Gaming Nexus Alien Games Retrospective: Part 1

In space, no one can hear you scream. The tagline for Ridley Scott’s genre-defining 1979 film is just as succinct, straightforward and effective as the movie it was advertising. At its best the Alien franchise has been about one thing: a terrifyingly perfect organism, and by extension how futile it is to fight, run from or even try to understand this creature. Naturally a film series as successful as Alien has spawned a commercial empire of tie-in media, chief among them being video games. Games have accompanied the Alien series almost from its beginning, and as with the films, the games have ranged from the sublime and terrifying to the mediocre, confused and unintentionally comical.

Like the movies, the recent Alien games have grown bland, convoluted and at times downright insulting, but Sega and Creative Assembly are poised to turn things around with the promising Alien: Isolation. As we wait in anticipation for Creative Assembly to return the series to its elegant, spine-chilling origins, I thought it would be cool to look back on a few of the more notable Alien games. As always, this is not a comprehensive list. These are the games I have the most experience with and I’m just as interested in the ones I haven’t played, so feel free to sound off in the comments about your favorites as well.

Let’s dive back into a few of our favorite nightmares.

Aliens Total Conversion – 1994
There sadly aren’t many noteworthy games based on Ridley Scott’s Alien. The Atari 2600 got a lame maze game that was an almost identical clone of Pac-Man, and was ironically more faithful to the arcade original than the abhorrent 2600 version of Pac-Man was. There was also a curiously ambitious title released for home PCs like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. This primitive game combined strategy and surveillance-juggling elements, forcing the player to keep tabs on all crew members, trap the Alien and prevent the treacherous android from aiding the creature. Its design elements are pretty obtuse by modern standards, but it stands as an intriguing precursor to '90s point-and-click adventures and full-motion-video games like Night Trap.

James Cameron’s more action-oriented sequel film, Aliens, lent itself much better to early, mass-market video game tie-ins but interestingly, my first meaningful Alien game experience wasn’t even with an officially licensed title. While many fans got their first taste of Aliens gaming with Konami’s classic Contra-style arcade shooter, I first felt the fear in a Doom mod of all things. Aliens: Total Conversion was one of the very first comprehensive Doom mods, and it got more right about Aliens than many official franchise games in the years to come.

Working in his spare time while completing a computer science degree, legendary modder Justin Fisher labored on the pioneering Doom wad for months. Fisher knew he wanted to make an Aliens mod within the first five minutes of playing Doom; ironic considering id Software had toyed with making a licensed Aliens game in very early Doom development before settling on their own demon-based concept. By rewatching, pausing and taking notes from his VHS copy of the film, Fisher created a frighteningly accurate game adaptation of Cameron’s vision.

Fisher not only built nine new maps from scratch but fundamentally altered aspects of the base game, exploiting quirks in Doom’s engine to invent new monster behaviors, add authentic weapons from the film and include creatures, sound clips and environments with dozens of custom textures and assets. This resulted in a campaign that roughly mirrored the film’s plot and featured hatching alien eggs, xenomorph warriors that exploded into lethal showers of acid and a climactic power loader battle with the alien queen.

Fisher had a keen understanding of what made Aliens work, especially the horror element. Compared to vanilla Doom, Aliens TC was a surprisingly tense and unnerving experience. The first level is completely devoid of aliens, a risky tension-building technique that subsequent Aliens games have emulated but never used quite as well as Fisher did. Ammo was scarce in Aliens TC and xenomorphs were tough, numerous and often spawned literally out of walls and right behind you. Justin Fisher masterfully implemented the early staples of the survival horror genre years before games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil were using them.

Aliens TC went on to inspire actual industry-made games, including several official Aliens titles and the ambitious but flawed Jurassic Park title, Trespasser. Fisher was even offered a spot on Trespasser’s development team, but decided to focus on his studies and professional career instead. It’s too bad Justin Fisher never went into game development, but I think we’re fortunate to have gotten Aliens TC; what he pulled off in 1994 was truer to Cameron’s film than anything else for years afterwards. Pretty impressive for a mid-'90s Doom wad.

Alien vs. Predator (Jaguar) – 1994
The first franchise-official first-person-shooter we got out of the Aliens series is not only a crossover, but an oft-overlooked gem due to the relative obscurity of the console it was released on. Regardless, if you were an Atari Jaguar owner in the creepy fall of 1994, you probably couldn’t wait to get your hands on Alien vs. Predator. One of the few high-profile games for the struggling Jag, the original AvP had a lot riding on it and even had a sizable ad campaign that included a rather disturbing TV commercial.

