Road to the Xeno Invasion 5 - Z-KOM the military threat to the Xenos
If you're reading this, you've probably played a video game, watched a series, or read a comic book at some point in your life where a group of brave soldiers save the world from an alien invasion. Or they're an agency specializing in stopping otherworldly threats with cutting-edge technology.
In these series or movies, you follow the adventures of the main characters, that elite team that manages to survive by the skin of their teeth every week, or until the end of the movie or comic book, from ridiculous and practically impossible situations. They defeat all the villain's forces and armies to get to him and defeat him with the power of the script.
But you've also seen the beginning of the game or episode, where another group of nameless and often faceless soldiers is massacred, riddled with bullets, and decimated by the threat of the moment. Throughout the rest of the story, no one misses them, no one mourns them; they become another number. That group of fierce human fighters who have everything against them and will fall by the dozen is the next enemy of the Xenos: the Z-KOM special group.
Let's go back a little further, as we usually do in this section, and start with the most obvious. The name Z-KOM is an obvious reference to the video game series X-COM: UFO Defense, although with marked differences. Since this is the most direct reference, let's start there.
The first game in the series, under the original title UFO: Enemy Unknown, was released in 1994 by Mythos Games, a spiritual successor to Laser Squad from the same studio. In this game, you take command of X-COM, a secret international military organization created to defend Earth from an ongoing alien invasion. You manage bases and plan tactical combat to stop the alien infiltration by reverse engineering their technology. Its main feature is the permanent death of playable characters, which creates a strong connection with each of your units. This feature would later be seen in other similar games, such as Fire Emblem.
Indeed, taking this into account, both concepts seem very similar. However, X-COM was not the first to feature a military organization tasked with defending Earth from extraterrestrial threats. In the same year, we had the movie Stargate, which would give way to the Stargate: SG-1 franchise a few years later (although we will talk about that a little later).
And just a year earlier, we had the release of the first video game in the DOOM series, where a private military organization defends Earth from an invasion of creatures from hell. Although the creatures are demons, they share similarities: they appear in portals on Mars, which technically makes them extraterrestrial.
But we can go even further back, to 1978, with Battlestar Galactica, where a human colony defends itself from attacks by a civilization known as the Cylons, and it is the military forces within the Galactica that carry out this defense.
At the moment, I have not been able to find any references older than this one in which a military organization defends Earth, aside from UNIT. This Earth-based planetary defense organization first appeared in Dr. Who in 1968 during the Second Doctor era. Since then, it has become a recurring organization in the series, with increasing technological capabilities and, of course, taking advantage of extraterrestrial technology to achieve this.
However, Stargate has undoubtedly been the most successful adaptation of this trope outside of video games, with 17 seasons and more than 350 episodes across its main series and spinoffs, as well as one movie and two television films. For years, Stargate explored the concept of a military organization that defends Earth and other planets from various extraterrestrial threats, starting with only Earth's military resources in its early seasons and gradually acquiring increasingly advanced weaponry and technology from the species they encountered or helped throughout the galaxy.
And although it is currently an inactive franchise with a somewhat scattered fan base, it remains a benchmark in science fiction. Whenever you see a circular portal in a science fiction or fantasy series, you can be sure that it will be a direct reference to Stargate.
So the next time you want to use Z-KOM in your Xeno Invasion games, you can use any of these references for inspiration and to give this interesting enemy some personality. Plus, I know from a reliable source that it's one of the author's favorites, so you can expect more material about this organization in the future.
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Mexican TikToker, writer, and role-playing game designer. He has been involved in the world of role-playing for over 23 years. He likes to write games that make you cry. Creator of "Laika", "Vuelve a casa", "Trato sucio", and Nox Maledictus.