The much-hyped Ridley Scott movie Prometheus isnât the only big Aliens-related project that might change the way we think of one of sci-fiâs best series.
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The next Aliens video game counts. Itâs canon. And the people who are making it think it might finally solve some key mysteries in the filmâand even make the films a bit better.
âItâs all connected together,â Randy Pitchford, head of Gearbox Software said to me recently, as we sat down in a convention hall in Boston to chat about Aliens: Colonial Marines, the big new game his team has been working on for several years.
Just before we chatted, another Gearbox developer had played an early part of Colonial Marines in front of me, blowing my mind a bit as he controlled a post-Aliens space Marine boarding the massive Sulaco. You might remember that ship from Aliens as the final battleground between an angry alien queen and a furious, mech-driving Ellen Ripley. The Marine was a member of a battalion that will be featured in the new game. Heâs attached to a recovery crew that links their ship to that huge, famous ship, the USS Sulaco. The Sulaco is floating in space above LV426, the planetoid on which much of James Cameronâs Aliens and its predecessor, Ridley Scottâs Alien, occurred.
The Marine heads into the loading bay, where the bottom half of the android Bishop lies, last seen when the alien queen ripped him apart at the end of Aliens. In this early bit, our Marine chats with some of the other recovery personnel in the bay. He heads past some monitors that just might hold hints to what really happenedâwhat moviegoers were never toldâto Ripley, Hicks and Newt between Aliens and Alien3. Thatâs still a big question. What did happen on the Sulaco between the movie that ended with those three in cryo sleep and the next, which left two of them dead and Ripley, impregnated by Alien, ejected from the Sulaco onto the prison planet of Fury 161?
The Prometheus Connection Trailers for Ridley Scottâs Prometheus movie have shown what appears to be the Derelict ship from Alien but the filmmaker has been cagey about how neatly his new movie fits into Alien lore. âOn the one hand, you can feel the DNA of the Aliens franchise in it,â Pitchford said of the upcoming movie. âIf you ask Ridley, heâll tell you heâs certainly borrowed things from the universe⌠Heâs not developing it as true canon. There are some inconsistencies that he accepted in order for his film to be the good story he wanted to tell there. To the extent that it is part of the Aliens universe, itâs prequel material. Weâre sequel material. Having said that, the endpoint of our adventure is the Derelict which is also the starting point on LV-426 with the Space Jockeys. There is a bit of a link there.â
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âTo make the sequel to Aliens as a video game was our prerequisite,â Pitchford told me, grinning. And the studio behind the movies, 20th Century Fox, obliged. âThe commitment they made was, âYes borrow the franchise for the purpose of doing the next story in the succession of those storylines.'â
While Pitchford stresses that his team âwants to tell a new storyâ and wonât re-tell the films, he canât help but have the game intersect. We will board the Sulaco; we will be joined by a synthetic who was the same model as Bishop and will therefore look like and be voiced by Bishop actor Lance Henriksen; we will head down to LV426; we will check out the ruins of ruins of Hadleyâs Hope, the human colony set up by the Weyland-Yutani corporation after the first Alien and whose residents were annihilated by the aliens just before Aliens begins. Those aliens came from the mysterious Derelict, the space-ship seemingly driven by something called the Space Jockey and filled with alien eggs, as seen in Alien
âWe donât treat the fan-service as the point,â Pitchford said. âItâs not the center of it, but itâs there.â Itâs there because Aliens: Colonial Marines really does sound like the logical tale of what would happen next. Itâs a shooter but it is seemingly also going to be a detective story.
How it all fits together
Pitchford and his team have a very good grasp on Alien series lore. Theyâve absorbed the films, spoken to Ridley Scott, discovered back-stories that didnât make it into the films and identified whatâs canonical. They know What Happened and that helped them shape their story.
Hereâs Pitchford, with some asides from me, walking me through the fiction of Aliens and Alien3 while zeroing in on the mysteries he hopes to help players solve with the new game.
âAt the end of Aliens, Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop go to sleep and are presumably going home. At the beginning of Alien3 something happened. We never knew what or why. But something caused them to be ejected from the Sulaco and they ended up on this prison planet.
