Mythos Games

19 The Rows, The High, Harlow, Essex, CM2

Julian Gollop quite rightly casts a long shadow over this blog. He created Rebelstar Raiders for Redshift, Chaos for Games Workshop, and, while I worked at Virgin Interactive Entertainment, I was lucky enough to be peripherally involved in the production of Magic & Mayhem. And then there's UFO: Enemy Unknown. Oh, UFO: Enemy Unknown. If there's one game that can eclipse my love for Highway Encounter, it's UFO: Enemy Unknown. It may be my favourite games ever. And it will be forever called UFO: Enemy Unknown, none of this X-COM nonsense.

By 1988 Julian Gollop had more or less released a game each year since 1983 and he'd been involved with three different companies. Redshift imploded, Games Workshop closed down their software label, and Firebird was in the process of being sold to MicroProse. It was clearly time to settle down and the logical place to found a new development company was Harlow, his home town in Essex. That company was Target Games as Julian Gollop told eurogamer.net in 2010:

When I left college, I set up Target Games with a friend. When he left, my brother Nick joined as a programmer. We made Laser Squad; I programmed the Spectrum and Amstrad versions, and Nick did the Commodore 64 version. Laser Squad was the first game where I was devoted to development full-time. It was a development of the Rebelstar ideas, which involved unit facings, hidden movement based on true line-of-sight, destructible terrain... all ideas which were then expanded by X-Com.

CRASH
August 1988 page 113

The Spectrum version came out first and was self-published. "It didn't do too badly," Julian Gollop told Eurogamer. There was also Rebelstar 2, a sequel to Rebelstar[1], released by Firebird on the budget Silverbird label:

It sold pretty well, even though they decided to put it on their Firebird label – I was hoping they were going to put it on their more expensive label. The royalty was a pittance – I think I got ten pence a copy – but it sold tens of thousands. I can’t remember the exact figures, but it did sell a lot. I bought a nice shiny red guitar and dotted around for a bit spending some money, so yeah, it was cool.
(nowgamer.com archived interview conducted 2011)

Rebelstar 2 was written before Laser Squad but dropped into the shops slightly afterwards. ACE clarified the family tree alongside a despairing letter from an Atari ST owning reader:

I read in your magazine that Laser Squad by Target Games was to be released on the ST. So being very excited, I wrote to them and asked if it was true. Yes, they said, in March next year!
How long does it take to convert a game?
I am now thinking of buying a Spectrum so I can play Laser Squad... or going into a deep state of depression.
Martin Beresford
Mansfield

[Julian Gollop] went on to explain that Rebelstar II was written long before Laser Squad... The Gollop brothers hadn't originally intended to publish 16-bit versions of Laser Squad but then someone approached them and offered to do the conversion. It all took a little while to set up and get going, but the ST version  will boast re-designed scenarios. "We decided to market a game worthy of the ST rather than do a straight conversion from the 8-bit game" was the line from the Gollops.
(ACE December 1988 page 123)

Julian Gollop handled the Amstrad conversion. His brother Nick did the Commodore 64 version. Laser Squad did finally appear on the Atari ST and Amiga, converted by Teque Software Development (who later became Krisalis Software). It's always difficult sussing out the release dates of games and in the case of Laser Squad it's especially complicated because distribution of the game was quickly taken over by a company called Blade Software. Sites online tend to confuse the Blade releases and the Target releases and it's difficult to get a sense of what came out when. The 1994 budget release by Krysalis doesn't do anything to help. I think there was a brief period around autumn/Christmas 1988 when the Gollops's handled distribution of the Spectrum and C64 version themselves through Target. Then Blade Software took over and, towards the end of 1989, re-released the C64 and Spectrum versions with new packaging, along with the versions for the Amstrad (AMSTRAD ACTION review, October 1989) and ST and Amiga (ZERO, December 1989 page 53).

