April 25, 2004

For the past 2 days Micah (xcomufo.com) and I have been in contact with Chris Cates (a professional game developer); and here's what we discovered:

Sid Meier did an interview for Gamespot about a game called "Pirates!". At the end of the interview, he points out that his company (Firaxis) has complete access to MicroProse's old licenses, including X-COM. Because most of the interview is about the game "Pirates!", here's a transcription of when it becomes interesting for us:

"Firaxis has made an arrangement with Atari that gives us access to some of our classic titles, like covert action, X-COM, colonization ... most of the games we had association with at Microprose are still owned by Atari and they've been encouraging us to take a look at redoing some of those, so we'd like to hear from our fans and see what they'd like us to do."

So... what are we waiting for? I've already posted the same info on xcomufo's forums, and sent a feedback to Firaxis. Now it's your turn...

To view the interview on Gamespot, click here (free membership required to stream video). The video is called "Developer Interview 1" .

To send Firaxis a feedback from their website, click here.

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April 20, 2004 16:12:

Here's an email that I have personally sent to Nancy Bushkin who works in Corporate Communication for Atari:

Hi there,

My name is Jonathan, and I host a website about X-COM games. X-COM is a licence owned by Microprose (who was bought by Hasbro who was bought by Infogrames).

I have only one question: There is a huge amount of fans out there dying for another X-COM title, like the Genesis project (cancelled in Dec, 1999) and it's you guys now that controls the licence. Is there any plans for another X-COM game?

Thank you for you time.

-Jonathan
Arky's X-COM page
commanderx.xcomufo.com

Here's the answer I got from Atari:

Thank you for your email. Yes, Atari does control the license to the X-COM franchise. We have no details at this time about future titles in the franchise but are exploring various possibilities.

Conclusion? The licence is not dead! and personnaly, I have more faith in Atari than in Hasbro for making another X-COM game. Hasbro had their chances with Email X-COM and Enforcer, and they stained the reputation X-COM has instead of making it shine again. The flame is yours now Atari!

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