Found at James Nicoll’s, the title sequence of the old Gerry & Sylvia Anderson live action series UFO. Three years ago Brad Hicks called this his favourite retro future, which was when I first heard about it. UFO is one of those series that, if you didn’t catch it when it was first aired, you’ll never know about and I was much too young (or even born) to do that. Since then I have managed to watch some episodes and seeing this title sequence reminded me of how much it resembles a similarly named classic computer game, UFO: Enemy Unknown. So much so the 1971 television series has to have been an inspiration for the 1994 video game; which the Wikipedia entry indeed says it was.
UFO: Enemy Unknown is one of the best games I’ve ever played and one of the few that actually scared me. A combination of strategy/god game and tactical squad combat, the player is the leader of the X-Com organisation defending Earth against UFO attack, having to set up bases and manage funds to equip his squads, improve weapons and ships and do research. Once an UFO is signaled you can try to intercept it and if you do you can send a squad to capture it and capture or kill any aliens it carries. There are also alien infestations you may need to combat etc. It had relatively good graphics and decent, atmospheric sound effects for a mid-nineties game.
It was when you went to actually fight the aliens that the game got scary. You could only see what was directly in your line of sight, especially in night missions you had little visibility and at literally ever corner some alien menace could hide. Add the music and sound effects, which though synthesiser based were quite spooky, then play late at night with the lights off not to wake anybody up and it could make you jump when you turned a corner and some nasty mo-fo was waiting for you…
I remember one time I had loaded my squad on a Shuttle, which had landed on the site of an UFO crash, I had moved my first soldier out, who had been armed with a grenade launcher, moved out the second one, then some alien fscker psionically possessed that first soldier and got her to launch a grenade right into the shuttle. Whoops, that was the squad gone…
Shorter me: I really should dig out my copy of this game again…
