LORD OF CHAOS

How XCOM’s JULIAN GOLLOP improved on the board games he loved

- JULIAN GOLLOP

Thank you to the 1980s schoolkids who wouldn’t let Julian Gollop join in. They were playing Warlock, a wizard-battling board game from a new publisher named Games Workshop, and Gollop was forced to watch from the sidelines. He consoled himself by picking holes in the game’s design. Warlock had cards, which represented player’s spells. But its board was wholly cosmetic—once the wizard tokens were placed in their floating arena, they didn’t move again. “What’s the point?” thought Gollop. “This board is useless.”

So he built Warlock for himself—unlicensed but better. In Gollop’s game, when a wizard summoned a creature, its card was placed on the board and moved around like a counter. Rather than simply playing the hand they were dealt, wizards directed units around a changing battlefield. Gollop called the game Chaos, and in 1985, he remade it for the Spectrum. The publisher? Games Workshop.

For most developers, a game’s story would have ended there. But Gollop remade Chaos again in 1990, and in ’98, and most recently as Chaos Reborn in 2015. That impulse, to find the flaws in the games he loves and improve on them, has driven the XCOM designer throughout his career. “There’s always an element of unfinished business,” he says. “I could have done that better, or it would have been more interesting to have done it that way.”