Blade Software, Brooklands, New Road, St Ives, Cambridgeshire, PE17

So who were Blade Software? The ZZAP!64 review of the Blade Software Laser Squad re-release fills in some blanks. They were: 

An offshoot of a deal involving programming team Teque and The Software Business Ltd, Blade Software is a new company although Laser Squad isn't new, having surfaced previously through Target Games.

Teque/Krysalis were based in Rotherham. The Software Business Ltd were based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire. I found a recruitment advert which described The Software Business as:

Buying and sales agents in the exciting world of International Games Software Distribution. Our Managing Director is the European Agent for Activision... and Konix... On top of this we act as buying agents for several major international distributors.

The Software Business were based at The Cromwell Business Centre, New Road, St Ives. I'm going out on a limb and guessing Brooklands was part of that site. It's all gone now and replaced byhousing (phew, no need to drive to St Ives) but I think it was this building, captured by Streetview in 2008.

Blade Software, as far as I can tell, released Laser Squad and Lords of Chaos and nothing else. The relationship between Blade and the Gollops soon soured. An extract from Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense by David L. Craddock gives plenty of detail of how the relationship went wrong following the release of Lords of Chaos: 

A distributor phoned Julian asking when he could expect the hundreds of copies he’d ordered from Blade Software. “That set alarm bells ringing,” Julian says.

The brothers investigated and discovered that Blade Software had been mired in financial problems... Months later, Julian and Nick waited on royalty checks that never arrived. They confronted Jeremy Cook and Tony Kavanaugh, who had the gall to assume they would publish the next project from Mythos Games. “You’re not getting Laser Squad 2 unless you pay us our outstanding royalties on Lords of Chaos,” Julian told them.

Rather than keep working and hope the checks would arrive, the Gollops dropped Blade. “We realized we needed to find a good publisher for our next project, which is what we did,” says Julian.

19 The Rows, The High, Harlow, Essex, CM2

YOUR SINCLAIR
September 1991 page 19

Before the 1990 release of Lords of Chaos, Target Games changed their name to Mythos Games. Julian Gollop told RETRO GAMER (issue 112 page 48):

My original partner left Target Games and the name of the company was his choice. Nick and I decided to create a new company, which he would join as director, with our own name and identity.

Companies House records Mythos Games (company number 02450717) as incorporated on 8 December 1989; around the time Laser Squad was being handled by Blade.

Adverts start appearing for The Rebelst★r Collection in the autumn of 1991. A compilation of Julian Gollop's earlier games. Tape one featured Rebelstar Raiders, Nebula, and Chaos. Tape two, Rebelstar and Rebelstar II. This advert was.my first sighting of the Mythos Games address; 19 The Rows, The High, Harlow.

I used to live in Essex, and Harlow was always a punchline. What's the best way to see Harlow? In a rear view mirror. Why do seagulls fly upside down over Harlow? It's not worth crapping on. What's the difference between Harlow and a disaster area? *shrug*. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get out of Harlow. And so on and so on. Actually, if you are coming in by train, as I was, then Harlow shows you its best face. It's lovely. The track follows the river Stort through gentle countryside. Even the walk from the station to the huge pedestrian precinct isn't terrible. The town is more green than you'd expect. The worst you can say, as a new town it has the usual thoughtless lack of interest in pedestrians outside of their designated areas. At one point I climbed a set of stairs up from Sainsbury's car park to be almost immediately directed back down into an underpass under Fourth Avenue. That underpass threw me out round the back of the precinct and once I'd worked out where I was, I realised I was at The Rows. 

March 2025

I'm not 100% certain which of those is number 19. It's either one of the shop units on the first floor, towards the left of the photo, or it's one of the flats above. It took me ages to get a decent picture. My first few were taken at the top of a flight of stairs looking towards the sun so the contrast was really washed out; also, that temporary fencing guided everybody under the walkway I was on, so I struggled to get a photo that wasn't full of people. Then I walked down and tried to get a photo facing on to the front of The Rows by lifting my camera up over the fencing but that just looked crummy. Then I stopped and looked round, and realised something had gone terribly wrong with Harlow. Not just wear and tear, or the usual struggling town centre, the market square area looks desolate. The central plaza was fenced off. The buildings facing it were abandoned. All the shops were empty. Looking up I could see peeling paint, water damage, and burns and scorch marks where one of the flats above the shops had gone on fire. The weird thing was, the shops hadn't been boarded up or secured. They had just been left, as if everyone locked up one day and went home and never came back. An empty Citizen's Advice Bureau sticks in my memory, the floor a mass of dust and fallen ceiling tiles. There were plenty of people around going about their business but this just made everything seem weirder. There was nowhere in sight for this business to take place.

