Julian Gollop

Early career (1982 to 1988)

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]

Mythos Games (1988 to 2001)

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, UFO: Enemy Unknown 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 UFO: Enemy Unknown (released in North America under the name X-Com: UFO Defense) that he first began 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]

Codo Technologies (2001 to 2006)

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]

Ubisoft Sofia (2006 to 2012)

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]}

Snapshot Games (since 2013)

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]