The game itself was developed by UK studio Rebellion, and served as a rough but forward-looking prototype for their future efforts in the series (more on those games in part 2). At first glance AvP is a standard Doom clone, but dig deeper and the game’s ambitions become evident. AvP established the basic formula for all subsequent versions: the game has three campaigns, one each for the Alien, Colonial Marine and Predator, and each character plays quite differently from the others.

The marine campaign is the most like a basic shooter—collect keys to progress, scavenge more powerful weapons and ammo, and shoot at enemies in first person. AvP was one of the first times fans could wield iconic weapons like the pulse rifle and smartgun (outside of Aliens TC, of course) and the xenomorph enemies were novel for the time. The limitations of the game engine and sparse sound effects for the aliens let them sneak up on and surround the player with little warning, lending a sense of constant tension to the marine campaign. The tough predators served as minibosses, sporting more health and several dangerous scifi weapons.

AvP was also the first chance players got to be the Alien, and while the primitive Jaguar experience wasn’t as evocative or unique as later versions it still established some foundational ideas, and introduced a few cool concepts that haven’t been used since. In particular, the Alien couldn’t regenerate health; instead it had to cocoon enemy humans, which were set down as literal respawn points. When the Alien died a new one was birthed from the last enemy the player had cocooned, and the player continued the mission as the freshly-chesbursted xenomorph.

The predator campaign introduced a stealth element—something that wouldn’t be standard in FPS until years later. While the predator could use most of his signature weapons from the movies, killing while cloaked resulted in a loss of honor, which could eventually lock out certain weapons. Conversely killing while visible restored honor and weapons, discouraging players from abusing the potentially balance-breaking cloaking device.

AvP on Jaguar was single-player only; the series-defining, asymmetric species-against-species multiplayer wouldn’t arrive until a later game. Its flat-plane, Doom-style levels also kept the game from being as dynamic or faithful to its source material as fans would’ve liked. That said, Rebellion’s first AvP game still laid a lot of groundwork for future games to follow, and it’s a shame that the game is so difficult to play these days. AvP was a Jaguar exclusive, so the only way to experience AvP is to either fight with a janky emulator, or track down a Jaguar and an original cartridge—an expensive prospect at best. Hopefully AvP will eventually get ported to GoG or some other digital service.

Alien 3 – 1993
Alien 3 is the oft-debated black sheep of the film series. While the first two movies are icons of their respective genres and the fourth movies is a disjointed, muddled and universally reviled black comedy, Alien 3 still defies easy categorization. This is probably owed to its torturous time in development hell, where it changed scripts, concepts and even directors multiple times. Abandoned by its director and often hated by fans for taking the series in a drastically different direction, David Fincher’s debut feature film is a relentlessly depressing and mean-spirited story that also happens to be an artistic tour-de-force, one that sticks to its bleak vision and the consequences be damned.

It is for this reason that Alien 3 has as many fans as it does detractors, and why in recent times it’s been re-evaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece. While Alien 3 can still spark heated debates over two decades after its release, there’s one thing few fans will argue over: the movie spawned some pretty great tie-in videogames. While there were several Alien 3 games made in the early 90s—including a pretty awesome arcade shooter—the pair of action-platformers developed by Probe Entertainment are most fondly remembered by fans. What’s curious about these two games is that they diverge from the arthouse horror plot of the movie and into Aliens action territory quite drastically, and they thoroughly embody both sides of the “metroidvania” coin.

The first game was developed for home PCs like the Commodore 64 and Amiga and then ported to the NES, but it’s the later Sega Genesis version that most people remember. The earlier versions were pretty mediocre, but on the Genesis, Probe got the chance to perfect the game into something very similar to the classic Castlevania titles. Like in the film Ripley was marooned on the prison planet Fury 161, but instead of being chased around unarmed by a single alien, Ripley is armed to the teeth and the whole prison is infested with xenomorphs.

Each level had a strict time limit like in early Castlevania games; Ripley had to rescue all prisoners in a level before time ran out and they were impregnated by aliens. The game was straight-up action adventure, with a number of iconic weapons and powerups to help Ripley ventilate the dozens and dozens of aliens roaming the prison corridors. The gameplay was tense and unrelenting, which could be satisfying but the lack of any save feature whatsoever could also make the game pretty frustrating too.

