Laser Squad (1992): The Julian Gollop Game That Came Before X-COM

Year: 1992 · Developer/Publisher: Krisalis · Designer: Julian Gollop · Platform: DOS · Theme: Science Fiction, Multiplayer

Laser Squad didn’t make much noise when it came out in 1992. It took a phenomenon to change that. Once Julian Gollop’s next project, X-COM, turned squad-based tactical combat into one of the defining PC genres of the decade, players went looking for whatever he’d made before it, and found this. The demand wasn’t really about Laser Squad standing on its own merits at launch. It was about wanting to see where X-COM’s DNA actually came from.

What they found holds up better than a footnote deserves to. You control a squad of futuristic soldiers across five large missions, each one a self-contained tactical puzzle rather than a level in a bigger campaign. Anyone who’s spent time with X-COM will recognize the bones immediately — action-point-driven movement, line-of-sight tension, the constant math of whether you can afford to peek around a corner this turn or need to hold position. Gollop was already working out the systems that would make his later game a landmark; Laser Squad is where the drafting happened.

One thing it does that X-COM never bothered with: a real two-player mode, where you and a friend cooperate on the same scenario instead of the AI handling one side. It sounds like a small addition until you’ve actually played it: coordinating with another person against the scenario’s threats is a noticeably different experience from directing both sides of a fight yourself, and it’s a mode the far more famous sequel simply doesn’t offer. That alone makes Laser Squad worth returning to even for people who’ve already put hundreds of hours into X-COM.

None of this makes Laser Squad a hidden masterpiece waiting to be discovered. It’s a smaller, tighter game than what came after it, five missions instead of a sprawling campaign, and its interface shows its 1992 age in ways X-COM’s slightly later, more polished systems don’t. That’s fine. Judging it against its own successor is a little unfair anyway; it was never trying to be the finished product, just the game that figured out most of the pieces first.

There’s also something to be said for scale working in the game’s favor rather than against it. Five tightly scoped missions mean Laser Squad never overstays its welcome the way a longer campaign built on the same-era interface might have. Every scenario has a clear shape, a clear objective, and an ending you can actually reach in a single sitting if you’re careful. That tightness is part of why it holds up as a two-player game specifically: neither side is signing up for a marathon, just a focused tactical puzzle you can solve together or against each other in an evening.

It’s also worth remembering that Laser Squad wasn’t built in a vacuum. Krisalis published it into a UK strategy-game scene that already had squad-tactics ideas floating around, and what set Gollop’s design apart wasn’t novelty for its own sake: it was how cleanly the action-point economy, the line-of-sight rules, and the turn structure fit together into something a player could actually reason about. That clarity is the through-line connecting this game to X-COM far more than any single specific mechanic is.

How to run it today

Laser Squad’s DOS release runs without issue in DOSBox on any modern system. Mount the game directory and launch it directly; no source port exists, and none is needed, since the original executable behaves correctly under DOSBox’s emulated environment.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard/mouse, turn-based point-and-click · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

The design lineage that produced Laser Squad didn’t survive as a functioning company, and no clear current rights-holder is actively selling or licensing the game today. That leaves its status genuinely unclear rather than confidently one thing or the other. There’s a real difference between “nobody’s selling it” and “nobody owns it,” and the record here only supports the first claim.

If you liked this, try

Breach 3, also part of this collection, covers similar squad-tactics ground in a science-fiction setting and is the closest match available here. Space Crusade and the earlier Strike Squad are worth tracking down too if you want more of the same genre from around the same period.