six months later, when the new, allegedly joint management team — Stealey would soon leave the company, feeling himself to have been thoroughly sidelined — started casting about for a game to feature in Europe in the first quarter of 1994, thereby to make the accountants happy. Peter Moreland piped up sheepishly: “You remember that UFO project you told us to cancel? Well, it’s actually still kicking around…” And so the Gollop brothers, who had been laboring under strangely little external pressure for the past 26 months or so, were now ordered to get their game done already. They managed it, just — UFO: Enemy Unknown shipped in Europe in March of 1994 — but some of the problems in the finished game definitely stem from the deadline that was so arbitrarily imposed from on high.

But if the game could have used a few more months in the oven, it nonetheless shipped in better condition than many other MicroProse games had during the recent stretch of financial difficulties. It garnered immediate rave reviews, while its sales also received a boost from another source. The first episode of The X-Files had aired the previous September in the United States, followed by airings across Europe. Just like that, a game about hostile alien visitors seemed a lot more relevant. Indeed, the game possessed much the same foreboding atmosphere as the show, from its muted color palette to MicroProse composer John Broomhall’s quietly malevolent soundtrack, which he had created in just two months in the final mad rush up to the release deadline. He couldn’t have done a better job if he’d had two years.

X-COM: UFO Defense shipped a few months later in North America, into a cultural zeitgeist that was if anything even more primed for it. Computer Gaming World, the American industry’s journal of record, gave it five stars out of five, and its sales soared well into the six digits. As the quote that opened this article attests, X-COM was in many ways the antithesis of what most publishers believed constituted a hit game in the context of 1994. Its graphics were little more than functional; it had no full-motion video, no real-time 3D rendering, no digitized voices; it fit perfectly well on a few floppy disks, thank you very much, with no need for any new-fangled CD-ROM drive. And yet it sold better than the vast majority of those other “cutting-edge” games. Many took its success as a welcome sign that gaming hadn’t yet lost its soul completely — that good old-fashioned gameplay could still trump production values from time to time.



The original X-COM‘s reputation has only grown more hallowed in the years since its release. It’s become a perennial on best-games-of-all-time lists, even ones whose authors weren’t yet born at the time of its release. For this is a game, so we’re told, that transcends its archaic presentation, that absolutely any student of game design needs to play.

That’s rather ironic in that X-COM is a game that really shouldn’t work at all according to many of the conventional rules of design. For example, it’s one of the most famous of all violators of what’s become known as the Covert Action Rule, as formulated by Sid Meier and named after one of his own less successful designs. The rule states that pacing is as important in a strategy game as it is in any other genre, that “mini-games” which pull the player away from the overarching strategic view need to be short and to the point, as is the case in Meier’s classic Pirates!. If they drag on too long, Meier tells us, the player loses focus on the bigger picture, forgets what she’s been trying to accomplish there, gets pulled out of that elusive state of “flow.”

But, as I already noted, X-COM‘s tactical battles can drag on for an hour or two at a time — and no one seems be bothered by this at all. What gives?

By way of an answer to that question, I would first note that the Covert Action Rule is, like virtually all supposedly hard-and-fast rules of game design, riddled with caveats and exceptions. (Personally, I don’t even agree that violating the yet-to-be-formulated Covert Action Rule was the worst problem of Covert Action itself.) And I would also note that X-COM does at least a couple of things extraordinarily well as compensation, better than any strategy game that came before it. Indeed, one can argue that no earlier grand-strategy game even attempted to do these things — not, at least, to anything like the same extent. Interestingly, both inspired strokes are borrowed from other gaming genres.