This isn't the place for a dissertation on town planning. The short answer: Harlow's town centre is now bigger that it needs. There was a plan to regenerate but it stalled. The proposed developer has been criticised for not securing empty shops, and antisocial behaviour and trespassing are becoming serious problems. I later learned the council is beginning a compulsory purchase of the area so that they can start the regeneration themselves. They've already begun by demolishing one side of The Rows. I couldn't have taken the picture I did before 2023, when an additional line of buildings turned The Rows into a narrow street. Streetview gives an idea of how it looked in 1991. The busy shops are at the other end of the precinct but I didn't go down there. Instead I went off, in a gloomy mood, to find a sandwich for lunch.

Back in 1991, Mythos games began working on their next title. The game that would become UFO: Enemy Unknown. At this point it seems to have been a demo for Laser Squad 2:

We were working on a very basic demo of Laser Squad 2 – it had isometric graphics and the environments were correctly 3D modelled so your shots could go up and down, or left and right. But it was still just a two-player tactical combat system. We decided once we had this demo that we needed to find a better publisher.

We had a few candidates: one was Domark, another was MicroProse. MicroProse was the company we really wanted to publish the game, because of Civilization and Railroad Tycoon – to us they were really the premier publisher of strategy games in the world at the time.

We took the demo to MicroProse in Chipping Sodbury, and showed it to a guy called Pete Moreland [MicroProse‘s head of development]. He showed it to a bunch of other people there – fortunately enough people at MicroProse were familiar with Laser Squad – and Pete came back and said to me and Nick that he liked it, but he wanted a ‘bigger’ game.

I had to ask him exactly what he meant, and it turned out he wanted something a bit more epic in terms of scale and scope, like Civilization, rather than just short tactical skirmishes.
(nowgamer.com)

I don't propose to talk much about UFO: Enemy Unknown because there's already a lot of information about it online. I've mentioned the David L. Craddock book further up the page and extracts from it were printed at Kotaku, Ars Technica, Shacknews, Vice Games, Polygon, and PC Gamer. What I do want to talk about is why I love the game  Everybody who has played UFO has war stories, usually about a mission that went hilariously badly, and here are a couple of mine.

There was, for example, the time I diligently kitted my team out for their first mission, flew out, and drew my weapons and engaged the enemy. This was the point I realised I'd forgotten to buy any ammunition. Most of my team died during the inglorious retreat back to the Skyranger. There was also the time my team landed and I followed my usual tactic of sending a lone team member a couple of paces down the Skyranger ramp, to make sure no aliens were lurking in the immediate vicinity. I then ended my turn. This was my first encounter with the psychic Ethereals who proceeded to spend their turn bombarding my team with mental attacks. Unfortunately one of my team cracked and panicked. Even more unfortunately, he was the one with the rocket launcher. Even more even more unfortunately, he was at the back of the Skyranger with my entire squad standing in front of him. The resulting explosion destroyed all of my team, except that one panicking X-COM operative who was shielded by his companions. He threw away the empty rocket launcher and ran gibbering into the night. Where he was sniped by an unseen assailant. Mission failed. Part of the joy of UFO is that no two games are ever the same. I didn't know aliens could invade your moonbase, until it happened.

UFO: Enemy Unknown leans heavily on the set up for Gerry Anderson's 1970 series UFO. Pete Moreland, deputy director of MicroProse UK suggested the UFO theme, and name-checked the TV series, to move the game away from Laser Squad's unconnected missions and give the game structure. Julian Gollop took these ideas and ran with them:

I remember going out and buying a video tape of the old Gerry Anderson UFO TV series, and the thing that inspired me from that was the idea of having a worldwide organisation that was set up to stop this alien menace.
(nowgamer.com)

To be honest I found [the series] a bit boring.

