A 4-part survey of the Alien franchise in computer, video and lightgun games (amongst other things…)
Back to Part 1! Ahead to Part 3! Fast-forward to Part 4!
Fifty-seven years elapsed between the end of Alien, when Ripley entered cryostasis for the long journey home aboard the Nostromo’s shuttle, to the beginning of Aliens when she was de-thawed. Fortunately for us though, only one week has elapsed since we first delved into the 37-year-plus history of H.R. Giger’s iconic creation in computer and video games. Put your hypersleep pyjamas on and get comfortable, because here comes the bug hunt.
We began last week with the very first Alien game, an Atari 2600 cartridge from 1982, and blazed our way through another Alien, three Aliens and a couple of arcade cabinets (including the 1993 light-gun machine, Alien 3: The Gun), to the 1993–1994 deluge of Alien 3 games, all from Probe Entertainment (with help from Eden Entertainment Software). This glut finally dried up with the 1994 release of the SEGA Game Gear version. We also noted that 1993 was the first time the Alien and his 20th Century Fox stablemate the Predator appeared in a game together, which is where we’re now going to get the facehugger egg rolling. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the one, the only… Alien vs Predator — on the Super Nintendo!
The first ever AvP game was developed by then-new Japanese developer Jorudan for Activision. This was only Jorudan’s third game since their 1990 debut with Battle Bull for the Game Boy (released in ’91 in North America). I remember playing the SNES AvP in college, back in the mid-nineties, and one thing that stands out in my memory is the Predator’s enormous, Frisbee-like ‘Smart Disc’. The game is another side-scroller, but with the Predator as the playable character, and was more of a beat ’em-up than the usual Pulse-Rifle-’em-up. Visually, the game recalled the chunky, colourful graphics of Konami’s 1990 Aliens cabinet. The backgrounds were a bit dreary and ‘grim’, but the Aliens were all of the ‘It’s a purple one, so it attacks differently from the blue one’ variety, while the Preds were as well-coordinated as the Spring edition of Vogue. Interestingly, many of the Aliens in the game bore a striking resemblance to the Kenner toy line of the time, with Gorilla Aliens, Shark Aliens, and so on. The SNES AvP is also remarkable for doing something no other entry in the game or film franchises had done since the original Alien film in 1979 — showing a cocooned human transforming into an egg (and this we only finally saw in a deleted scene from the 2003 Director’s Cut).
Apart from SEGA’s previously-mentioned Alien 3: The Gun lightgun arcade machine, 1993 gave us only one other Alien appearance, in Activision’s Game Boy title, Alien vs Predator: The Last of His Clan. The graphics were not too bad as Game Boy games go, featuring large, detailed characters in a side-scrolling platformer that was a different affair entirely from their own SNES AvP, although both games used the same box art.
[Image Credit: 20th Century Fox] (For more of this madness, visit alienanthology.fandom.com/wiki]
The final thought to consider at this point is how the last few years’ worth of Alien arcade games and console titles are all thematically very similar: colourful, stylized Aliens based on various animals and other weird things (taking the Alien 3 idea of Aliens taking on the attributes of their hosts), and how much they have in common visually with the toys, comics and cartoon spin-offs from the toy line. The 1987 MSX Aliens was the first of these kinds of Alien games, and the 1994 Capcom arcade cabinet the last (more on that in a minute). From all the evidence, it would seem that this seven-year stretch of colourful, kid-friendly ‘nonsense’ was partly the result of the Japanese influence — from Square in ’87 to Capcom, Konami and SEGA’s arcade games through to the Jorudan-developed SNES AvP and Capcom AvP cabinet in 1994. Mostly though, it seems to have come from the Alien and Predator franchises’ wider dissemination into popular culture, initially through the Dark Horse comics series and Titan novels, then through the insane Operation: Aliens cartoon and tie-in Kenner toy line. The cartoon had originally been planned by Fox as an Alien 3 promo tool (!), but then dropped before full production could begin. However, with Kenner they’d already planned and started producing a line of spin-off toys and games. It was too late to change the packaging for some of these items before they went to market, although most of it was rebranded with the generic ‘Aliens’ title. The toys’ release was then timed to coincide with the SNES AvP game.
