Julian Gollop begins the conversation with a few words in Bulgarian before switching to his more comfortable native English. He is one of the gaming legends of the 1990s, best known for the X-COM series of games in which an international organization investigates and fights an alien invasion. Over the years Gollop has worked with companies such as MicroProse, Bandai Namco and Ubisoft, but for the past ten years he has been creating games in Bulgaria with his own company Snapshot Games. The reason? He married a Bulgarian woman.
We met Gollop to correct a mistake of ours. In July, Capital.bg published an article about gaming studios in Bulgaria, but a reader said in the comments section that it missed Snapshot Games. "How could you miss Julian Gollop's Snapshot Games?" commented everlast666. This reader's remark is entirely appropriate. The story made Gollop himself laugh.
It's a good moment to meet. Over the past year, Gollop has hired more than 15 people who are particularly hard to find in the gaming industry. The reason is that Snapshot Games runs two games in parallel. Both are unannounced, which in the gaming world means they can't be talked about. At the moment, 86 people work in the company Snapshot Games Sofia. Revenues for 2023 total 7.7 million levs (3.9 million euro) and profit exceeds 500 thousand levs.
Board games made on a computer
Julian Gollop began learning to code when he was 18 years old. "I had a Sinclair ZX81 computer, very simple by today's standards - with one kilobyte of memory. I learned to program on it, and from there I learned to make games," says Gollop. Even then, he had a huge interest in board games, which is also evident from the Snapshot Games office. One can also tell by his style - the usual board game turn-swapping mechanic is carried over to many of the games he would make in the future.
In 1988, he founded the Mythos Games company with his brother Nick Gollop. In the late 1980s, they developed the games Laser Squad and Lords of Chaos. The big hit, however, came in 1994 when they developed and released X-COM: UFO Defense. It was released by Sid Meier's publishing company, one of the most famous names in the gaming world. In 1997, X-COM got a sequel made by the Gollop brothers. The titles after that were not done by the two because the rights to the series remained with MicroProse.
After X-COM, Gollop signed with Virgin Interactive Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Virgin conglomerate founded by Richard Branson. The contract was for four games, but only one ended up being released - Magic & Mayhem. "We started working on the second one, but suddenly Virgin Interactive found themselves in serious financial trouble and sold part of their business to EA. It all happened because of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which happened very quickly," says Gollop.
The sale of Virgin Interactive landed the brothers in legal trouble. Technically, they still had an exclusive distribution deal for their next three games, but with a company that no longer existed. Gollop tried to buy himself out, but this proved impossible, and so Mythos Games collapsed. Instead, the brothers formed Codo Technologies, through which they developed Laser Squad Nemesis, a sequel to their 1988 game, as well as Rebelstar: Tactical Command, another sequel to their game published by the Japanese gaming giant Bandai Namco.
A Briton in Bulgaria
"I married a Bulgarian woman in 2003 and we initially lived in the UK, but then I thought - why don't we just move to Bulgaria? I came here in 2005 and in 2006 I joined Ubisoft. They had just opened their studio with about 30 people. I was with them until 2011. I made two games with them - Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars and Assassin's Creed: Liberation," says Gollop, adding that he quickly began to miss having his own gaming studio.
"At Ubisoft, I could see how a really big gaming company was working, doing a lot of interesting things, but at the same time, like in any big company, everyone was doing something very specific. There wasn't much interest there in the turn-based games that I prefer, nor in, broadly speaking, the strategy genre," he adds.
That is how Snapshot Games came about, co-founded with David Kay, who is the sole employee of the American parent company acting as the games publisher. Gollop says the two captured a moment when gaming developers were starting to successfully raise funds through donation platforms like Kickstarter. Surprisingly for him, it turned out that there were quite a few people who remember his games from the 90s.
"That's how we raised the money for our first game, Chaos Reborn, a remake of a game from 1995 - just over 200 thousand dollars, which I used to hire people and open an office. There were a lot of people who remembered it, especially in the UK. It's great because it gave you instant support," says Gollop.
Chaos Reborn came out in 2015, but Snapshot's bigger hit is Phoenix Reborn, which came out in 2019. It has a similar idea to the X-COM series, and some fans consider it to be its authentic sequel. More importantly from a business perspective, Snapshot signed an exclusive distribution deal through the Epic Store, as well as an additional deal with Microsoft for distribution through the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
Some concussions and two upcoming games
The big change came in 2020 when the world shut down because of the coronavirus. For the gaming industry, this meant a huge boom because more people could play more games for longer while staying at home. In 2021, Snapshot was bought by the Swedish group Embracer, which bought a number of other companies during the pandemic, counting on the gaming boom to last for a long time. This turned out to be the wrong bet.
"There's chaos in the gaming industry right now. There are many reasons, but the main ones I think are a few - the boom around the coronavirus has not lasted. People were playing a lot of games and buying a lot of games, but that stopped. Free money from central banks stopped, interest rates went up", Gollop says.
Regardless of the current gaming climate, Snapshot Games is currently working on two games. All Gollop can say is one is turn-based and the other is real-time strategy. These are the genres that define Gollop's entire career, which also raises the logical question of why he likes them so much - given that, according to his own words, they have long been out of fashion in the industry.
"It's probably because of my love for board games. When I was young, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, I played historical games. These games are decided by your strategy and your thinking, not by manipulating a keyboard or a joystick. It's all in your brain and that's what I love about them" Gollop concludes.
Julian Gollop begins the conversation with a few words in Bulgarian before switching to his more comfortable native English. He is one of the gaming legends of the 1990s, best known for the X-COM series of games in which an international organization investigates and fights an alien invasion. Over the years Gollop has worked with companies such as MicroProse, Bandai Namco and Ubisoft, but for the past ten years he has been creating games in Bulgaria with his own company Snapshot Games. The reason? He married a Bulgarian woman.
We met Gollop to correct a mistake of ours. In July, Capital.bg published an article about gaming studios in Bulgaria, but a reader said in the comments section that it missed Snapshot Games. "How could you miss Julian Gollop's Snapshot Games?" commented everlast666. This reader's remark is entirely appropriate. The story made Gollop himself laugh.