The SNES game, conversely was in a class of its own. Taking inspiration from the Metroid tradition, it had plenty of action and aliens but the focus was on exploration so there was no nagging time limit. Each level had multiple missions for Ripley to complete and there was a password save system similar to Super Castlevania for restoring progress. The SNES port’s presentation was also a cut above, with smoother animations, more detailed scrolling backgrounds and crisper sprites than the Genesis version. The game even had slick cutscenes that matched to the film surprisingly well. The SNES port is definitely the best version of Alien 3: The Game, and while it’s no Super Metroid, it is still a surprisingly good entry in the checkered history of Alien games.

In a way, these two games brought the Alien series full-circle. Alien and Aliens influenced countless action games in the 80s and 90s, most notably Contra and especially Nintendo’s Metroid series. It’s only fitting that an Alien series game would emulate the gameplay pioneered in Metroid itself—a gameplay style originally invented by Nintendo to evoke the loneliness, desolation and strong female protagonist of Alien.

Alien Trilogy – 1996
The Alien series didn’t get another true FPS until Alien Trilogy in 1996, and it turned out to be quite a fascinating little game. After its work on Alien 3, Probe Software was tasked with tackling all three movies in this underappreciated shooter. At its core a typical Doom clone, it was the game’s atmosphere, production values and curious quirks and mechanics that set it apart. True to its title, Alien Trilogy blended the first three (and at that time only) Alien films into one broad overarching narrative, which got most of the general points of the movies right but basically just served as an excuse for Ripley to shoot a bunch of xenos.

While the shooting mechanics were workable and fairly standard for the day, they also lagged far behind Quake and even Duke Nukem 3D. While this led to a number of frustrating bugs, the game’s limitations worked to its benefit as well. The controls were comparatively stiff, especially on the Playstation and Sega Saturn ports, but this had the aftereffect of making it harder to aim, shoot and navigate, adding to the game’s uneasy atmosphere. Ripley wasn’t a solider after all—she was a space trucker, and the clunky controls reinforced that she wasn’t a top shot or particularly agile. The limited draw distance necessitated by the PS1 and Saturn’s paltry RAM meant that every level was cloaked in smoky darkness; aliens and facehuggers would leap at you out of the dark, and you could usually hear them skittering about in the shadows before you could see them.

As often as the technical limitations enhanced the atmosphere, they also crippled the game. It was packed with movie-accurate assets that were made grainy and warped due to the PS1’s janky texture renderer. I actually met one of the game’s developers while he was a computer science professor at Ohio State. He said he felt almost criminal down-rezzing the beautifully CG-rendered aliens into jerky, pixelated sprites. He also mentioned that 20^th Century Fox sent Probe an intricately detailed Ripley head bust from the filming of Alien 3, to be scanned in for the game’s cutscenes. Supposedly the people at Fox weren’t too happy when the Probe staff took goofy pictures with the bust, dressing the disembodied Sigourney Weaver head in a succession of silly hats.

The game itself at least offered a variety of locations that were very accurate to, or at least strongly inspired by, the movie sets. Considering the hardware limitations of the time it’s impressive that Probe was able to recreate the oppressive corporate homogeneity of the Hadley’s Hope colony, the bleak, cavernous halls of the Fury 161 prison and even the disturbingly sexual contours of H.R. Giger’s derelict alien dreadnought. Each environment was populated with alien warriors, facehuggers, and the “runner” dog aliens you’d expect, but Probe also included fanatical Weyland Yutani employees, alien-handlers in hazmat suits, implacable android synthetics and even chestburster-birthing colonists cocooned to the walls. The whole experience was wrapped up in a wonderfully subtle, eerie soundtrack that didn’t steal any of the music from the movies, but managed to perfectly emulate their foreboding mood nonetheless.

In the end I like Aliens TC better than Alien Trilogy, even though the latter is the more professionally made game. Having been built on the Doom engine Aliens TC plays much better, but there’s something hopeless, dreadful and just plain scary about Alien trilogy. It’s nearly impossible to get it running on a modern OS without DoSBox, but sometimes, when that nagging fear licks at the edges of my perception, I still feel the urge to boot up my Playstation and step back into the darkness.

That wraps up part one of my Alien video game retrospective. Be sure to “collate” in the comments, share your favorite Alien gaming experiences and let me know which great games I missed out on. Next time we’ll see one spinoff dominate the Alien gaming landscape for nearly a decade, proving once and for all that tossing Predators into the mix makes for pretty terrible movies, but awesome games. It turns out that in deathmatch, everyone can hear you scream.