Michael Jorgensen: Zombie Studios

Name: Michael Jorgensen

Company: Zombie Studios

Profession: QA Lead / QA Tester

Favorite Classic Game: XCOM: UFO Defense

Quote: Lasers, Aliens, Explosions, Jets, Strategy, Tactics, Statistics, Research, everything a budding geek loves.

In a world, filled with “easy-mode” games, where the player is rewarded for every action, XCOM is the counter. Even the EASY mode for XCOM would make Patton or McArthur sweat. Time is almost always working against you. You are constantly fighting, scrambling to get things done, hurrying to unlock secrets, acquire more & better weapons, acquire more & better personnel, build more bases, etc. And the consequence of failure, is the END OF THE HUMAN RACE! From the opening movie onward, you will simply be hooked. Say goodbye to your girlfriend and kids, you won’t be seeing them for a while, XCOM has sucked you in.

Relating to Game Development:

XCOM heralds back to the days, when each component of a game was made by 1 or maybe 2 individuals. You would be lucky if you had a “large” team of 20 people making the game. The programmers literally knew each line of code they had written. You would get a different feel from the different pieces of content, because they had each been given a unique artists touch. What makes this game even more impressive, was the technological masterpiece behind the coding. The game, was literally 2 separate game engines (the geoscape, and the tactical), passing data back and forth. See kids, back when the 286 and dinosaurs roamed the earth, the 640k limit really constrained games. To get around this, each engine would boot, run what the user needed, then pass off to the other engine, and do so quickly that the user never noticed. It may not sound like much, but it would be YEARS before anyone would make something so impressive.

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