“I said, ‘that’s the game we’re going to make’ - totally believable.”
“But everyone was always focused on the Aliens experience, given its natural connection between aliens and shooting.
Creative Assembly, coincidentally stuffed with Alien fans, put its hand up.
Hope wrote out a short proposal for Sega.
Forget the other movies.
We only have this 116 minutes of source material.”
It’s dirty, gritty, and every day is mundane and boring…
But it’s this ethic that runs through Alien’s tech: rugged, industrial and unreliable.
But still Creative Assembly needed more material, more connection to the film.
It was time to break that 116-minute rule.
“So, yeah, I was breaking my own rule,” admits Hope.
Amanda Ripley, after all, was first mentioned in Aliens' Special Edition.
“I was thinking, they’ll never let us have Amanda.
But they did - they let us tell her story.”
Amanda Ripley follows in her mother’s footsteps, working in space for Weyland-Yutani.
She’s busy welding when company man/android Samuels sidles in, offering Ripley some much-needed closure.
On arrival, an explosion rocks the station, thrusting Ripley into a nightmare.
One where crucially - and just like the player - she has no idea what’s going on.
This is the delight of Alien: Isolation.
Alien: Isolation’s marketing department even created a Twitter account for a systems archivist on Sevastopol.
Mike Tanaka’s early tweets hint at the forthcoming violent events on the station.
“So…a few more faces popped up on the missing person’s board today.
Saw it on my way back to my room.
What the hell is going on?”
But there were only three writers.
“We spent a lot of time thinking, ‘How do we tell something new with Alien?
How do we put a twist on it?'”
says Dion Lay, one-third of that writing team.
We needed to revisit the original, be faithful to it and trust the aliens enough."
“Because that just wasn’t the vibe.
It was more, to quote a Working Joe: ‘You shouldn’t be here’”.
“Sevastopol Station - what a shithole,” reports Blane, a friend of the Torrens’s captain.
Sevastopol is being decommissioned."
Chief Porter’s lament interweaves with several stories from other Sevastopol workers and executives.
“That was the trickiest thing,” continues Porter.
And finally, does it make sense?"
Between the chills, there’s another layer of subtlety to Alien: Isolation.
But they always make the point that you’re missing something, miles from home.
“It’s happening again, got to go and find out what it is.
It’s more screams…
I have to see what’s happening.
Love you, girls x,” he portentously writes in one of his final tweets.
“And it wasn’t always fun.
Gamers who, naturally, like nothing better than being stalked by an eight-foot-tall killing machine.
You’d be quiet and venture to ensure it doesn’t see you.
Hide under a desk.
Maybe distract the tiger by throwing something in the other direction?”
These tactics will sound familiar.
“I said, ‘that’s the game we’re going to make’ - totally believable.”
This believability extends to the alien itself.
Even when Ripley acquires the flamethrower, it’s only ever a deterrent.
“For a time, it’s really effective in deterring the alien.
But then it starts to learn, and will no longer charge you.”
It was also one of the most important balancing acts in the game.
“Everyone came out of that room terrified and anxious and wrote glowing previews,” he says.
“Knowing I was an Alien fan, my colleague returned and said, ‘Dude, this is it.
This is the Alien game that someone should have made’”.
“I think Creative Assembly took that to a level not many video games do.
It’s also just the best horror game ever made, by quite some margin.”
But that authenticity was still a gamble, in one place in particular.
“The save stations were part of that mechanism, a moment that lets the player breathe.
“Whereas in Alien: Isolation, you’re cowering in the dirt for most of the game.
Maybe that was a negative for some people; but obviously, that is what Alien should be about.
The mobile game Alien: Blackout gave little relief to fans.
“A lot of enemies in horror games are still quite rudimentary in comparison.
Maybe it’s hard to do?
Or is it that Alien: Isolation ‘only’ sold two million copies?”
I have another theory.
Maybe a large faction of gamers thought Alien: Isolation would be too scary for them.
I throw this loaded tail barb straight back to Al Hope.
But I couldn’t play it.’
It would have broken that idea if we’d altered it and made it less scary.
Alien: Isolation asks the question: how are you going to survive?
And, yeah, maybe that’s too much for some people.
But if it was too easy, it would have broken that spell.”
It made for a thrilling full-circle moment for Hope and his colleagues.
Even on this latest playthrough, I’m holding my breath as the xeno stomps closer.
And I soon make a mistake, those goo-dripping jaws homing in on poor Ripley’s skull once again.
Hiding in lockers and furtively checking computer screens will forever be my kind of bliss.
And now I get to do it all over again.
The Perfect Organism by Andy Kelly is availablefrom Unboundand all good booksellers and is highly recommended.
Our thanks to Alistair Hope, Andy Kelly, Will Porter and Dion Lay.