That's Julian Gollop talking to AMIGA CD32 GAMER (October 1994 page 14) and proving it's possible to be an amazingly good game designer but have no taste in television. One Sunday afternoon I edited the theme music of Gerry Anderson's UFO to the opening video for UFO: Enemy Unknown. It demonstrates nothing but doing it was a marvellous way to relax.

I've often wondered if the name change from UFO to X-COM was the result of any sort of pressure from Gerry Anderson, or whoever owned the copyright to the television series[2]. Probably not, is the boring answer. The European and US versions of the game were both launched in 1994 and Europe went with UFO Enemy Unknown while the American release was X-COM: UFO Defense. It looks like the Americans just preferred the harder sound of the X-COM name (eXtraterrestrial COMbat) and, given the wild success of the game in America, it became the default name for the franchise when sequels were planned.

Mythos worked on the sequel X-COM: Apocalypse while the internal development team at Microprose UK turned out a hasty cash-grab follow up, X-COM: Terror From The Deep. Ironically of the two, Terror From The Deep looks like the more faithful sequel because it just overlays an underwater theme on  the first game while X-COM: Apocalypse goes off in a radically different direction.

The original idea for Apocalypse was somewhat going back to the Judge Dredd concept I had many years before[4], which was having a city that was a living, breathing entity with different factions and corporations with economic relationships to each other, and populated by traffic and people moving around.
(nowgamer.com)

The relationship between Mythos and MicroProse broke down during the development of X-COM: Apocalyse. MicroProse appear to have been insistent that they were responsible for the graphics and provided assets which didn't work when added to the game:

It was a disaster area. Apocalypse was quite a sophisticated and ambitious game, but it was a big mistake from our point of view. In retrospect, we should have originally agreed to do a sequel in six months, and spent a year doing it, like they did! It would've been a lot better.
(eurogamer.net)

Mythos decided to split from MicroProse but first there was the inevitable legal disagreement over who owned the X-COM franchise.

Well we didn’t really have much of an option because the actual intellectual property rights were somewhat ambiguous. Our lawyers told us that if it came to a court battle MicroProse would probably win; their lawyers were clearly telling them that if it came to a court battle, we would win.

They wanted us to do a deal where we would sign over any rights that we might have in return for some cash plus a high royalty on X-COM: Apocalypse. They more or less insisted on it, otherwise they were threatening to cancel the Apocalypse project, so there was a lot of bluff involved. We thought we may as well do it and afterwards, go and find some other publisher.

4 Mitre Buildings, Kitson Way, Harlow, CM20

 

THE GUARDIAN
Monday 27th January 1997

I'm not sure when Mythos moved from The Rows to Mitre Buildings. Some time in 1994/95 when they were flush with UFO cash would be my guess. If UFO was a reworked Laser Squad then Magic & Mayhem was, sort of, a reworked Chaos/Lords of Chaos. I wish I had some amazing stories about the development of Magic & Mayhem but all I really did was help out a bit with testing. I was asked to play through the single player campaign and look for areas where the map had become corrupted and email the co-ordinates of any corrupted bits to the lead tester. If there are still corrupted areas of map in the game then I didn't do my job properly. One reason I might not have done my job properly, I was too busy complaining about the title to anyone who would listen. I always though Magic & Mayhem was rubbish. I appreciate Virgin wanted a name that alliterated like Command & Conquer but mayhem was the wrong word. Mayhem was what happened when the kids on TISWAS got a bit boisterous.I'm sitting here wracking my memory trying to recall if the working title was The Art of Magic; as eventually on the sequel. It might have been.