The first is the intriguing mystery surrounding the aliens, which is peeled back layer by layer as you progress. As your scientists study the equipment and alien corpses brought back from the battle sites and interrogate the live aliens your soldiers have captured, you learn more and more about where your enemies come from and what motivates them to attack the Earth so relentlessly. It doesn’t take long to reach a point where you look forward to the next piece of this puzzle as excitedly as you do the next cool gun or piece of armor. By the time the whole experience culminates in a desperate attack on the aliens’ home base, you’re all in. Granted, a byproduct of this sense of unfolding discovery is that you may not feel like revisiting the game after you win; for many or most of us, this is a strategy game to play through once rather than over and over again. But on the other hand, considering the fifty hours or more it will take you to get through it once, it’s hard to complain overmuch about that fact. Needless to say, when you do play it for the first time you should meticulously avoid spoilers about What Is Really Going On Here.

Learning more about the alien invaders via an autopsy. The game was ahead of its time; the year after X-COM‘s release, at the height of the X-Files-fueled UFO craze, the Fox television channel would broadcast Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? in the United States. (For the record, it was most assuredly the latter.)

X-COM‘s other, even more brilliant stroke is the sense of identification it builds between you and the soldiers you send into battle. Each soldier has unique strengths and weaknesses, forcing you to carefully consider the role she plays in combat: a burly, fearless character who can carry enough weaponry to outfit your average platoon but couldn’t hit the proverbial broad side of a barn must be handled in a very different way from a slender, nervous sharpshooter. As your soldiers (hopefully) survive missions, their skills improve, CRPG-style. Thus you have plenty of practical reasons to be more loathe to lose a seasoned veteran than a greenhorn fresh out of basic training. And yet this purely zero-sum calculus doesn’t fully explain why each mission is so nail-bitingly tense, so full of agonizing decisions balancing risk against reward.

One of X-COM‘s most defining design choices is also one of its simplest: it lets you name each soldier for yourself. As you play, you form a picture of each of them in your imagination, even though the game itself never describes any of them to you as anything other than a list of numbers. Losing a soldier who’s been around for a while feels weirdly like losing a genuine acquaintance. For here too you can’t help but embellish the thin scaffolding of fact the game provides with your own story of what happened: the grizzled old-timer who went out one time too many, whose nerves just couldn’t handle another firefight; the foolhardy, testosterone-addled youth who threw himself into every battle like he was indestructible, until one day he wasn’t. X-COM provides the merest glimpse of what it must feel like to be an actual commander in war: the overwhelming stress of having the lives of others hanging on your decisions, the guilty second-guessing that inevitably goes on when you lose someone. It has something that games all too often lack: a sense of consequences for your actions. Theoretically at least, the best way to play it is in iron-man mode: no saving and restoring to fix bad outcomes, dead is dead, own your decisions as commander.

Beginning with just a name you choose for yourself and a handful of statistics which the game provides, your imagination will conjure a whole personality for each of your soldiers. Dwight here, for example, likes guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music.

In one of those strange concordances that tend to crop up in many creative fields, X-COM wasn’t the only strategy game of 1994 to bring in CRPG elements to great effect. Ironically, these innovations occurred just as the CRPG genre itself was in its worst doldrums since Ultima I and Wizadry I had first brought it to prominence. Today, even as the CRPG has long since regained its mojo as a gaming genre, CRPG elements have become the special sauce ladled over a wide array of other types of games. X-COM was among the first to show how tasty the end result could be.

I have to say, however, that I find other elements of X-COM less appetizing, and that its strengths don’t quite overcome its weaknesses in my mind sufficiently to win it a place on my personal list of best games ever. My first stumbling block is the game’s learning curve, which is not just steep but unnecessarily so. I’d like to quote Garth Deangelis, who led the team that created XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the critically acclaimed franchise reboot that was released in 2012:

While [the original X-COM] may have been magnificent, it was also a unique beast when it came to beginning a new game. We often joked that the diehards who mastered the game independently belonged to an elite club because by today’s standards the learning curve was like climbing Mount Everest.

As soon as you fire up the original, you’re placed in a Geoscape with the Earth silently looming, and various options to explore within your base — including reading (unexplained) financial reports, approving manufacturing requests (without any context as to what those would mean later on), and examining a blueprint (which hinted at the possibility for base expansion), for example — the player is given no direction.

