User:Pete

Introduction

My name's Pete (no, really) and I'm webmaster at StrategyCore. I live in Chester, England and am getting married next May (no idea why you need that much information but there we go).

My interest in X-COM began in 1995 when my brother bought TFTD, full price at £34.99 - an absolute fortune when you're young (and more money than I've paid for a game in years thinking about it)! I remember watching him play it for hours and hours, and then I learned that the prequel, UFO, was on offer in our local Game store (Game being a franchise here in the UK) and the rest is history.

The X-COM.co.uk Era

Sometime around 2000/2001 I started the X-COM.co.uk website (hosted on Tripod/Lycos before eventually buying that domain. Only recently to this we got dial-up at my parents house and I produced a lot of my own content as well as, not knowing netiquette, "borrowing" a large portion from cyke of AllianceX. After some apologies and a lot of enouragement by cyke I ended up working on the site and it's spin-off and successor to the present day (I was on the verge of quitting before that encouragement and the rest of this entry would never have happened - thanks cyke!). A history of X-COM.co.uk is captured on Archive.org for those who are curious or have suffered memory loss.

Expansion to UFOAftermath.co.uk

Sometime later, when it appeared that there were not going to be any more X-COM games after Enforcer - a game which I strangely enjoyed, though obviously it's not really X-COM - I branched out and built UFOAftermath.co.uk when the UFO games started to come out. Again, a history of that site is listed on Archive.org.

Evolution to StrategyCore.co.uk

In 2004, with Slaughter pretty much single-handedly running UFOAftermath.co.uk and myself wondering what to do next, we decided to branch out and cover more games whilst merging the two smaller sites into one large site known today as StrategyCore.

Looking after an invaluable resource

In 2008 (I think) GazChap handed me the reigns of UFOPaedia (in terms of hosting - I couldn't hope to contribute even a fraction of what you guys have done here and am extremely grateful to you all that such a detailed and active resource is available!) and that pretty much brings us up to date on my online history relating to X-COM.

What I'm up to now

I still play UFO on and off. I recently played Apoc again and marvelled at how long it takes to get particularly far through that game - I mean days and days of real time to get through a few weeks compared to being able to complete UFO in a day - and pretty much left it alone again once I got to the alien dimension. It's a fun game with some obvious improvements over UFO, but UFO is far easier to dip in and out of and it gives you the added bonus of feeling like you're gaining some ground against the aliens pretty quickly.

I'm currently planning another major round of updates to StrategyCore as well in the coming months as well as some interviews with the developers of serveral X-COM inspired projects/remakes. I do get sidetracked quite easily and, sadly, it appears to be one of the things I'm known best for - but come on, StarCraft II, Team Fortress 2 and the Left 4 Dead games are a good excuse for a distraction! ;)