Month: March 2021

Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense tells the story of the early years of legendary strategy game designer Julian Gollop and the making of the original X-COM and is funding now on Kickstarter. In this excerpt from the book, Julian and his brother Nick coordinate with X-COM publisher MicroProse UK on the design of alien enemies and the game's cinematic intro.

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  It's hard for me not to picture this as a man in a foam rubber costume.

Julian and Nick Gollop signed a contract with MicroProse UK in 1991. The agreement granted them approximately £3,000 per month (roughly $2,224 in 1991 US dollars) to tide them over while they developed UFO: Enemy Unknown, which the publisher estimated should take 18 months.

"They didn't really have any sophistication about planning a development release schedule for a game," says Julian. "It was 18 months: That's how long these games take, so that's how long it will be. Of course, it took a lot longer, almost twice as long as that, which got us quite worried, actually."

Enlarge / A photo shows a traffic jam at 1905 Street and Third Ring Road in Moscow, Russia, on March 3, 2021. Moscow ranked fourth-worst in the world for traffic congestion in 2020, with an average of 100 hours spent in jams. (credit: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Image)

In 2020, the average US driver spent 26 hours stuck in traffic. While that's still more than a day, it's a steep decline from pre-pandemic times; in 2019 the average American sacrificed 99 hours to traffic jams. Around the world, it's a similar story. German drivers averaged an identical 26 hours of traffic in 2020, down from 46 the year before. In the UK, 2019 sounded positively awful, with 115 hours in traffic jams. At least one thing improved for that island nation in 2020: its drivers only spent 37 hours stationary in their cars.

This data was all collected by traffic analytics company Inrix for its 2020 Global Traffic Scorecard that tracks mobility across more than 1,000 different cities around the world based on travel times, miles traveled, trip characteristics, and the effect of crashes on congestion in each city.

And unless you've spent the past 12 months in a cave—in which case, gee, do I have some crappy news for you—you'll instinctively know that there were big declines in traffic in 2020, and in particular a drop in people traveling to downtowns and central business districts.