Pitching A Winning Strategy Game

Every success story has a beginning.  XCOM: Enemy Unknown's involved a small team of incredibly passionate artists that wanted to make a statement about where strategy gaming could go.  So we made a movie.  Half of the shots in this were animated by me, and I will have another post showing some of the process that went into their creation. 

Watch it here:


X-COM Pitch Movie Credits

Lead Artist – Greg Foertsch

Lead Animator – Dennis Moellers

Animators –  Justin Thomas
                   Kevin Bradley

Modelers –  Chris Sulzbach (Hero Soldier/high poly set)
                 Brian Mahoney (Furniture/Room Deco)

                 Ryan Murray (Sectoid/Sectopod)

                 Bryce Homick (items in bedroom)

                 Nathan Gordon (truck/shotgun)

                 Justin Thomas (low poly set model/layout)

FX Animators –  Brian Feldges

                       Mike Bazzell

Concept Artist – Piero MacGowan

Sound –  Roland Rizzo

            Mark Cromer

UI Artist – Steve Ogden

These are the people responsible for creating the original pitch movie for the game “X-COM: Enemy Unknown.”  This pre-rendered cinematic was created over a four month time frame from January to April in 2008. A handful of us had started preliminary work in December of 2007.  It represents our vision for the “X-COM” remake we wanted to develop.  Originally we wanted the title to be simply “X-COM” but that idea changed over the course of development for many reasons. 

Little did we know that we were embarking on a nearly five year development journey that would push us harder, and bring us closer as a team than any other title previously developed at Firaxis Games.

I feel privileged to have had such a large involvement with its creation.