I have one other story about Magic & Mayhem. As you play through the single player game, your character ages. At first I thought the game was changing my portrait depending on what spells I cast. In Chaos the game tracks your use of lawful, chaotic, or neutral spells and the balance of the universe changes accordingly. I thought Magic & Mayhem was referencing Chaos by altering the appearance of your character; more angry looking for chaotic spells, etc. I mentioned this very casually to the lead tester, and was delighted later on when he said he'd passed this on to the development team... and Julian Gollop liked my idea *swoon*. Alas, there wasn't time to implement it in the current game and there wouldn't be a sequel. At least not one by Mythos Games.

Julian Gollop never had a lot of luck with publishers. Red Shift imploded. Games Workshop closed. Firebird was sold off and wound down. Relations broke down with MicroProse. Virgin Interactive Entertainment was split up, sold off, and asset stripped. In that order.

“We had signed a four-game development contract with Virgin Interactive Entertainment,” Gollop told me, “which was fantastic, from my point of view, because they were a big company. They owned Westwood Studios which produced all the Command and Conquer stuff, of course, amongst other things.

“I wanted to sort of try and do a sort of spiritual successor to the original X-COM. ... We tried to build it both on Playstation 2 and PC. ... What killed the project was that Virgin Interactive sold Westwood Studios to EA. Virgin Interactive was then sold to Interplay, and then Interplay was sold to Titus Interactive. The only thing they were interested in was the, intellectual property that Interplay had. They were not interested in our projects. They basically stopped funding us.”
(Polygon.com archived interview with Julian Gollop, 2017)

The spiritual successor to UFO X-COM was Dreamland Chronicles or, to give it it's full title, The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge (this was clearly planned as the start of a new franchise). PC ZONE previewed the game in March 2000 with a provisional release date of November 2000. 

PC ZONE
March 2000 page 14

By July, that date had slipped back to 2001. The first rumours that the game was in trouble came in April 2001:

The release date of the much anticipated Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, by the Gollop brothers, has been pushed back to late this year and news just in is that Virgin has dropped it from Its schedules. Hopefully someone else will pick it up soon.

Then the May issue of PC ZONE brought the bad news:

THE DREAM IS OVER

The Gollops' Dreamland Chronicles has been cancelled. Bugger

Mythos Games • ETA never • www.mythosgames.com

It was going to be one of the greatest turn-based strategy games ever. It was going to take the concept of the much-loved UFO: Enemy Unknown the first in the X-COM series - and give it an extraordinary 3D update. It was going to be a sophisticated, multi-platform blockbuster. We were looking forward to it.
Then, on the Mythos forum, the legendary Julian Gollop posted this: "It is with great regret I have to announce that Dreamland has been cancelled. We have been looking for a publisher for a while now, but no agreement has been reached and we have run out of cash. There will be no further development on the game."
The rumours are that more than £10 million had already been spent on Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge and there is a whole Transatlantic drama involved in its cancellation. Virgin, the European publisher of the game, who was financing the project, found that it could no longer afford to do so and was forced to loan a substantial sum from Bethesda. In exchange, Bethesda acquired rights to publish the game in the States and subsequently tried to become the sole proprietor of the title. There were even rumours of them replacing Mythos with a cheaper Russian team. Rather than let this happen, Virgin decided to pull the plug on Dreamland. Confused?
Virgin and Bethesda have refused to comment, leaving only Mythos' side of the story, but neither have denied any of it.
Games get cancelled all the time - Obi Wan being a recent example - but rarely is it a title that has created such anticipation throughout the gaming community.
If you think it's not a big deal, you either know nothing about the game or its developers or you dislike the marvellous X-COM series. At least we know that Mythos is going to jump straight into another big project, and hopefully we'll see Dreamland Resurface in some other form in the near future.

Titus appear to have held Mythos to their four game contract but also refused to fund any development. Mythos Games was liquidated.  Virgin Interactive kept the rights for Dreamland Chronicles and passed them on to developer Altar Interactive. The game was subsequently given the working title UFO: Freedom Ridge and then released as UFO: Aftermath. 

The Gollops moved on and founded Codo Technologies and released Laser Squad Nemesis and Rebelstar: Tactical Command. Julian Gollop then got married and went to live in Sofia where he worked for Ubisoft, until 2013. Nick left the games industry. Julian left Ubisoft to found Snapshot Games, a company still in operation today [5].