Even going on your first combat mission can be a bit of a mystery (and when you first step off the Skyranger, the game will kill off a few of your soldiers before you even see your first alien — welcome to X-COM!).

There’s certainly a place for complex games, and complexity will always come complete with a learning curve of some sort. But, again, X-COM‘s curve is just unnecessarily steep. Consider: when you begin a new game, you have two interceptors already in your hangar for bringing down UFOs. Fair enough. Unfortunately, they come equipped with sub-optimal Stingray missiles and borderline-useless cannon. So, one of the first tasks of the experienced player becomes to requisition some more advanced Avalanche missiles, put them on her interceptors, and sell off the old junk. Why can the game not just start you off with a reasonable weapons load-out? A similar question applies to the equipment carried by your individual soldiers, as it does to the well-nigh indefensible layout of your starting base itself, which makes it guaranteed to fall to the first squad of marauding aliens who come calling. The new player is likely to assume, reasonably enough, that the decisions the game has already made for her are good ones. She finds out otherwise only by being kicked in the teeth as a result of them. This is not good game design. The impression created is of a game that is not tough but fair, but rather actively out to get her.

Your starting base layout. By no means should you assume that this is a defensible one. In fact, many players spend a lot of money at the very beginning ripping it up completely and starting all over again. Why should this be necessary?

You’ll never use a large swath of the subpar weapons and equipment included in X-COM, which rather begs the questions what they’re doing in there. The game could have profited greatly from an editor empowered to pare back all of this extraneous nonsense and home in on its core appeal. Likewise, the user interface in the strategic portion operates on the principle that, if one mouse click is good, ten must be that much better; everything is way more convoluted than it needs to be. Just buying and selling equipment is agonizing.

The tactical game’s interface is also dauntingly complex, but does have somewhat more method to its madness, being the beneficiary of all of Julian Gollop’s earlier experience with this sort of game. Still, even tactical combat, so widely and justly lauded as the beating heart of X-COM, is not without its frustrations. Certainly every X-COM player is all too familiar with the last-alien-on-the-map syndrome, where you sometimes have to spend fifteen or twenty minutes methodically hunting the one remaining enemy, who’s hunkered down in some obscure corner somewhere. The nature of the game is such that you can’t relax even in these situations; getting careless can still get one or more of your precious soldiers killed before you even realize what’s happening. But, although perhaps a realistic depiction of war, this part of the game just isn’t much fun. The problem is frustrating not least because it’s so easily soluble: just have the remaining aliens commit suicide to avoid capture — something entirely in keeping with their nature — when their numbers get too depleted.

All of these niggling problems mark X-COM as the kind of game I have to rant about here all too often: the kind that was never actually played before its release. For all its extended development time, it still needed a few more months filled with play-testing and polishing to reach its full potential. X-COM‘s most infamous bug serves as a reminder of just how little of either it got: its difficulty levels are broken. If you select something other than the “beginner” difficulty, it reverts back to the easiest level after the first combat mission. In one sense, this is a blessing: the beginner difficulty is more than difficult enough for the vast majority of players. On the other, though… how the heck could something as basic as that be overlooked? There’s only one way that I can see: if you barely played the game at all before you put it in a box and shipped it out the door.

To his credit, Julian Gollop himself is well aware of these issues and freely acknowledges them — does so much more freely in fact than some of his game’s biggest fans. He notes the influence of vintage Avalon Hill and SPI board games, some of which were so demanding that just being able to play them at all — never mind playing them well — was an odd sort of badge of honor for the grognards of the 1970s and early 1980s. He would appear to agree with me that there’s a bit too much of their style of complexity-for-its-own-sake in X-COM:

I believe that a good game may have relatively simple rules, but have complex situations arise from them. Strategy games tend to do that very well, you know — even the simplest ones are very good at that. I think it’s possible to have an accessible game which doesn’t have amazingly complex rules, but still has a kind of emerging complexity within what happens — you know, what players do, what players explore. For me, that’s the Holy Grail of game design. So, I don’t think that I would probably go back to making games as complex as [X-COM].

