X-COM: Alliance was a cancelled video game in the science fiction series X-COM, being developed by first MicroProse, then Hasbro Interactive and eventually Atari from 1995[1] until 2002. The game was originally announced in 1998 to be released in first half of 1999,[2] then repeatedly delayed and put on hold before becoming vaporware.
The early versions of Alliance garnered very favorable reception by several video game publications, including GameSpot's "Best of E3 (Sequels)" award in 2008 and IGN PC's "Best Action Game of E3" award in 2000. GameSpy called it "the most ambitious game we've seen at E3, and if they can pull this one off ... the pinnacle of tactical gaming, a new high-water mark that'll bust through established game genres" and PC Zone called it "a serious contender for 'game of the year'" in 2000.[2][3][4]
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The game takes place in the year 2062, 12 years after the events of X-COM: Terror from the Deep and five years before these of X-COM: Interceptor, when the Patton, an Earth research ship, travels to Cydonia to locate Elerium-115 on the surface of Mars and establish a mining facility. The Patton goes through a dimensional wormhole gateway and ends up many light years from Earth, finding the alien invaders from UFO: Enemy Unknown (such as Sectoids and Ethereals) engaged in a war with a new alien race, the Ascidians. The crew of the Patton joins forces with the Ascidians and their alliance gives the game its name. There would be also several new alien races introduced as well.[5][6]
Unlike other games in the X-COM series, most of which were turn-based strategy, Alliance was a first person shooter, but described as "with strategy, adventure and RPG elements too".[1] The game had the player assume the role of commander of the lost X-COM mission. Gameplay would emphasize team management and tactics. Through the first-person perspective, the player would assemble and lead the squads of up to four members (from the pool of only 12, mostly scientists and engineers, all of them with not only different skills but also their own unique abilities, voices and lines of speech, personalities, feelings and attitudes, resulting in their display human-like behavior, distinctively different for various characters if they were put in the same situation) through the 13 missions with various objectives. The troopers' speech, movement, and combat effectiveness would be affected by their emotional state which would be infuenced by their individual personal traits and conditions such as the current morale and fatigue levels and their surroundings. Multiplayer co-operative (for the story mode) and deathmatch and capture the flag modes were also being planned.[1][5][7][8][9]
The work on Alliance (its original working titles being X-COM 4 and Fox Force Five in a reference to the film Pulp Fiction to stop media leaks) began in the UK Studio of MicroProse and was then led by the producer Stuart Whyte and the designer Andrew G. Williams, who previously had worked together on the Amiga and PlayStation ports of Enemy Unknown and then on Terror from the Deep for the PC (Whyte has also co-produced Apocalypse). The game's concept was inspired in part by the head-mounted cameras of Colonial Marines in the film Aliens, also sharing similarities with the 1993 video game Hired Guns, co-created by Scott Johnston who was also part of the original development team of Alliance. According to Whyte, the game was at first (in mid-1990s) supposed to be multiplayer-based, possibly with one player assuming the role of the team leader and directing the other players. It was also envisioned as featuring deformable landscapes (as in the X-COM strategy games), a concept similar to the game engine that would be later created for Red Faction.[10]
In Apirl 1999, when "much of the foundation work had already been set",[1] the work on the game was then taken over by MicroProse's Chapel Hill Studio (Chris Clark-led development team behind Klingon Honor Guard) after Hasbro had acquired MicroProse and decided to close the British studio.[5][7] Development progressed and game design advice was lended by X-COM development veteran Dave Ellis (the designer of X-COM Interceptor and the unreleased X-COM: Genesis who previously had also wrote the official strategy guides to the first three games in the series) and the game elements such as the featured weapons and alien races were being coordinated for canon compatibility between Alliance and Genesis.[11] The game was to use the heavily-modified Unreal Engine, with a skeletal animation system also using motion capture, a completely different AI, a new sound system to be able to store and playback large amounts of speech and a DirectMusic-based dynamic music system. There would be also a large 2D component for the game's management and research section.[1][5][6]
Near the end of 1999, Hasbro closed the Chapel Hill Studio, ending the development of Genesis,[11] while the work on Alliance was moved again, this time to the Hunt Valley Studio, and pushed back to Q4 2000, and then again to "sometime in the year 2001" in August 2000.[12] In January 2000, the game was stated to be the producer Martin DeRiso to be "60-70%" complete.[9] The project was put on indefinite hold in late 2000, when the Hunt Valley studio was redirected to create the much less-ambitious X-COM: Enforcer instead. In January 2001, Alliance was claimed to be again in develolment and its new planned release date was set to third quarter of 2001.[13] After Infogrames Entertainment bought Hasbro Interactive, the game was announced to be postponed again because of the departure of a key team member (responsible for the implementation of the game's would-be revolutionary AI system) and would not ship until "the end of 2001 at the earliest".[14][15] An official website was even put up by Infogrames in February 2002, just to be taken down only a few days later.[16][17] The game was ultimately aborted without any official announcement.
Julian Gollop, the chief designer of Enemy Unknown and Apocalypse, said in 2011: "I do remember going to E3 in 1999 and MicroProse had a huge display for X-COM: Alliance, with giant tubes with alien foetuses and guys dressed up as aliens walking around, but when I went up to try and play the game they didn’t really have anything playable. They were clearly having problems getting the engine to work properly. It ... looked good, but it was kind of a tragic demo in a way – the playability wasn’t there. It was later cancelled, of course."[18]
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