Alien: forty years of fear between cinema and video game

Although he arrived quietly and did not show much, Aliens: Fireteam, new cooperative fps set in the narrative universe of Alien (here the news) and expected for next summer, has been a pleasant weekly surprise.

Set up as a team action game, with small teams of three players who must survive hordes of Xenomorphs (the alienones of the film series), Fireteam seems to want to present itself as an interesting new incarnation of a film brand whose history is closely linked to that of the video game due to the various transpositions followed over the years, but not only.

Today, to pay homage to the announcement of the game, let's go over a history of almost forty years, which mixes cinema and video game without mercy, and then groped to cast a glance at what awaits us.

Alien: a transmedia profile

Few are the science fiction / horror brands that have had such a profound impact on pop culture as that of Alien, a series that, while in recent decades has shown little ability to reinvent itself and affect itself, he literally dominated the imagery of the 80s and 90s thanks to his four main films (if we exclude the "modern" and discussed Prometheus and Alien: Covenant).

Since his debut with Alien, the first film in the series released in 1979 under the direction of Ridley Scott, the series has invented a new paradigm for science fiction, with a mix with horror capable of building stories focused on few and poorly equipped protagonists who move in dark damaged spaceships surrounded by alien and utterly hostile creatures.

These were not completely unexplored themes for cinema, as films such as The Thing from the Other World or The Village of the Damned had already tried contamination between horror and sci-fi, but never of this type.

It was a real big bang: in the following forty years the saga continued with three other films that not only managed to make the most of the basic formula of the first episode, but also to decline it through different authorial cuts. With Aliens-Final Showdown James Cameron made Scott's universe the scenario for a tense and testosteronic action thriller, while Alien3 by David Fincher (the same one who would later film Se7en) that of a body-horror from the unhealthy atmospheres and closer to those of the first films i David Cronenberg.

In all this, a series of novels, Dark Horse comics, web shorts (such as those released in 2019 to commemorate the first film's forty years) expanded the universe around movies and to give it narrative coherence until it becomes a well-rounded setting.

All while maintaining an identity that is only partially commercial, because Alien films have never failed to gravitate around what we could define as "philosophical science fiction". In addition to being a great thriller / horror, the first Alien was also a film capable of tackling the theme of the relationship between man and machine and that between the individual and social systems, thanks to its telling a story made up of multinationals that colonize space in search of resources, of humanoid (or "synthetic") cyborgs that go crazy and computers with too powerful and ambitious intelligence.

A real symbol series that, born at the dawn of the cradle period of contemporary gaming - the 80s -it has never failed to cross its history with it.

Alien and the video game: a long story

Like any videogame story linked to impactful and successful brands, even that of Alien is long and full of significant episodes, for better or for worse.

The first video game based on Alien is from 1982, and it is a game by Fox Video Games (gaming division of the then 20th Century Fox) which was nothing more than a "sci-fi / horror" declination of ... Pac-Man.

Yes, that's right: in the role of Ripley, the tough protagonist of the series, the player had to survive the pursuit of the Aliens inside a complex maze, exactly like in Pac-Man.

If this operation makes you smile today for its naivety (but we are always talking about the early 80s), already the subsequent text adventure of 1984, also titled Alien, seemed to be beginning to understand that he had narrative material in his hands perfectly suited to deep and story-centered games, and proposed a game formula that seemed halfway between a digital board game and a narrative adventure. As the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, we were called to defend ourselves from the Xenomorph by better managing our aircraft and its internal premises through a navigable map and various management menus. A "strategic" setting that seems curiously to recall that of another contemporary "sci-fi setting" game, Among Us.

The rest of the 80s and early 90s, cinematically characterized by Aliens: Final Showdown (1986) and Alien3 (1992) is dedicated to this type of transposition in action games that aim to recreate the atmosphere of films by playing in the field of sliding action, at least until 1996, when we have what we could define the most mature of the first transpositions of Alien, Alien trilogy, which traces the events of all three films in the series by adopting an FPS setting.

For the first time, the videogame Alien took the path of "modernity" by playing with greater depth on the fact of putting the player in contact with a strongly hostile environment thanks to the first person tool.

The choice worked, so much so that in 1999 the English Rebellion Developments team decided not only to exploit it for a new title unrelated to the films, but above all for a sort of crazy homage to horror science fiction: Alien vs Predator, action / horror game that, inspired by some Dark Horse Comics comic sagas based on the hypothesis of a meeting between Alien and Predator, brought together two of the most important "science fiction monsters" of the 80s under one roof.