âThe Sulaco is there at the prison planet.â [Note from Stephen: Right? Itâs definitely not over LV426, which is where it appears to be in the start of Colonial Marines. Logically, itâd be near the planet it ejected Ripley onto.]
âEverything that Ripley dealt with on the prison planet ends with her martyring herself as Weyland-Yutani is trying to collect the specimen.â [Note from Stephen: Thatâs the end of Alien3, of course.]
âWeyland-Yutani actually ⌠boarded the Sulaco.â [Note from Stephen: I did not know this, but it makes sense. Menacing corporation that sets up Hadleyâs Hope and wants to retrieve alien queen embryo would obviously track down the Sulaco and search it.]
No Easy Bug-Hunt Video games tend to have higher body counts than even the most violent movies, which relegates many movie-related bad guys in games to cannon fodder. But Gearbox doesnât want to turn the fearsome xenomorphs of Alien and Alien3 into easily-swattable bugs. âWeâre going to need to defeat some things but we are also going to need to feel the deadliness of them,â Pitchford said. âThe actual game is pretty lethal. The skill test is anticipating or reacting. If you are good at anticipating and reacting you will be killing lots of xenos and you will be effective at it. You have the tools to do it. But when they get you, they frickinâ get you. Youâll die. Youâll die a lot. I donât know if weâre as far as Dark Souls. Weâre still tuning it, but itâs going to be pretty brutal.â
âSomething happened before that Ripley doesnât know about that led to the ejection [from the Sulaco.]. If Weyland-Yutani canât get the specimen from Ripley, and they are on the ship, what would their next step be? It would be to turn the ship around and go back to the source, LV426.
âSo the Sulaco gets back to LV426. Now, [in the game], weâre part of the contingent thatâs the rescue crew. Remember, Ripley asks how long before weâre overdue can we expect a rescue and Hicks says 17 days. And Hudson says something like, â17 days? Weâre not going to last 17 hours, man.â That creates the opening for the ship thatâs going to go deal with the fact that something happened. Now the Sulaco is reported destroyed. They didnât send it in 17 days, but they are going to investigate. 17 weeks later, Weyland-Yutani has had plenty of time on LV426.
âNow, LV426 is actually a moon around a ring planet. Itâs actually not a planet itself. But itâs a big one. Itâs a shake-n-bake colony, so thereâs a bit of an atmosphere. The atmosphere processor blew [Note from Stephen: during Aliens]. That is about 3 kilometers away is where Hadleyâs Hope is, and itâs taken a lot of damage because that was about a 40 megaton blast. About 1000 kilometers away from that is where the derelict was. Thatâs the big ship that had all the eggs in Alien
In this deleted scene from Aliens, a family of colonists from Hadleyâs Hope inspects the Derelict crash site and makes first, terrible contact with the aliens. Weâll be heading out there in the new game.
âWe know where Alien begins, thereâs a Derelict on this alien planet and we also know from Aliens that, when they finally found Ripley and Burke sent a report, that got the colonists out to see what is this. [They were told:] âGo to this grid point, see whatâs there.â And thatâs when they stumbled into the eggs and thatâs when Hadleyâs Hope was taken over.â
I thought I knew the movies well, but much of what Pitchford told me here went over my head the first time. Hadleyâs Hope? That was were Newt lived, right? (Right.) The Derelict? We never really saw much of that, just glimpses, right? (Right.) But the more I thought about it all, the more I looked over what Pitchford told me, the more neatly it all clicked together.
Trailer for Gearsboxâs Aliens: Colonial Marines which is slated for a late 2012 release on the Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii U
âOne of the things weâre really proud about is that there were some things that fans like us always believed were inconsistencies between Alien3 and Aliens,â Pitchford said, âBut as we dig into it, as we work with filmmakers and kind of understand it all and think about it from a logic problem point of view, there is actually a truth there that makes more sense. When we are able to use it to stitch it together, Alien3 is actually a better movie.â
This is a sequel that matters. Thatâs clear. Hopefully, it is one worthy of the films it ties together.
(Aliens movie screencaps are via the AvP Wikia.)
