After 40 years, Aliens is still shaping the way video games are made
James Cameron’s high-octane film sequel is a blueprint for modern action space slashers
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It is difficult to believe that James Cameron’s Aliens was released into cinemas 40 years ago. The seminal space shooter took the original Alien – a tense slasher film with a tiny cast and one monster – and transformed it into an intergalactic war movie crammed with wry one-liners, massive guns and an actual boss battle finale. As a 14-year-old, I stood in line at the Tatton Gatley cinema, unsure if I’d be allowed in – I came out three hours later a changed person, my head filled with esoteric military slang and a deep fear of beeping motion detectors. For days afterwards, I slept with my duvet covering my mouth so that no facehuggers could get me. (I was a highly impressionable teenager.)
It’s little wonder that the film has had such a profound effect on video game design. Take the colonial marines, for example. Although the concept of the space soldier had been around in sci-fi novels since the 1930s, most notably in the works of EE “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein (the Starship Troopers), Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and co, were the perfect 80s rendition, combining the witty banter of contemporary buddy cop flicks with awesome weaponry and hi-tech gadgets. Their influence is easy to spot in Doom, where the nameless marine fights ceaseless waves of hellish monsters using a mix of futuristic rifles and good old shotguns. It’s there too in the Halo series, the Spartan soldiers sporting the same armour and mega weapons, cruising about in very similar highly militarised starships and fighting recognisable hive-mind space beasts. Gears of War, Killzone and Marathon all borrow from the same set of costumes and deadly accessories.
Also important to future game designers was the way in which James Cameron opened up the world of Alien after Ridley Scott’s original locked-room mystery of a movie. He beefed up the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, giving us the stencil for dozens of evil video game mega corps; he brought in an array of weapons from handguns to M41A pulse rifles and the M56 smart guns, introducing the idea of a scaled armoury to discover and master; and he employed a structure based around the repeated rhythm of tense exploration followed by explosive encounters that countless games would follow.
It’s weird, then, how difficult it has proven to directly translate the movie into games. While the original Alien spawned a cult 8bit translation and the brilliant Alien: Isolation, Cameron’s sequel is best known for the disastrously bugged Aliens: Colonial Marines, which led to a lawsuit for deceptive marketing. Elsewhere, third-person co-op blaster Aliens: Fireteam Elite drew mixed reviews but has at least birthed a forthcoming sequel, and the 2D Metroid-style game Aliens: Infestation has plenty of fans. My favourite, though, was one of the two official tie-ins from 1986. Aliens: the Computer Game from Electric Dreams Software was a thrilling proto-FPS, allowing you to control several of the movie’s characters as they stalked through an atmosphere processing plant getting attacked by xenomorphs and facehuggers. I’m not sure it’s ever been bettered.
Watching the movie again this week, it’s impossible not to notice all the little scenic and narrative touches that have since shaped how sci-fi action games function. Even the sentry gun, which was cut from the cinematic release and only turned up in the special edition home release, has become a staple special weapon, present in everything from Call of Duty to Helldivers. I wonder how many of today’s game creators were also stood in cinema lines in the summer of 1986, too young to be there, not quite ready to have their minds blown for ever?
What to play
Those of us with an interest in the fibre arts are always delighted to see them crop up in other media. Here, embroidered character art helps Scarlet Deer Inn to stand out in a crowded market. Once players are in, they’ll find the charming medieval village has some horrific secrets. Players guide mother-of-two Elise through danger-filled caverns on a quest to find her children and prevent them from meeting a gruesome end, a goal that gained additional meaning when the husband-and-wife developers had a baby of their own. Armed only with a torch, you must keep it lit or likely repeatedly succumb to the darkness. Jordan Erica Webber
Available on:PC
Estimated playtime:four hours
What to read
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In what is likely to become a familiar problem for the games industry, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VImarketing schedule is being infiltrated by AI-generated trailers purporting to show scenes from the forthcoming game. Examples include a surfing video and a woman enjoying champagne on a yacht. As Eurogamer points out, the videos are filling a vacuum left by Rockstar’s somewhat stingy approach to releasing in-game footage. The company does not seem to be impressed.
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Rather embarrassingly for console manufacturers seeking to go digital only, network outages are back. On Friday, PlayStation Network went down for several hours, leaving players with no access to their games. And on Monday, it was the turn of Xbox, a major outage making it impossible to sign in to user accounts, launch games or download content. While the PlayStation situation has now been resolved, the Xbox network was still having issues at time of press. All hail our disc-less future!
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When Valve announced its new Steam Machine PC, fans were intrigued by a custom front plate the company had attached to the machine, which appeared to be an e-ink screen displaying performance data from inside the computer, such as memory and CPU performance. Now, Valve has released all the files and details for what it calls The Inkterface, so owners can build one – and gaming site Aftermath has done just that. Very nerdy, but very cool.
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And if you enjoyed reminiscing about Aliens,you might want to check out forthcoming book Aliens: The Video Games by Mike Diver, a complete history of adaptations, including lots of developer interviews.
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Question Block
This week’s question is from Ben
“I want to learn more about the history of video games and I wondered if there are any canonical lists of the best titles– perhaps a gaming equivalent of the BFI’s 250 Greatest Films of All Time or the American Film Institute’s 100 Years 100 Movies?”
Many publications that write about video games have their own top 100 list, although these tends to be compiled by their own critics or readers rather than a broader spread of experts. GQ, GameRant and Rolling Stone all have versions, while IGN has a “mathematically derived” list of the top 500, and we’ve done the best games of the 21st century (so far). For more formal attempts at developing a canon, the Strong Museum has a World Video Game Hall of Fame, MoMA has a games collection (but for some reason its website does NOT want you to find a definitive list!), and for its Art of Games exhibition in 2012, the Smithsonian compiled a list of 80 important titles with the help of gamers and game makers. There have also been a few books on the subject: try Penguin’s 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die (full disclosure: I wrote some of this book), BFI’s 100 Video Games, or Game On!: From Pong to Oblivion – The Greatest Video Games of All Time, compiled by ex-Edge magazine writers.
If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
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