Mythos Games

» see mythosgames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Julian and Nick Gollop started Mythos Games in 1988, trading at first as Target Games. Julian had already been writing strategy games on 8-bit machines for years, going back to Rebelstar and Chaos on the ZX Spectrum, which is where the turn-based grid and the permanent consequences came from. The company stayed small for its entire life. It never had a publishing arm and never had more than a handful of people in the room.

Laser Squad arrived in 1988 and Lords of Chaos in 1990, both of them strategy games with a level of cruelty that would now be marketed as a feature. Then MicroProse commissioned something bigger, and the Gollops spent three years on it under conditions that came close to ending it more than once. MicroProse very nearly canceled the project mid-development. It shipped in 1994 as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe and X-COM: UFO Defense in the United States.

PC games reached Turkey then mostly as compilation discs from a shop, years after release, without boxes and usually without manuals. You found out what a game was by starting it. The studio names on those discs meant nothing at all to anyone I knew, which is one reason the 2001 closure registered here as no news whatsoever.

~ the record ~

~ the game that made them ~

UFO: Enemy Unknown is a strategy layer and a tactics layer stacked on each other, and the reason people still argue about it is that the two layers punish you on different timescales. On the world map you are running a budget, deciding which countries to defend and watching the ones you neglect sign treaties with the invaders. On the ground you are moving eight soldiers through a dark farmhouse with limited action points, and when one dies they stay dead with the name you gave them and whatever gear they were carrying.

It sold slowly and then kept selling, mostly on recommendation, which is how a game with no marketing budget becomes a genre. X-COM: Apocalypse followed in 1997 and Magic & Mayhem in 1998. Neither had the same reach.

~ the one that did not ship ~

The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge was going to be the real successor, a 3D reworking of the original design for PC and PlayStation 2, made by the actual authors rather than by whoever held the license. Development went on hold in February 2001 when Mythos could not find a publisher. Bethesda Softworks picked it up, then stopped funding it in April. That was the end of the money, and by the middle of 2001 the game was canceled and the company had ceased operations.

The concept was sold on to Altar Interactive in the Czech Republic and became UFO: Aftermath in 2003. The Gollops set up Codo Technologies and spent most of the next decade on work-for-hire, well away from the thing they were known for. Julian Gollop got back to it eventually with Chaos Reborn in 2015 and Phoenix Point in 2019, by which point Firaxis had rebuilt his 1994 game as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and sold it to a few million people who had never heard of Mythos Games.

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