At any rate, 1994 marked the beginning of a new era in Alien gaming, and one which leads us directly to where we stand today with Aliens: Colonial Marines and Alien: Isolation. It’s a journey which also very much eschewed the more out-there elements of the last few years of gaming, so if you’re particularly fond of the Bat Alien, say goodbye to him now. Goodbye, Bat Alien!
[Image Credit: Rebellion Developments Limited]
At last, 1994! Compared to the last few years, this was a quiet one for Alien games (though no less momentous), giving us just two to consider (apart from the previously-mentioned May release of Probe Entertainment’s Alien 3 on the SEGA Game Gear). The first of these was another AvP arcade cabinet, this time from Capcom, using their still-new CPS-2 board (of Super Street Fighter II fame). The story for this one features a California town over-run by Aliens, a pair of cybernetic Colonial Marines teaming up with two Predators and an explosive finale that once again proves the game franchises have been at least a step ahead of the films most of the time.
If the games were one step ahead of the films, then the comics were always two steps ahead of the games and the films, because it was Dark Horse Comics’ 1990 Alien vs Predator series that sparked off the entire AvP concept: films, games, branded lunchboxes and all. But despite the numerous AvP entries in Alien gaming history up to this point, it’s arguably UK developer Rebellion Developments’ AvP games that we think of, when we think of ‘AvP games’. The first of these was developed for Atari’s Jaguar console, a short-lived 64-bit machine that sadly failed to reinsert Atari into the hardware market. Apart from anything else, just one year on from its 1993 North American launch, it suddenly found itself in competition with SEGA’s equally short-lived (but well-loved and certainly better-remembered) Saturn, as well as the mighty PlayStation, all three of which are part of what we now consider the 5th Generation of gaming consoles. Of course, SONY’s little grey box did for both SEGA and Atari’s console ambitions completely, and the rest is history.
But back to Rebellion. Founded in 1992 by Jason and Chris Kingsley in Oxford, England, Alien vs Predator was the company’s premier game, and was originally slated as a Jaguar launch title (although it was delayed several times). The Atari Jaguar’s Alien vs Predator was an FPS that forged the template for the series to come, with its familiar three campaigns, one each for Marines, Aliens and Predators. The distinctive look of the game’s characters is largely attributable to the fact that Rebellion bought, painted and digitized high-quality resin model kits of the Aliens and Predators, then animated them in the computer. (For the Marine, they obtained a costume from the Cameron film, dressed up their graphic designer Lance Lewis, and digitized him!).
[Image Credit: Rebellion Developments Limited]
Now, looking at the screenshots above (or the top two rows of a GIS), and even accounting for image resolution and yadda yadda technical gubbins, the reasonable response is ‘Wow, looks good for an old dog’, or even just acknowledgement that it’s something a bit different from the usual bunch of Gigeresque, Cameronian pixels. That’s today. But imagine that you were looking at those screens in a magazine in late 1992, or even running on a display model Atari Jaguar in a store, and it’s reasonable to expect that your mind would have been somewhat blown. At the risk of belabouring the point, that first AvP was something of a watershed in Alien gaming. Back then, in the early-to-mid 1990s, technology was finally getting to a point where, in terms of entertainment purposes, it was finally able to really properly convey our stupid dreams and pop-culture fantasies with something even vaguely approaching ‘realism’. In the case of Rebellion’s AvP, any (relative) weaknesses in the Jaguar’s hardware — combined with the necessarily mostly bland palette and a well-implemented soundscape — only served to heighten the oppressive atmosphere. It seems too, that 22 years later, Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation has turned another corner in both conveying realism through graphical fidelity, but also cinematically, through its scripting, mood, atmosphere and feeling.
