Trivia / XCOM: Enemy Unknown

• Ascended Fanon: The Skyranger inherited the designation code SR-77H from a fan-ficky technical sheet.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Otto Zander, the "main character" in Guavamoment's X-COM Let's Play, was made into an X-COM hero unit in the remake.
  • Many fans of the original X-Com loved to exaggerate the threat of Chryssalids, with several Let's Play retellings deliberately including missions where X-Com is forced to face massive numbers of Chryssalids, most notably Guava's LP where Japan is overrun. The Enemy Within Council Mission "Site Recon" plays out almost exactly like some of them, even allowing for the possibility of operatives failing to reach the evac point by the time bombs start dropping!
• Development Gag:
  • The logo appears to be de-hyphened, much like The Bureau. But if you look at the negative space in the last three letters...
  • Ditto for the title itself; it's a combination of the original game's two titles (X-COM: UFO Defense and UFO: Enemy Unknown).
  • The cover art is an Homage to Laser Squad.^note The original X-COM: UFO Defense was originally Laser Squad II.
  • In Enemy Within, one clue you can get to the location of EXALT's HQ is that they are based in a country you can play as in Civilization V, which is also developed by Firaxis.
• Dueling Games: With Xenonauts, although Jake Solomon is cordial about the competition.
• Dummied Out: Within days of the official release, enterprising programmers discovered some mostly-finished functions that weren't implemented in the final game. These include the ability to intercept Terror Ships and Abductors before they land, making it possible to avoid the associated Terror and Abduction missions altogether. Modders have managed to reactivate some of these options (Terror Battleships, for one), and others have since been officially patched back in (for example, you'll get Abductor ship landings instead of abduction missions if you have full satellite coverage).
• Genre Relaunch: After being effectively dead for over a decade, this game showed that Western turn based tactics games could still have a place.
• Promoted Fanboy: Lead designer Jake Solomon has been an enormous fan of the X-COM franchise since he was a child, and as this article reveals, it's no understatement to say that his journey to create Enemy Unknown was nothing short of a lifelong passion.
• Running the Asylum:
  • Pretty much everyone on the development team adored the original. Enforced for those who hadn't played it before; every other Friday, time was set aside to play the original. All of them became addicted.
  • New hires had to beat the original before they could start working on the new one, to boot. It's a wonder the game was ever finished in the first place.
• Technology Marches On: The main menu of Enemy Unknown shows a keypad-based cellphone lying on the ground next to the car with its late owner.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A story Quentin Smith of the "Sit Down and Play" site told was that in the early stages of development, the developers couldn't figure out how the new XCOM was supposed to play. So they went to the house of Sid Meier and used dice, paper and wooden tokens as a bare-bones XCOM to get a feel of it. An XCOM board game... Wouldn't you wanna get your friends around a table to give it a shot?
    • And sadly, the XCOM board game is almost completely unrelated.
  • The game originally bore a greater resemblance to the original, retaining action points as well as the various types of fire (snap shot, aimed shot, etc.) Jake Solomon insists that while it sounds fun, its mechanics were more complicated than complex, and he apparently had to continuously explain and re-explain them to everyone who tried to play it. This version was scrapped after about a year of development, but a playable build has been shown at several events.
  • Dr. Vahlen and Dr. Shen were originally married to each other.
  • Originally, the Muton was supposed to get a mechanical variant in Enemy Within instead of the Sectoid, but was looked over due to already being big.
  • The base ini file suggests there were as many as 36 nations on the Council before it was pared down to 16. The remnants of this can be seen in the appearance of nationalities among recruited soldiers not on the Council such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and South Korea.
  • Prestige Classes were considered for inclusion in Operation Slingshot, including the Flame Trooper for Assault classes. They would be unlocked through special missions that would be identical between playthroughs.
  • There is proof of concept footage of significantly more dynamically-animated combat for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, almost looking like Gears of War turned into a turn-based tactics game (eight years before it actually happened) with the units constantly moving in their square to exchange fire and duck (a bit like the animations of units inflicting or receiving Suppression), and the senior soldier ordering the junior. Also, a soldier gets injured and grips himself in light of that as well as visibly reacting with horror to his comrade being killed. Lastly, the ending shows a soldier having killed a Muton with his knife, making it obvious the use of melee combat for XCOM was considered before it actually happened in 2.