Like poets, game designers often simplify their work as they age, the better to capture the real essence of what they’re trying to express.



But whatever their final evaluation of the first game, most players then and now would agree that few franchises have been as thoroughly botched by their trustees as X-COM was afterward. When the first X-COM became an out-of-left-field hit, MicroProse UK, who had great need of hits at the time to impress the Spectrum Holobyte brass, wanted the Gollops to provide a sequel within a year. Knowing that that amount of time would allow them to do little more than reskin the existing engine, they worked out a deal: they would give their publisher their source code and let them make a quickie sequel in-house, while they themselves developed a more ambitious sequel for later release.

The in-house MicroProse project became 1995’s X-COM: Terror from the Deep, which posited that, forty years after their defeat at the end of the first game, the aliens have returned to try again. The wrinkle this time is that they’ve set up bases under the Earth’s oceans, which you must attack and eradicate. Unfortunately, Terror from the Deep does little to correct the original’s problems; if anything, it makes them worse. Most notably, it’s an even more difficult game than its predecessor, a decision that’s hard to understand on any level. Was anyone really complaining that X-COM was too easy? All in all, Terror from the Deep is exactly the unimaginative quickie sequel which the Gollops weren’t excited about having to make.

Nevertheless, it’s arguably the best of the post-original, pre-reboot generation of X-COM games. X-COM: Apocalypse, the Gollops’ own sequel, was a project on a vastly greater scale than the first two X-COM games, a scale to which they themselves struggled to adapt. It was riven by bureaucratic snafus and constant conflict between developer and publisher, and the resulting process of design-by-fractious-committee turned it into a game that did a lot of different things — turned-based and real-time combat in the very same game! — but did none of them all that well, nor even looked all that good whilst doing them. Julian Gollop today calls it “the worst experience of my entire career” and “a nightmare.” He and Nick cut all ties with MicroProse after its 1997 release.

After that, MicroProse lost the plot entirely, stamping the X-COM label onto games that had virtually nothing in common with the first one. X-COM: Interceptor (1998) was a space simulator in the mode of Wing Commander; Em@il Games: X-COM (1999) was a casual multiplayer networked affair; X-COM: Enforcer (2001) was a mindless shoot-em-up. This last proved to be the final straw;  the X-COM name disappeared for the next eleven years, until XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the reboot by Firaxis Games.

If you ask me, said reboot is in absolute terms a better game than the original, picking up on almost all of its considerable strengths while eliminating most of its weaknesses. But it cannot, of course, lay claim to the same importance in the history of gaming. Despite its flaws, the original X-COM taught designers to personalize strategy games, showed them how to raise the emotional stakes in a genre previously associated only with cool calculation. For that reason, it richly deserves its reputation as one of the most important games of its era.

(Sources: the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; Amstrad Action of October 1989; Computer Gaming World of August 1994, September 1994, April 1995, and July 1995; Crash of Christmas 1988 and May 1989; Game Developer of April 2013; Retro Gamer 13, 68, 81, 104, 106, 112, and 124; Amiga Format of December 1989, June 1994, and November 1994; Computer and Video Games of December 1988; Games TM 46; New Computer Express of September 15 1990; Games Machine of July 1988; Your Sinclair of August 1990 and September 1990; Personal Computer News of July 21 1983. Online sources include Julian Gollop’s X-COM postmortem from the 2013 Game Developers Conference, “The Story of X-COM at EuroGamer, and David Jenkins’s interview with Julian Gollop at Metro.

The original X-COM is available for digital purchase at GOG.com, as are most of the other X-COM games mentioned in this article.)

 
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Posted by on September 18, 2020 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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