From Dream To Disaster: The Story Of Aliens: Colonial Marines

(Unfortunately, despite weeks of fan and press requests for an explanation about what went wrong with this game, representatives from Sega and Gearbox both declined to comment for this story.)

Just days after announcing their Aliens acquisition, Sega announced that they were making a first-person shooter with Gearbox, the studio then best known for developing Brothers in Arms and some of the expansions to Half-Life. When Sega made that announcement, pre-production had just started, according to multiple sources. There was nothing to show, because nothing existed yet.

Meanwhile, Sega contracted independent studio Obsidian Entertainment to handle the Aliens RPG.

Also in 2009, Gearbox released Borderlands, the Diablo-esque shooter that went on to become a surprise critical and commercial hit. Because of this sudden success, Gearbox decided to immediately start working on Borderlands 2—internally codenamed Willow 2—so they decided to outsource the bulk of development on Colonial Marines—codenamed Pecan—to a company called TimeGate, best known for the first-person shooter Section 8. At the time, TimeGate was finishing up development on the sequel, Section 8: Prejudice.Over the next few years, both Aliens games were delayed multiple times. By 2009, Sega was going through some financial difficulties and both games were costing them a great deal of money. According to one source, Sega’s producers said they had to choose between the first-person shooter and the role-playing game. They chose the shooter—and unceremoniously cancelled the RPG.

Around November or December of 2010, TimeGate had a company meeting to talk about their next project. Things went well.

“There was really good synergy between both teams about what needed to happen,” one source told me. “It was a very love-love situation.”

“Everyone at [TimeGate] was pretty stoked,” said another source.

So Gearbox sent over the game materials, and TimeGate’s team started to work on project Pecan—although at least a few staffers were shocked by how little progress Gearbox had made on the game.

“There was obviously not four years of work done on the game,” one source said.

According to three people familiar with the project, Gearbox didn’t put a lot of work into Colonial Marines between 2007 and 2010. Instead, those people told me, Gearbox chose to focus on Duke Nukem Forever, Borderlands, and Borderlands 2. Colonial Marines was not a priority.

One source told me that when TimeGate got the project, Colonial Marines was “basically a hodgepodge” of assets, including the shader—or lighting processor—from Borderlands. “A lot of assets just didn’t seem like they fit there,” the source said.

I’ve heard conflicting things about how much of Gearbox’s work was retained by TimeGate. According to one source, TimeGate threw everything out. According to another source, TimeGate’s staff worked with what they had, even if that did require a ton of iteration.

But by all accounts, starting at the end of 2010, TimeGate was the developer of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Gearbox had oversight, and much of TimeGate’s work had to go through approval by producers at both Gearbox and Sega, but the bulk of the project was TimeGate’s responsibility.

In 2011, TimeGate started facing big problems. The first major problem was the game’s story: even four years after Colonial Marines was announced, nobody had locked down a final script. Narrative designers at both Gearbox and TimeGate were writing and rewriting constantly, and TimeGate had to discard entire scenes and levels because of story changes during development, according to three sources.

“For a couple months, we were just kind of guessing,” said one of those sources. “It’s really weird to work on a game when you don’t have a basic idea of how things will work.”

And then there was interference—with three companies involved in decision-making on Pecan, bureaucracy was inevitable. According to one source, Sega’s producers wanted Colonial Marines to feel like Call of Duty—in other words, more shooting marines, less shooting aliens. Upper staff at both Gearbox and TimeGate disagreed with this mentality, the source said, and there was a tug-of-war between developer and publisher on how the game should be designed.

“There was also the ‘too many chefs’ syndrome when it came to gameplay, where too many people gave feedback on both ends and it ultimately led to further delays,” said a source. “In one case, working on a particular task took me a month to finalize, as there was inconsistent and delayed feedback.”

Another issue: incompatible management styles. Gearbox and TimeGate are two very different developers that approached the game in two very different ways.

“You could not pick two companies whose general workflow is more diametrically opposed,” said one source. “Gearbox is used to ‘work, work, work, iterate, iterate.’ TimeGate is the exact opposite—they’re always about shipping the product.”

Over the course of development, the team scrapped a lot of levels and missions, one source told me. One cut mission, for example, involved a scientist who would follow the player around and turn out to be a secret agent for Weyland Yutani, the evil corporation that plays an integral role in Aliens fiction. “He was scrapped because escort missions are stupid,” the source said.

“We just spent a lot of time trying to make the game shippable,” said the same source.