Meanwhile, back in Harlow, I had a disappointing sandwich and went hunting for 4 Mitre Buildings. Kitson Way is not far from The Rows and on the edge of that same desolate awaiting-redevelopment area. I walked back alongside the abandoned buildings of Market Square, swung past a boarded off empty space, and an abandoned cinema. I turned left at the Whetherspoons and headed towards a new-ish development around a courtyard. I was paying more attention to the directions on my phone but as I glanced into the courtyard it seemed to be full of people. I caught a glimpse of families with prams and a bloke in a hat sitting on the floor and packing a bag. There was a sign that read Mitre Buildings and, as I turned right and walked down the side of the Whetherspoons, I thought, "I hope number four isn't down there." It was.

March 2025

I walked all the way down Kitson Way, studying the back of the yellow brick buildings and hoping really hard to see a sign that read "number-four-this-way-and-not-back-towards-that-courtyard-you-saw-earlier". I didn't. Finally I did a u-turn and found another pedestrian entrance at the far end of the courtyard. I went through it. There were still people with prams standing around chatting and some less cheerful people standing around smoking. Number four now houses the Essex Probation Service and that was where the less cheerful people were standing. I couldn't spot the bloke with the hat. I walked back to the Whetherspoons end of the courtyard and hid round the corner. 

There was no way to get a picture of number four without seriously intruding on the privacy of people who wouldn't appreciate what I was doing. And I don't blame them. Not for the first time in Harlow I felt the soft nostalgic whimsy of this blog grind against harsh reality. And reality won. It usually does. The picture above does the job. I stood and carefully used the corner of building six to obscure any people. And then I turned round and headed back to the station. The Market Square area of Harlow looks grim at the moment. But hopefully it's the sort of grim that will pass. I'm going to re-enter the soft embrace of the past, to avoid ending on a chill note of social realism.

Back in April 1990, ACE profiled Target Games on the eve of the launch of Lords of Chaos. It's a nice article, although my Harlow jokes are much better than the one they quote from Richard Digance. The mystery I've got is that the writer of the article has clearly been to Harlow but I'm pretty sure the photographer hasn't.

Despite what the sub-editor thinks, that's not Harlow. I'm pretty sure I can see London black cabs in the background of that photo. And take a look at these ones from the same page.

That looks like central London. Maybe the pictures were taken in the vicinity of EMAP's offices in Farringdon and I'm missing some funny joke. Anyway, normally I'd try and take some modern versions of these photos but I can't. If you know where the ACE pictures were taken (and maybe it really is Harlow) then leave a comment or drop an email to whereweretheynow@gmail.com

[1] For the release of the Amstrad version of Laser Squad, Julian Gollop spoke to AMSTRAD ACTION in October 1989 and complained about his payment for Reblestar: 
It wasn’t until Summer 1985 that his next game, the best-selling budget game Rebelstar (Firebird) appeared yet he's still bitter about it! Why? "Well, it sold thousands of copies, and all I got was £1,000 for ten months work. You’d be crazy to choose to do ten months work for £1,000!" he says.
[2] In 1994, this was probably the fantastically villainous sounding Bond Corporation run by Alan Bond the Australian businessman "noted for his high-profile and often corrupt business dealings".[3]
[3] Not my words, solicitors acting for the estate of Alan Bond, the words of the Wikipedia Foundation.
[4] For Games Workshop in 1985, the game never appeared.
[5] blvd. Alexander Malinov 80A, Sofia 1799.

The UFO: Enemy Unknown cover comes from Mobygames.

Have you spotted any corrupted portions of the Magic & Mayhem maps? It's a bit late for me to do anything about them, sorry about that. Do you know what Harlow looks like? Or the difference between Harlow and a bucket of something nasty? Do you have a photo of blvd. Alexander Malinov 80A, Sofia 1799? Emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com I am also on Bluesky. @shammountebank.bsky.social