Two generations of XCOM: Gollop and Solomon on this year's remake

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"On The Shoulders of Giants" is the name of the achievement that pops up towards the end of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Firaxis' reimagining of the revered strategy classic X-Com: UFO Defense. The achievement is awarded when you pass the final bottleneck into the game's finale - put another way, nobody who finishes the game could possibly miss it. Firaxis want to make the esteem in which they hold the 1994 original unmistakably clear.
You can't blame them. Microprose's idiosyncratic sci-fi strategy game had captured hearts all over the world but also steeled them against imitators. No official or unofficial sequel to X-Com had ever met with widespread fan approval. Otherwise perfectly competent games like the UFO Extraterrestrials series and UFO Aftershock and its sequels were dismissed as "not X-Com enough."
What was that elusive magic that the original had and no remake had successfully recaptured? Jake Solomon, the producer of Firaxis' XCOM wasn't even sure that he knew.
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