First out the gate, though, is indie title Xenonauts, which is militant in its desire to do X-COM properly. It also has a cute genesis – its lead designer Chris England (who is indeed from England) says he was inspired to create an X-COM remake after we wished for one on our podcast. Aw!

The resume's cut-and-dried confirmation was obscured somewhat by subsequent Twitter messages from Superannuation's proprietor that pointed to a second X-Com in the works. The tweets read: "Apparently, there's a rumor that X-Com is being developed by Firaxis, which I wouldn't find hard to believe. I swear that I read they're working on a sci-fi game somewhere...The rumor is that there's two X-Com games--[an] FPS from Irrational and [a] turn-based one from Firaxis."


As it turns out, rumors of a Firaxis-developed reboot of X-Com go back to 2001. That's when Atari parent Infogrames bought X-Com publisher MicroProse, the birthplace of the wildly popular Civilization series cocreated by Firaxis cofounder Sid Meier. During a 2004 video interview promoting the relaunch of Pirates, Meier told GameSpot that Firaxis had entered into a long-term agreement with Atari to retain the X-com IP. According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the X-Com license transferred to Take-Two when it bought Firaxis in 2005.

I don't really agree with you btw Peltz, I think there's a huge market of people who would pay for an updated copy of the original.