When Rebellion’s Alien vs Predator was finally released on October 20th 1994, a lot of gamers and critics felt the same way, rewarding the fist-time devs with good scores in the magazines and strong sales. Twelve years later, in 2006, GameTrailers even placed it on their list of ‘Top Ten Scariest Games’, as one of only two pre-1996 games to make it. There are a few more entries in the ‘official’ AvP series: the 1999 PC version (which made its titular ‘Alien’ a plural); a sequel (Alien vs Predator 2, developed by Monolith Productions); an expansion pack to the sequel (Aliens versus Predator 2: Primal Hunt, developed by Third Law Entertainment and serving as a prequel to the sequel!); a modern upgrade of the original (Alien vs Predator Classic 2000), and a proper third game in the series, commonly known as Alien vs Predator (2010) to avoid confusion. But before we even get to the first of those, Rebellion’s legendary 1999 PC version of their own AvP, we have three years to get through, giving us one return to the scene by Alien 3 maestros Probe Entertainment, and two total oddities, including The Worst Alien Game Ever…
[Image Credit: Cryo Interactive Entertainment/Mindscape]
That last one is the 1995 PC-only Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure, a clumsy point-and-click adventure (with 3D grid-based combat!) by the Uwe Boll of adventure gaming, Cryo Interactive Entertainment. By all accounts it’s a terrible game, hampered by bad writing, pointless, illogical puzzles and fiddly pixel-hunting for the interactive bits, as well as the near-constant pressure of having to do everything within set time limits — sort of like QuickTime events (vomit), but drawn out to agonizing lengths. Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure was originally designed to be a much grander work than it ended up being, and artefacts of the abandoned bits still linger — a morale system that doesn’t do anything but take up a small bit of the screen, and a hunger system that requires your crew of terraformers and odd-job men to sit down and eat early on in the story, or face a literally game-breaking end much later on. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game now is the fact that it borrows a concept from the really rather good 1993–94 Dark Horse Comics series, Alien: Labyrinth (itself later novelized by S.D. Perry). If you want to read more about Cryo’s horrifying monsterpiece, you could do no worse than clicking here for a lengthy 2014 article at PC Gamer by Richard Cobbett as part of his legendary Saturday Crapshoot series.
One year on, and early 1996 finds us at the height of PlayStation fever. The SEGA Saturn is still doing well enough, and our old friends at Probe Entertainment are back to wash away the memory of the previous year’s dreadful Cryo adventure with a much, much better FPS, Alien Trilogy. This is notable, first and foremost, for having a unique story not directly derived from either the comics or the films, but instead being a mash-up of the Alien, Aliens and Alien 3 films (hence the ‘Trilogy’ part of the name). A Doom-like corridor shooter (being Doom-like was one of the worst criticisms of the game at the time, so really, it’s already doing pretty well), Alien Trilogy cast the player as a slightly different-looking Ripley, now actually a Colonial Marine herself. With text briefings setting up each of the game’s 30 levels, Ripley begins in Aliens’ Hadley’s Hope, investigating the missing colonists, escapes from there with Bishop to Alien 3’s ‘Fury’ 161 prison facility, and from there to Alien’s derelict ‘jockey’ ship. Each of the three segments features an Alien queen as a final boss, and in anticipation of Alien: Isolation 18 years later, rogue androids also appear as enemies in the first part.
and a Japanese SEGA Saturn box, why not.
