Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney. With me tonight

is one of my regular panel, Dr. Bruce Garrick. Bruce, welcome to the show. Yeah. Hello,

gamers. We are also joined by game designer, Jake Solomon from Faraxis, who's been working on a little

project you may have heard of called Xcom Enemy Unknown. Jake, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you. This is kind of like a milestone achievement for me, being on three moves ahead. So I'm glad to be here. And we're super glad to have you, and we're certainly glad to be talking again about XCOM. So I'm, you know, I've been bidding how to start the show. So let's, you know, Revin diving into our impressions yet.

Jake, why don't you talk about sort of the challenge you set for yourself when you decided,

when you were sort of tasked with relaunching Xcom?

Well, yeah, it was sort of, you know, in its own way.

I mean, this has sort of been a dream of mine. You know, I, you know, this is my

favorite game. I played this all my senior in high school, and this is sort of the game that

set me on the track to actually put me in the industry because I got a computer science degree

because of this game, and then I really got into strategy games, and that's why I went to Pharaxas. And so for the last

12 plus years I've been at Fraxas, I've basically been annoying the hell out of Sid to make this game.

And so for me, when the opportunity, in fact, I even, you know, I made a prototype of XCOM just on my own, like in 2002, and it was terrible.

I mean, it was awful.

And then, so we waited a while, and then when we finally came back to it, like, this was,

you know, this was sort of my dream project.

So I didn't actually go into it as properly terrified as I probably should have been.

I was a little naive when I went into it.

But yeah, I mean, it's a game like that, a game like XCOM, it was definitely, development

has been quite roller coaster wide, right?

It's been quite a challenge um you know taking

...