Just watched The Bureau quick look. It looks cool! But since when was XCOM some kind of American (limited quite perfectly to US borders in fact) initiative and not a global front? Since when was XCOM founded by Americans? There's a lot I don't know of course, but from what I've seen so far, The Bureau is a retconning of XCOM as a global initiative into a kind of politically motivated NATO parable. I'm hoping the actual name of this force is The Bureau and that they become XCOM when they join up with the global community, but if this just turns out to be another story of how fucking awesome Americans are to help organize the rest of this idiot planet to stop the bad guys I'm gonna hurl.

It likely started out as an American initiative that later expanded to a more global project. Enemy Unknown takes several place decades after the 60s and features members from everywhere.

In the game X-com started as a US anti-Russian organization, but then aliens invaded.

The Americanization of mankind's accomplishments in the media is nothing new really.

They aren't making XCOM American, they're just saying it started here. I imagine that by the end of this game they'll be laying the ground work for how the major world governments came together to re-create XCOM as global organization, because if the aliens come back it wont just be to the United States.

It could be that XCOM (modern XCOM) ends up being formed from other organizations, just like The Bureau, that fought their own secret wars with the aliens before realizing this was going to be a global problem. And they just thought the American's name was the coolest. : p

Its a cold war aesthetic, the aliens are communists. The McCarthy era is very defined in America and the Stalin era in Russia and nowhere else really has a strong identity in the time and place. Its a stretch to turn this into anti American rant number 20238.

Since the Cold War you commie.

Im really not bothered either way, and I'm from good ol' Europe. More concerned with the quality of the game.

What did your countries have going on around that time? Is putting a man on the moon one of those things? No? Then Xcom gets to be about us.

Ya, it always sucks when they contrive some excuse to make the story be all about USA #1 they are the only ones who can save the world. I'm about to start playing and hope that by the end they realize that this is happening around the world and we are just seeing it from the one perspective of them trying to keep it hidden. Then when they realize it's too big for one place to handle they form the real x-com.

As long as there are no massive cities getting wiped off the planet and it's just a bunch of small scouting incursions, it makes sense to me that given the time it takes place in it that it could be possible for attacks from around the world to be hidden from the masses to some extent. It's not like this day and age when everyone has a camera to record this stuff and the internet to share it with the world. Not to mention that with the cold war going on people would be easily convinced that it's attacks by the evil (insert other guy here).

Frankly, given the time period in question, having it start in America (or Russia, I suppose, wouldn't that be interesting?) makes sense. I suppose I can understand frustration with how often America gets put center stage, but frankly, when talking about the origins of a massive secret conspiracy-like military operation, formed in the cold war era and persisting to this day, does anywhere else make sense?

Every country is guilty of doing this. America just produces more media than any other English speaking country so you see more of it.

Not in my XCOM world it's not, it started in South Africa, District 9-style!

Given it is the cold war making it a NATO thing could be far more interesting and you would have more of the Xcom fell.

We win the 20th century! Woo!

Eat it, other countries!

I would imagine all the major world powers experiencing alien incursions had their own programs at the time that later merged together as global XCOM once it become impossible to cover it up from each other that this was a thing going on.