Polygon's Chris Plante recently published an incredible and extensive article on The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. It goes into detail about its history from when the franchise was acquired in 2006, the changes it has gone through, the teams that became involved, the troubles that were encountered to establish the game's identity, and how it ultimately became the game as we know it now through the accounts of various anonymous sources.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/19/4614410/xcom-the-bureau-development-2006-2013

I have a few issues with Polygon but they really can knock a feature out of the park.

An incredible story. Always sucks when talented people get corporately fucked :(

This reminds me of @patrickklepek's idea for doing more coverage of why bad games end up bad. Very interesting to read.

It's a shame for both studios as 2K Marin obviously wanted to work on new IP while 2K Australia wanted to become a top tier development studio instead of being known as the guys who help out on other people's projects. I gotta say, I'm still much more interested in the first iteration of the game they showed back when they first announced it, though as stated in the article, the photography/stealth gameplay just didn't work out.

I actually thought the first version of this game looked really interesting...

@probablytuna: I think that's the problem with 2K as a whole. On a Non Rockstar Year they don't make the profits they want and will try so hard to make a killer IP. They spent so much money on Spec ops and Mafia 2 and they didn't really sell well and i think that's what we are seeing from XCOM now.

Cool. Thanks for the link dude.