Ken Levine came up with the idea for XCOM 2, says Solomon

Jake Solomon is now a well-known and respected strategy game designer, but of course, this was not always the case. In an interview with Edge magazine, published online via GamesRadar, he talked about his career, from the very beginning to the current Midnight Suns.

However, important events that greatly influenced Solomon occurred even before he entered the gaming industry. We are talking about the studio Microprose, which is behind a whole series of strategy games. The Civilization and XCOM series are undoubtedly among the most famous. Solomon was particularly fond of the latter, and when Sid Meier, along with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds, left Microprose to found Firaxis Games in 1996, Jake did not hesitate to apply for a position at the studio. It was the only company he applied for a job with, and he has been with them since 2000 to the present day. Sid Meier was his great mentor from the very beginning.

“The company was very small at the time, maybe 20 or 25 people, because half of them left with Brian Reynolds to start Big Huge Games. It was a big coincidence that they took on a guy who had just graduated from college.” says Solomon. Along with two other colleagues, they are said to have been the only programmers since everyone else left. Although Solomon was a graphics programmer, he says he was ill-prepared for the job.

He has worked successively on Civilization 3, Sid Meier’s Golf and Sid Meier’s Pirates. This ends his role as a graphics programmer, and he embarks on the path of gameplay programming. It was after the release of Pirates in 2004 that he created the first prototype of the new XCOM. He had 6 months to do it, but he didn’t use it very effectively. Instead of important features, he focused on building an inventory that worked well, but many other, more important elements were missing. “It looked good for what it was, but it wasn’t fun at all” Solomon says, adding that he joined Meyer on Civilization Revolution after a failed attempt. It was a breakthrough project for Jake, and he says it made him the designer we know today.

He then re-entered XCOM, initially assisted by Meyer. Initially, he came up with a very complex table system that no one understood, so he completely reduced the game to one basic statistic and gradually developed others from it. Solomon says he was and continues to be inspired by board games, not video games.

Enemy Unknown and the subsequent expansion Enemy Within were a huge success, so Solomon began work on the second volume after its release. But what’s interesting is that he didn’t come up with the premise. When the aliens won and XCOM became a mere resistance, renowned designer Ken Levine, a friend of Solomon, came and told him to use the idea, which he did. Thanks to this, new mechanics could appear in the duo, such as stealth or hacking. “It was a huge project and it took a lot of time, just like Enemy Unknown. It had all these changes that didn’t look good at first, but it all came together in the end.” Solomon says of the second XCOM, which received the massive War of the Chosen expansion a year after its release. He brought the game to the level that Jake imagined from the very beginning.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is Solomon’s latest project. According to him, he went even further in “fairness” and the player will find out all the necessary information. While in XCOM shooting is based on a percentage chance, in Midnight Suns heroes cannot miss. At the same time, Jake praises the freedom within 2K that allowed him to develop the game the way he really wanted to. And at the same time, he created something that he did not expect at all. “It wasn’t intentional, but Midnight Suns is basically the opposite of XCOM. You’re not stuck on a map with scary aliens – the bad guys are afraid of you.”