Trivia
Ten years after the game was released, a real element 115 was discovered. Unfortunately, it wasn't named elerium like in the game, but ununpentium.
Contributed by
Rola (979) on Aug 26, 2009.
There was a "Limited Edition" of UFO: Enemy Unknown for the Amiga CD32 that included a Microprose travel alarm clock.
Contributed by
robotriot 
(6380) on Jun 01, 2008.
X-Com: UFO Defense was named #22 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).
Contributed by
PCGamer77 (3025) on May 01, 2008.
A novelization of the game was published through the Proteus imprint of Prima Publishing. It written by Diane Duane and first published in December of 1995.
In March of 2007, IGN said that X-Com is the number 1 PC game of all time. http://pc.ign.com/articles/772/772285p3.html
X-COM: UFO Defense was ranked # 8 in the 50 Best Games of All Time list published by PC Gamer Magazine in its April 2005 issue.
Contributed by
PCGamer77 (3025) on Mar 19, 2005.
The game is heavy influenced from the TV series UFO . It's about a secret UFO defense base which sends out military aircrafts to shoot down UFOs, sending out squads to seek the wreckage and kill or catch aliens to analyze them.
'X-Com: UFO Defense' was named the #3 game of the Top 50 Games of all time, by the editors of PC Gamer magazine in their October 2001 issue.
GeForce owners have probably encountered display problems that render the game unplayable. This can be fixed though; go to the Windows Control Panel and the DirectX settings. Switch off DirectDraw hardware acceleration and the game should work fine.
Don't forget to switch acceleration back on afterwards, though.
The CD version may include a partial install version and a full install version, depending on which CD you got. The partial install version leaves some datafiles on the CD to save disk space. However, the "full install" version is also on the CD in the HARDDISK directory.
You can actually play "multiplayer" XCOM long before e-mail XCOM... By using sort of a "hack". As the game actually plays through turn by turn on both sides, it is actually possible to take the saved file right at the end of a turn, edit a pointer, and play the "other side" using the engine. And if you exchange files back and forth, you can have a multiplayer game.
http://www.tacticalplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?xcom/multip.zip
The game is actually Geoscape, the rotating globe and resource management, generating the battlefield conditions for BattleScape, where you conduct tactical combat against the aliens. If you press Ctrl-C (as suggested by the hint "level skip") while in Battlescape, you interrupt the Battlescape program, preventing it from writing the "results" file. Thus you will get the same result as your previous battle. This is a result of the developement history (see the other trivia entries), whereas MicroProse decided that the tactical combat is not enough to be a game in itself, and asked Mythos to write a strategy game around it.
In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, it was named by the readers the tenth best game of all time. The staff named it the third best.
X-Com was voted #15 overall in PCGamer Magazine's Readers All-Time Top 50 Games Poll (April 2000 issue).
Contributed by
PCGamer77 (3025) on Jan 21, 2001.
V1.4 patch removed the document check copy protection.
This game is part of Computer Gaming World magazine's Hall of Fame.
The last offical patch changed the sound effects of the game. Many people didn't like the new sounds.
X-COM: UFO Defense is one of the few 256-color DOS games to implement dynamic lightning. By using 16 shades of 16 different hues (16 x 16 = 256) as the palette, artists could create isometric tiles whose colors can be gradually changed simply by incrementing each tile's palette entries by 1, 2 and so on. In this way, the same tiles can be shown darker and darker simultaneously on the screen.
Contributed by
IJan (1980) on Jun 29, 2000.
A new version of the X-COM series dubbed "X-COM: Genesis", focusing on some of the gameplay features found in the original, was in production at Hasbro/Microprose in 1999. The project was cut during mass-layoffs for the company.
A complete version of X-COM is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine.
Jullian Gollop, designer of X-COM: UFO Defence tells how X-COM was created:
"We showed a demo of ‘Laser Squad 2’ on the Atari ST to Microprose in 1991. The idea was to produce a sequel to ‘Laser Squad’ but with much neater graphics using an isometric style very similar to Populous. They liked what we had done so far, but they explained that they wanted a ‘big’ game. I said "what do you mean by ‘big’" and they said "well, you know – BIG". They also said that it had to be set on earth, like Civilisation or Railroad Tycoon, because people could relate to it much more. So we went away, scratched our heads and thought about it. Then we came up with the idea of adding on a grand strategic element to the game, very firmly set on earth, in which the player managed an organisation that defended the planet against UFO incursions. I bought quite a few books on UFOs for research purposes so that we could give the game an even more ‘authentic’ basis.
The project started reasonably well with myself and Nick designing and programming, while the art was to be done by John Reitze and martin Smillie at MicroProse. Soon we had some problems because Microprose did not understand our game design and they asked for clarification. Several documents later we were not much better off and I had wasted a lot of time. Certain creature types were removed, including the ‘Men In Black’ and others added. Then the whole project was nearly axed when MicroProse made some cutbacks due to financial difficulties. Everything proceeded reasonably smoothly for a while until Spectrum Holobyte acquired Bill Stealey’s shares in the company. Our producer was made redundant and the game was nearly axed again. Finally we had to spend a couple of months working very long hours at MicroProse in Chipping Sodbury to get the game finished by the end of March in 1994."
-- taken from the Mythos Games web site.
Contributed by
IJan (1980) on Dec 06, 1999.
The game has a bug in the difficulty settings. Regardless of which difficulty level you choose, you always start at the easiest level. Surprisingly, the official patch of the game does not correct this problem. However, there is an unofficial patch available for solving this issue.
The game was released under the name of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in Europe. This release also had a completely different box art.
Contributed by
IJan (1980) on Dec 04, 1999.
