Julian Gollop

Julian Gollop was born in 1965.[4] He came of age in Harlow, England.[5] When he was a child, his father introduced him to many different types of games, including chess, card games, and board games.[5][6] His family played games regularly, choosing to play games instead of going to see films.[5] When he was about 14 years old, Gollop started playing more complex games like Dungeons & Dragons, SPI board games, and Avalon Hill board games.[5][6] After home computers became a reality while he was in secondary school, Gollop's fascination for complex strategy games helped him recognise how computers could allow him to make and play games he enjoyed.[5][6]

In 1982, while he was still in secondary school, Gollop started designing and programming computer games.[1][6][7] For £25, Gollop bought his first computer, a ZX81, from a school friend to learn programming.[6] Even though the ZX81 only had one kilobyte of memory and no real graphics processing ability, he was "amazed" at its capabilities.[6] His first published games were Islandia and Time Lords, which he made for the BBC Micro in 1983 with programmer Andy Greene, a school friend.[7][8][9] Gollop subsequently upgraded to a ZX Spectrum and began creating video games like Nebula in BASIC.[6] He recognised that his future involved computers.[6]

When Gollop went on to the London School of Economics to study sociology, he spent more time creating video games such as Chaos: The Battle of Wizards and Rebelstar than he spent studying.[1][6] He created the first Rebelstar by himself as a two-player game and brought it to a publisher that had an office near his college.[6] They wanted it to be a single-player game, something he had not made before,[6] so Gollop created functional path-finding algorithms from scratch, the game got published, and it ended up doing well.[6]

In 1988, he was joined by his brother, Nick Gollop, in founding Target Games, a video game development company that subsequently changed to Mythos Games.[6][10] Under the Mythos name, the Gollop brothers designed and developed computer games such as Laser Squad, X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Apocalypse.[2][10][11] Up to this time, Gollop had only made computer games for 8-bit and 16-bit home computers commonly found in Europe.[6] It was with X-COM: UFO Defense that he first beginning making video games directly for the MS-DOS and later Microsoft Windows operating system personal computers that at the time would be sold primarily in the United States.[6] Despite the success of these and other games, Mythos Games was forced to close in 2001 after an essential publisher was acquired by a company that withdrew commitments for The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, which Mythos Games was in the process of developing.[6][12][13]

After closing Mythos Games, Gollops founded Codo Technologies.[13] They were disheartened by how mainstream publishers treated them at Mythos Games, so they tried a different business model.[13] The inaugural game of Codo Technologies in 2002 was Laser Squad Nemesis, a turn-based tactics game with asynchronous, multiplayer play-by-email features which required a monthly subscription.[13] The Gollop brothers developed only one other game, Rebelstar: Tactical Command, before he moved to Bulgaria with his wife in 2006.[14][15]

After moving to Bulgaria, Gollop began working for Ubisoft in Sofia as a game designer.[6] He was promoted quickly to producer, eventually leading the development of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars for the Nintendo 3DS.[6][16] He then became the co-creative director of Assassin's Creed III: Liberation for the PlayStation Vita.[16] Gollop left Ubisoft in 2012 with ideas to remake games from earlier in his career.[14][15][16][17]

As of 2017, Gollop works in Sofia as the CEO and chief designer for Snapshot Games, an independent video game developer he co-founded in 2013 with David Kaye.[3][18][19][20] Chaos Reborn, the studio's first game, was released by Snapshot Games in 2015.[21] He then led his company's development of Phoenix Point, which was released in December 2019.[3][22]