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The brainchild of Julian Gollop and other assorted Microprose personnel, ''UFO: Enemy Unknown'' was a strategy game produced in 1993 and unleashed upon the European gaming public. A year later, it jumped the pond to grace American players as ''X-COM: UFO Defense'', since there was a naming rights conflict with an obscure 1989 flight sim by subLOGIC called ''UFO''.
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By either name, ''X-COM'' puts the player in command of an e'''X'''traterrestrial '''COM'''bat unit charged with protecting Earth from an alien threat, managing resources and researching captured technology in the process. The hybrid of [[Real Time Strategy]] (improving X-COM's overall condition and catching [[Flying Saucer|UFOs]] as they land - or crashing them yourself) and [[Tactical Turn Based|Turn Based Tactics]] (exploring crash sites, stopping terror attacks, and defending and assaulting bases) quickly won the hearts of the gaming public.
Not to say the ''X-COM'' legacy is a solo act, however. While Gollop's team set to work on ''X-COM: Apocalypse'', an in-house crew at Microprose beat him to the punch with ''X-COM: Terror From The Deep'' in 1995, a [[Mission Pack Sequel]] created to satiate player demand for more alien-assaulting action. ''Apocalypse'' hit the shelves in 1997, to mixed reviews due to its [[Art Shift]] into pseudo-3D futuristic graphics and the clunkiness of a newly-introduced real-time option for playing missions. The last days of Microprose (and its acquisition by Hasbro Interactive) saw ''X-COM'' trying to get back on its feet with two [[Genre Shift|Genre Shifted]] offerings: ''X-COM: Interceptor'' (1998) kept the base management elements while swapping out the strategy missions for space-bound [[Simulation Game|Flight Simulator]] action, while ''X-COM: Enforcer'' (2001) ditched the strategy part outright to make a [[First Person Shooter]] running parallel to the timeline of ''UFO Defense''. Sadly, neither had the mystique of their ancestors, and are often [[Canon Discontinuity|shunted away from canon]] due to the [[Unexpected Gameplay Change]] (and in the case of ''Enforcer'', being awful).
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Meanwhile, the original reboot, ''The Bureau: XCOM Declassified'', was released in 2013 to lukewarm reviews -- it wasn't bad, but it didn't wow anybody, either. After much speculation on the degree of canonical interconnection between the FPS and the strategy game, the case has been finally laid to rest by [https://web.archive.org/web/20121231042915/http://au.gamespot.com/xcom-enemy-unknown/previews/xcom-enemy-unknown-whats-new-whats-not-6364778/ associate producer Pete Murray]: "They're in their universe; we're in our universe," he says. "We do talk with [2K Marin], but thematically, they're separate."
In 2015, Firaxis announced a sequel to Enemy Unknown, simply titled ''XCOM 2'', that's released on 5 February 2016. Rather than continue the storyline with the typical "Congratulations on defeating the aliens, now have some more aliens!" maneuver, ''XCOM 2'' follows from a canon ending that XCOM [[The Bad Guys Win|lost hard]].<ref>According to Firaxis's data, this is how most real players' hard-mode games end.</ref> The aliens have taken over the planet, publicly appearing to be benevolent rulers. The remnants of XCOM went underground, suspecting that the aliens' motives were not so altruistic, and twenty years later, they're ready to bring together the various resistance cells and take back the planet. The game has received similar accolades to its prequel and has received a number of DLCs. The latest and apparently final DLC expansion, ''War of the Chosen'',
In 2020, a sequel to ''War of the Chosen'', ''XCOM: Chimera Squad'', was released. Five years after victory over the aliens, it stars the eponymous mixed squad of human and friendly alien troopers as they fight to keep the peace in City 31, where humans and aliens cohabit.
{{tropelist|Not Enough Trope Units!}}
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* [[Chest Burster]]: Chryssalids and Tentaculats.
* [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]]: Most prevalent in ''UFO Defense'', where aliens don't suffer from Fatal Wounds unless they were inflicted under previous mind control, magically know the entire map (and your soldiers' positions) after Turn 20, and can target any of your soldiers as soon as just one is in visual range (particularly rage-inducing with Ethereals' psi-spamming).
** Even so, it's possible to fool them by bringing a psi-decoy with low mental defences and no weapons (if you want to keep one somewhat useful with zero damage capability, there are medi-kit, mind probe, smoke grenades and flares) to suck up all their psychic powers, as they are always going to target the people with the weakest minds. This can be exploited to screen for low mental defense before you gain the ability to see a unit's value directly.
*** Thus making that poor bastard a [[Mind Rape]] [[Unwitting Pawn]].
*** The aliens were also capable (in ''TFTD'', and presumably ''UFO Defense'') of hiding in squares that were in [[Fog of War|line-of-sight.]] Finding a lobster man three squares away with a blaster launcher just outside the final room of T'leth is an unpleasant surprise. When the discovery takes place because it rotated where you could see it after you'd specifically [[Failed a Spot Check|looked in that corner...]]
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== XCOM Reboot ==
* [[Alternate Reality Game]]: ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120125225011/http://www.projectenemyunknown.com/ Project: Enemy Unknown]'', also known as "InfiniVac", was started up in 2010 to help draw interest towards the XCOM reboot prior to its official announcement. It was placed on hiatus when 2K began retooling the game, thus delaying its release. Recently, as an attempt to draw much-needed attention to XCOM through a different approach (i.e., average citizens keeping tabs on strange phenomena instead of [[The Government]] doing so via the now-defunct InfiniVac Network), 2K started a new ARG called ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120701052450/http://www.citizenskywatch.com/ Citizen Skywatch]''. While news sites and online commentators alike were mostly speculating that the ARG was connected to either GTA 5, Bioshock, or an upcoming game called Agent, despite the heavy implication of UFO-related happenings from the title alone, an explicit link to XCOM was made by the appearance of [https://web.archive.org/web/20130326155747/http://forums.2kgames.com/forumdisplay.php?100-Citizen-Skywatch a Citizen Skywatch section] in the XCOM-specific part of 2K's official forums.
* [[Blob Monster]]: The black goo.
* [[Code Emergency]]: The InfiniVac Network from ''Project: Enemy Unknown'' was on "Code Black Lockdown" for quite some time. {{spoiler|1=This may have been related to a possible alien attack on a Russian defector and an XCOM agent who was escorting him; according to the information that was available on the InfiniVac Network, their remains bore evidence that they might have been killed by the black blobs seen in the 2010 E3 trailer.}}
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** By the late-game however, this evolves into sleek curves and more naturalistic styles.
* [[Airborne Aircraft Carrier]]: The ''Avenger,'' XCOM's new and mobile base of operations. Though technically, it's an old alien supply vessel from the events of ''Enemy Unknown/Within'' that's been heavily modified.
* [[All There in the Manual]]: The in-game XCOM Archives as well as the official prologue novel, ''[https://blog.2k.com/news/2k-blog-official-xcom-2-prequel-novel-xcom-2-resurrection-available-now XCOM 2: Resurrection]''{{Dead link}}
* [[Alternate Universe]]: {{spoiler|An Ethereal with a differently colored aura implies that these exist, including those where XCOM ''won'' in ''Enemy Unknown/Within.''}}
* [[And I Must Scream]]: It's strongly implied that the Commander has been heavily experimented on by ADVENT and the aliens {{spoiler|while being held in captivity for decades}}.
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