Commemorative and cinephile game par excellence, Alien vs Predator was structured in two parallel campaigns that paid homage to the two franchises in an original way, putting ourselves in the shoes of specimens of the two iconic monsters.

An incredible success, which led to a sort of short circuit following which the 20th Century Fox was persuaded to produce an AvP-based spin-off film, with the cast also Raoul Bova (alas).

The mature period: Colonial Marines and Alien: Isolation

As of 2010, the Alien franchise undergoes a revival attempt, once again with mixed results.

If in 2012 it is Ridley Scott himself who tries to bring the saga back to the cinema through a sort of new course with Prometheus, a title that attempts to amalgamate Alien mythology with reptilian-like conspiracy theories (splitting critics and audiences), a year later Aliens: Colonial Marines attempts to transpose the narrative architecture of the second episode of the saga into a tactical fps developed by Gearbox Software, unfortunately intended for half a fiasco due to a non-impactful storyline, AI issues and most of all a general lack of bite.

An excellent idea on paper, but realized in a very poor way and only after a development hell of about ten years.

Best result for Alien: isolation, released in 2014 and much more "armored" both from a narrative and gameplay point of view. Set between Alien and Aliens - Final Showdown, Isolation put us in the shoes of Amanda, daughter of Ellen Ripley as she searches for her mother lost in space after the events of the first film., inside the Sevastopol space station.

The result of the operation has been defined one of the best games dedicated to Alien, with a respectable survival-horror component and one faithful recreation of the atmosphere of the original film, also thanks to a special graphic option that reproduces the effects of 70s film film.

Alien: the impact on the video game

If the videogame history of the Alien franchise is rich, broad and has given players unforgettable adventures, different and perhaps even more interesting is another matter, that is that of the influence of the Alien films on the survival horror video game.

In fact, if we shift our gaze from the story of the saga's history to that of its iconographic impact on pop culture, it's hard not to see traces of the Xenomorphs' hunt for Ripley in so many games.

We could mention recent productions and somehow distant daughters of Alien such as The Last of Us, in which the most dangerous infected move around the map with a predatory approach that derives in some way from the films of the series, as well as most of the survival horror.

If Alien has contributed to the way of telling thriller stories in images, this is in the way he put on screen claustrophobic environments, disgusting creatures, skilful uses of light and shadow aimed at increasing the tension in the viewer, all elements that we find in sagas like resident evil or even in the dear old ones FEAR.

However, going into the concrete, to firmly take in our hands and rework the lore and mood of Alien we find for example Doom (and in particular Doom 3, the most horror of the "classic" series), with its menacing haunted metal abysses, the System Shock series and obviously, Dead Space, which in fact focused everything on the revival of shots, atmospheres, suggestions, of the sci-fi horror saga par excellence.

If we then look at Aliens-Final Showdown and his staging epic clashes between hyper-armored colonial marines and hordes of ruthless enemies, the thought cannot fail to go to Gears of War and its series, which like Cameron's film is built on a fascination for dirty, brutal, but science fiction genuinely heroic.

Finally, a separate discussion on Ripley, tough protagonist of the series who, thanks to an interpretation of Sigourney Weaver who made the history of genre cinema, gave the inspiration for countless video game heroines, like Resident Evil's Jill Valentine.

Hope in Fireteam

If we look at the path we have talked about in perspective, Aliens: Fireteam it appears a very necessary game in its own way.

After almost forty years of playing video games on the Alien franchise, Isolation seems to have given a videogame version of the project that is finally modern, with a perfect intertwining of cinematic origins and mature gameplay that finally did justice to a genuinely survival horror tale like the first Alien.

The icing on the cake would now be to do justice to Aliens too, superfine action film, fun, all writing-of-iron-and-showmanship, which has given so much to its genre and also to the video game (see above, under "Gears of War").

At the moment we know very little about Fireteam, the gameplay seems to suggest a very traditional and certainly not breaking game, conceived almost as a branded cast of other titles such as Left 4 Dead, but maybe that's exactly what it should be: the attempt to pay homage to a classic of the past with an easily recognizable and manageable gameplay structure, able to attract the sympathies of fans and revive the splendor of an entire brand.

Will he succeed?

The technological means are all there.

Fingers crossed.