GamesBeat met with Pope at a private The Bureau: XCOM Declassified event held by developer 2K Marin and publisher 2K Games. You can read our thoughts on the game itself, along with developer interviews, in our hands-on preview.
GAMESBEAT: CAN YOU START OFF WITH THE GENERAL OVERVIEW OF YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES AS A UFO INVESTIGATOR?
NICK POPE: I had to basically investigate UFO sightings and see if they were any potential threat, or more generally if they were of any defense interest. We didn't take a view on what they might or might not be. We just said, "Look, people have seen things." Particularly, as it's often alleged, these were solid-structured things in our airspace. That made it a defense issue. That made it a national security issue.
But like I say, we didn't take a view on whether we were dealing with aliens or whether we were dealing, as was the original thinking, with maybe the next generation of Soviet spy planes or drones, something like that. That was basically the job. Through that, anything else weird or wonderful that there wasn't a place for in government kind of came our way by default, particularly if it was perceived that there was a link with UFOs. Alien abductions, crop circles. We found ourselves getting all the weird stuff, like people who had seen ghosts at military bases. That's why it has been called the real-life X-Files.
GAMESBEAT: WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?
POPE: Basically, I work as a freelance writer and broadcaster. I've written a couple of sci-fi books. I do a lot of TV work on shows like Ancient Aliens. I've worked with some of the Hollywood film companies on some of the PR for movie launches, if there's an alien theme. I guess people come to me and say, "Well, we're doing this as fiction, but there's very often an interesting tie-in. Is any of this actually true?"
What's your alien apocalypse survival plan?GAMESBEAT: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE GAME SO FAR?
POPE: Oh, I love it. I'm not just saying that. I mean-I guess I was brought up, maybe, in an era where games were just a few pixels moving clumsily across the screen. I can't even remember what they were called. What was that one where you just bounced it around?
GAMESBEAT: PONG?
POPE: Pong! I'm probably showing my age there. But you look at something like The Bureau, and it's just, "My God." The other thing is, I love that whole style of the '60s, whether it's the cars or the shops, the signs. It's got a nice feel to it as well. Like I say, I don't play these games, so I can't, I'm afraid, give any sort of technical-insight clever answer to that. But I've obviously sat in on some meetings, I've looked at it, and I've thought, "Wow, that's impressive."
GAMESBEAT: IN ALL YOUR DECADES OF WORK THAT YOU'VE DONE AND YOUR HYPOTHESIZING AND DISCUSSION AND SO ON, IF YOU TURNED ON THE NEWS AND SAW THAT ALIENS WERE ARRIVING - LIGHTS IN THE SKY AND THAT KIND OF STUFF - WOULD YOU BE EXCITED, OR WOULD YOU BE WORRIED?
POPE: Both. I'd see it as almost a validation or a culmination of a quest that I guess I've been on. But also-I guess, self-evidently, if aliens get here, given that we can only just about slowly send a few space probes out to the edge of our solar system, if somebody has cracked viable interstellar travel, they've got technology orders of magnitude above and beyond anything we've got. So I couldn't help but be worried.
I think Stephen Hawking said this - it would be like the European explorers meeting the native Americans, only we're the native Americans. We'd have to hope that alien visitors are explorers, ambassadors, adventurers, and not the sort of cynical exploiters that, sadly, in human history we've tended to be when we encounter new territories. So we're going to have to hope that they're friendly and altruistic, because if they're not, we're in trouble.
GAMESBEAT: WE CAN HOPE THAT IT DOESN'T COME BACK ON US, ALL THE TERRIBLE THINGS THAT WE'VE DONE TO OTHER CIVILIZATIONS.
POPE: Yes. It would be a kind of cosmic karma, I suppose, if it did. Our only hope would be that great staple of sci-fi, to use the aliens' own technology against them.
GAMESBEAT: OR WATER AND AIR, IN THE CASE OF SIGNS AND WAR OF THE WORLDS.
POPE: [laughs] Yeah, or Independence Day: just plug your laptop in and take down the entire alien defense system.
GAMESBEAT: I THINK THE SECRET IS JUST TO HAVE RANDY QUAID ON SPEED DIAL AND TO KEEP HIS CROP-DUSTER FUELED.
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