http://www.pcgamer.com/x-coms-julian-gollop-almost-worked-on-mario-rabbids-kingdom-battle/

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is likely to remain a Switch exclusive forever, but if it wasn’t for the Nintendo characters, it wouldn’t look all that out of place on PC, especially with its many similarities to X-COM/XCOM. And it turns out that this connection could have been stronger, as X-COM creator Julian Gollop almost worked on it. 

“The creative director Davide Soliani [the lovely crying man from E3] is a friend of mine from Ubisoft,” Gollop told PCGamesN. “When I was at Ubisoft Sofia he was, and still is, working for Ubisoft Milan and I visited him a couple of times. We had conversations about project ideas… he was a fan of my previous games, like Laser Squad [Nemesis] and stuff like that, and he was really into his strategy and turn-based ideas from the beginning.”