Writing for PCGamer, Julian Gollop explains the good and bad of RNG in games.

Never has there been a more controversial topic in the history of strategy gaming than the use and abuse of RNG, otherwise known as Random Number Generators. I know this from experience, since my last game, Chaos Reborn, reveled and delighted in the liberal use of RNGs (it wasn’t called 'Chaos' for nothing). 

It was based on a ZX Spectrum game I made in 1985 called Chaos and published by Games Workshop (a company not shy of randomness itself—usually in the form of buckets of dice rolled in their army games). In Chaos Reborn you play a wizard, and the casting of spells and combat were subject to binary outcome randomness. The combat is especially brutal, with a success killing a target outright and a failure doing nothing at all. Even a lowly giant rat had a 10% chance to kill a dragon.

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In his column for PCGamer Julian Gollop asks where are all the Lovecraftian games?

In any game developer’s career there is always that game you wanted to make, but never got to make. And you still think is a great idea. And nobody else has done anything like it. 

For me the ‘one that got away’ was a concept I prepared for MicroProse shortly after finishing work on the original UFO: Enemy Unknown / X-COM: UFO Defense in 1994. It was heavily inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, set in the 1930s in an alternate version of history where renowned occultist Aleister Crowley plotted to take over the world by summoning monsters through an alternate dimension. (Crowley himself was a real, historical figure, a founder of the religion Thelema and a leading member of the Ordo Templi Orientis.)

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@Blue's News A new game has been announced by the original X-Com creator called Phoenix Point. The game is described as a turn-based tactical combat game with strategic overworld according to Gollop.

There's nothing there but newsletter signups Rock, Paper, Shotgun points the way to a tweet from Gollop with all there is to know about this for the moment, which says:

"Phoenix Point is our new game - turn based tactical combat - world based strategy - http://www.phoenixpoint.info/"

@GDC Vault developer Julian Gollop talks about his classic X-Com game and its development over 20 years ago with publisher Microprose. I've included the youtube video for those who prefer it but the gdc has the longer video.

Firaxis' and 2K Games' recent X-COM: Enemy Unknown is actually a remake of a series that began twenty years ago. It all started in 1994 with MicroProse's UFO: Enemy Unknown, entitled X-COM: UFO Defense in North America, a real-time base management simulation with turn-based tactical combat and an engaging story of alien invasion. The marriage of its distinct Geoscape and Battlescape views represented the game's strategy and battle modes, respectively; and they provided what felt like two different and compelling games in one. In this postmortem, Julian Gollop will lay out the tactics he deployed in directing, co-designing, co-programming, and even co-drawing the first, and often highest regarded, UFO/X-COM entry.