[Image Credit: Acclaim Entertainment, Inc./Fox Interactive]
This is another Alien game that succeeds in creating some tension and atmosphere, and is possibly the apotheosis of the ‘shove all the iconic stuff from the films into a blender and wizz for 30 seconds’ approach to Alien game design. What saves it from being slavish exploitation is its unique ‘mix-tape’ approach to the story, and some truly nasty death scenes for the hapless player — in no other Alien fiction that I can think of (apart from her nightmare at the beginning of Aliens) do we see Ripley speared, bitten, eaten, sliced, diced and acid-vomited on with such gusto as we do here. In 1997, when PlayStations and N64s were flying off shelves and Lara Croft was still new and exciting, I was working in an Electronics Boutique in London, England, and Alien Trilogy was one of our best sellers. In lean times, we could Sellotape a copy to a PlayStation and that was a guaranteed sale (although the number of people who mispronounced trilogy as ‘tri-ology’ was a bit surprising). Released on the PSX and Saturn in the first few months of 1996 and to the PC in November, Probe’s experience with the Alien 3 license a few years earlier stands them in good stead here, creating a nice bridge between the Jaguar FPS and its next iteration, the classic PC Alien vs Predator.
[Image Credit: Probe Entertainment/Acclaim Entertainment]
Juuust before we get to that one though, there’s one more stop to make, and that’s in March 1998 for the Alien’s online debut in Mythic Entertainment’s Aliens Online. Published by Kesmai, this was a straightforward affair, being an online shooter between teams of Aliens and Colonial Marines, but one that required a subscription to Kesmai’s online GameStorm service. The 1990s were an interesting time for online gaming, and the foreign-sounding Kesmai (actually an American developer/publisher named by one of its two founders using a random name generator they’d created) were one of the early pioneers. Founded in 1981 by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor, Kesmai’s client list featured names such as AOL, CompuServe and GEnie, with their output being a mixture of MUDs and early online games such as Legends of Kesmai and Air Warrior. Mythic, of course, are well-known for another classic, Dark Age of Camelot, as well as the more recent Warhammer Online (2008–2013 R.I.P.). But at the time of Aliens Online they were still going by their original name, Interworld Productions, and developing Aliens Online with a USD 450,000 budget using a modified version of the engine they’d developed for an earlier online shooter, the magic-themed Rolemaster: Magestorm.
In terms of gameplay, Marines could be customized to your taste from a variety of different heads and torsos etc, and had four classes to choose from which gave them some simple RPG-like stats determining their efficiency with health kits and damage with different types of guns. Speaking of which, they had all the usual guns and gadgets, and apart from some early unfairness with the Aliens being able to spawn anywhere on a map, including on one map in air vents directly over the Marine spawnpoints, they were functionally much as you’d expect — good at doing long-range damage, but nice and squishy up close.
[Image Credit: Mythic Entertainment/Kesmai/Fox Interactive]
More interesting were the Aliens. Each map began with a large number of AI-controlled Aliens, with human players spawning into a random Alien as it went about its business. Upon death, the human players would spawn into another random Alien, and so on, until the total pool of available Aliens had been whittled down to zero. This kept the Marine players nicely on edge, wondering whether the next Alien they met would be a ‘stupid’ AI drone or a smarter, more deadly human one. (Cunning human Aliens would mimic the simplistic behaviour of their AI counterparts to lure unsuspecting Marines into surprise attacks). Alien players could also choose to play not only as Aliens, but also as facehuggers, which although smaller and weaker had their own spawn pool and an extremely annoying tail-whip attack. Most excitingly, players earned experience while playing as the Alien drones, which would eventually allow them to play as a Queen, and later, an Empress — in reality just a bigger, tougher Queen, but also with the occasional right to create custom games instead of just queuing to join them.
Just reading about Aliens Online is an exciting experience, and it only makes me wonder now why we haven’t had another proper, dedicated team-based online Alien. Battlefield: Aliens, anyone?
Right then, back to the dropship for another week before we make the final push. Next time we’ll be in 1999, playing the much-anticipated PC version of AvP, followed by a brief Alien Resurrection break before diving into the string of sequels and expansions to PC AvP which will lead us to the present day. Until then, “Stay frosty!”
An earlier version of this article was previously published by this author at XP4T.com in 2015
