X-COM: Alliance - Development

Development

The concept for the game was originally conceived in 1995. Development work began in 1996 at MicroProse's UK Studio in Chipping Sodbury, then led by the Terror from the Deep producer Stuart Whyte and designer Andrew G. Williams, who had also worked together on the Amiga and PlayStation ports of the first two X-COM games (Williams was also simultaneously a co-producer of X-COM: Apocalypse). The game's concept was inspired in part by the head-mounted cameras of Colonial Marines in the film Aliens, and was similar to the 1993 video game Hired Guns, co-created by Scott Johnston, a programmer in the original development team of Alliance. According to Whyte, the game was intended to be multiplayer-based, possibly with one player becoming the team leader and directing the other players. X-COM Alliance used the Unreal Engine. Deformable and destructible environments (as in the X-COM strategy games) were one of the game's planned features; the game engine later created for Red Faction employed a similar concept.

In April 1999, when "much of the foundation work had already been set," the work on the game was then taken over by MicroProse's Chapel Hill Studio (creators of Klingon Honor Guard) after Hasbro had acquired MicroProse and decided to close the British studio. Chris Clark became the new lead designer and Chris Coon was lead programmer on the project. The game was redesigned, including a complete overhaul of the game graphics and HUD. Dave Ellis provided game design advice, helping to coordinate elements such as the featured weapons and alien races for canon compatibility between Alliance and the other X-COM title in development, X-COM: Genesis. The game was supposed to use the heavily-modified Unreal Engine, featuring a skeletal animation system, motion capture, a completely different AI, a new sound system able to store and playback large amounts of speech, and a DirectMusic-based dynamic music system. Additionally, a large 2D component was planned for the game's management and research part.

The 1999 E3 conference by MicroProse featured people dressed up as aliens and other items from the game's universe, but the display did not include a playable demo. Near the end of 1999, Hasbro closed the Chapel Hill Studio, ending the development of Genesis. The work on Alliance relocated again, this time to the MicroProse headquarters Hunt Valley Studio. The game, set for a Q4-2000 release, was pushed back again in August 2000 to "sometime in the year 2001." In January 2000 producer Martin DeRiso stated that the game was "60–70%" complete, but the project was put on indefinite hold in late 2000 when the Hunt Valley studio was redirected to begin work on the much less-ambitious X-COM: Enforcer, using some resources from Alliance. In January 2001, Alliance had supposedly resumed development, and its new release date was set to the third quarter of 2001. After Infogrames Entertainment bought Hasbro Interactive, the game was postponed again because of the departure of a key team member (responsible for the implementation of the game's revolutionary AI system). Infogrames created an official website in February 2002, only to pull it down a few days later. The game was ultimately aborted without any official announcement.