Alien vs. Predator

I’ve previously confessed to being one of the poor saps who threw money at an Atari Jaguar, and one of the main reasons that misfire of a 64-bit console appealed to teenage me was its upcoming, heavily hyped first-person shooter Alien vs. Predator

Separate campaigns let you play as a xenomorph, a yautja warrior, or a U.S. colonial marine, but the marine’s adventure was clearly the star of the show. It was just inherently more interesting to play as a feeble human reliant on gathering weapons and finding keycards while you tried to escape from that maze of a space station.

More interesting, and scarier. Alien vs. Predator was little more than Wolfenstein 3D with a lot more colors and a slightly more complex inventory system, but damned if they didn’t get the aliens right. Those things were dead-silent as they ran up to attack, whereupon they made their presence known with an ear-splitting screech.

The vast majority of the marine’s opposition was just aliens, facehuggers, and an occasional predator, but those damn xenos carried the game by cranking my anxiety on the regular. They made the whole, otherwise mediocre thing kinda work. I was always afraid to peek around the next bend because I knew what might come running, and worse, what might be approaching from behind.
—Alexandra Hall