The word ‘xenomorph’ was banned during the development of Alien: Isolation. As far as the team at Creative Assembly was concerned, only the 1979 Alien movie existed – and nobody said ‘xenomorph’ until James Cameron’s sequel.
“In Alien, they talk about ‘the creature’, or ‘that thing’,” creative lead Al Hope says. “To label it is to have some kind of power over it. And those people do not have any power over this thing. It’s not the xenomorph, it’s death.”
The ban on naming was just one of the ways in which Hope and his colleagues set about restoring fear and respect for the alien – a reverence that had been diminished over decades of franchise spinoffs and videogame adaptations. “I was really adamant that the alien would completely dominate the frame, control everything and look down on the player,” Hope says. “And not be these kind of angry dogs that scuffle around.”
No one asked Creative Assembly to make Alien: Isolation. The studio had just finished making Viking: Battle For Asgard, a rarely remembered action adventure game about a war between the Norse gods. The team needed another project, and Hope knew that Sega, the company’s owner, held the licence to make games based on Alien.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/1131753731.jpg]
“It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pitch something,” he recalls. “Games always seem to focus on the James Cameron Aliens experience, and that’s quite a natural match for a videogame. But if you could take someone back to the Nostromo and let them experience what it’d be like to try to survive against Ridley Scott’s original alien, that’d be like nothing else. No one had ever done anything like that.”
Hope’s boss at the time gave him a week and a handful of developers to come up with something. They built a mood piece of sorts, in which you could briefly explore a series of Nostromo-style corridors, before finally confronting the alien. The monster unravelled from the ceiling before the player’s eyes. “Just one would demand your respect,” Hope says.
This proof of concept was kept largely secret while 20th Century Fox mulled over the proposal. Nevertheless, anticipation, driven by word of mouth, began to spread within Creative Assembly. “It was very, very exciting,” says Simon Ridge, who animated the face-huggers in that first demo. “There was a buzz around it.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/3757305530.jpg]
Once the Isolation team got the green light, they needed that enthusiasm to carry them through what was a “really challenging endeavour,” as Hope puts it. “There were very few guiding lights.” Alien: Isolation wasn’t going to be a shooter, despite taking on many FPS trappings. Nor was it going to be a traditional survival horror game, stocked with a series of readily defeatable enemies. There were no other games Hope could point to as reference points, to help align the team behind a clear vision. Instead, he gave them a roleplaying scenario: if we released a tiger into the office right now, what would you do? “There are no guns in the studio, so I can’t shoot it,” Hope says. “I’ll probably hide behind my desk and be quiet and try and make sure it can’t see me. To get to the fire exit at the other end of the building, I’ll carefully peek and make my way from desk to desk. Maybe I’ll pick up something and throw it, distract the tiger, and then I’ll make a break for it.”
While the threat of a tiger might be an underexplored motivational tool in game development, it remained as a thought experiment – one that helped define Alien: Isolation’s central experience in the minds of its creators. Even so, there was a lot of soul-searching along the way.
“Are we actually doing the right thing?” Hope recalls asking. “It’d be so much easier to just give the player a gun and let them shoot it dead, then come across another one and shoot it dead. I was just adamant: no, we’ve gotta stay true.” Where most action games were power fantasies, Isolation was in many ways the opposite. It was about being underpowered, underprepared, and making tough choices in a nightmare situation – whether that’s which desk to hide behind or what gadget to cobble together with your limited resources.
“I loved the idea that we were just creating these spaces at a high level,” Hope says. “We drop the alien and these other elements in and tell the player, ‘OK, get to the other end – you deal with it’. That felt like the right thing to do, rather than choreograph specific jump scares. For me, the magic of the experience was that everyone enters that space in the same location and exits in the same location, but has their own journey and their own story to tell in between.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/7351177713.jpg]
This is Isolation’s enduring power, and the reason it still sometimes tops fan lists of the best horror games ever made. Creative Assembly recognised that a scripted sequence, even a frightening one, is comforting to the player – a signal that an unseen designer is sculpting their path and taking care of them, that an end they will see is part of the plan. In contrast, Isolation offered no such comforts, making the player entirely responsible for their own safety and eventual escape from the ship.
“After a certain point, we’re not really teaching any more,” Hope says. “You’re just using your natural instincts to adapt. That felt really powerful and in keeping with the whole idea of what we were trying to do.”
The lack of scripting had enormous knock-on effects for the development team, which set about creating entities on the doomed Sevastopol space station who were driven by their own senses – maintenance synths and human survivors who relied on their sight and hearing to locate and respond to the player, typically violently. Alien: Isolation became a deeply systemic stealth game, with much of its pacing defined procedurally on the fly.
“We used to talk a lot about managing tension and release,” Hope says. “If the player has a really close encounter [with the alien], a near-death experience, then they have a chance to breathe before it starts again.” This breathing room, governed by multiple systems running beneath the hood, prevents the game from becoming unrelenting. That said, the silence can be just as terrifying as going mano-a-mandible with the creature.
“We really are standing on the shoulders of the giant,” Hope says. He evokes the first deadly encounter in Ridley Scott’s movie, in which technician Brett searches for the Nostromo’s missing cat amid the jangling chains and dripping water of the ship’s hangar. “There’s no alien on screen, but you’re white-knuckled, projecting your worst fears about what’s going to happen,” he says. “I thought, that’s probably going to happen for us – that people feel as scared or even more scared when the alien isn’t on screen. It’s this information war: what do I know versus what does it know?”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/FDpZP3gBZQ1730455282791.jpg]
To some extent, all stealth games are battles for information – a round of Battleship in which the fall of footsteps or a glimpsed torch gives away the location of a patrolling guard. With Isolation, Hope and his team went further, demanding that players make tradeoffs to receive the information they need. “One of the things I was really keen on was that everything has a cost,” he says. “A really good example of that is the motion tracker. It pierces through walls and can show you things you can’t see, but when you hold it up, we blur the background. You gain information, but we take some away, so you have to switch between the two. If you’re gonna survive, you really need to think about it.”
Alien: Isolation’s pièce de résistance was the AI that made its constantly hunting alien effectively autonomous. It navigated vents and corridors according to its own whims, reacting to visual and audio stimuli with the horrifyingly acute sensory power of a perfect organism. Although it was often out of sight, the monster never cheated when it came to finding the player, according to the people who created it.
“It might be difficult, maybe at times a little bit brutal, but it had to be fair,” Hope says. “Because I believe it’s quite an instinctual game. That means you have to trust the rules of the world around you. A loud noise will draw the alien. If you’re quiet, you’re definitely increasing your odds of survival.” Into that reliable ruleset, the movements of the alien introduced an unpredictability that meant no level was ever the same after a reload. “You always had to be on your guard.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/N3Qiez8Hl1730455302924.jpg]
These essential concepts of fairness and trust go hand in hand with believability – the one word which, unlike ‘xenomorph’, Hope repeated constantly to the team during the game’s development. “The player has to believe in what’s happening on the screen, because if they don’t it just falls apart,” he says. “We were really trying to view everything through that lens to ensure that you had this experience that could actually get the heart racing, and the palms sweaty. Because you’re having this emotional reaction to a flatscreen TV.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/3337153031.jpg]
Once the alien was in view, it was Ridge who helped ensure it was convincing as a ...
“In Alien, they talk about ‘the creature’, or ‘that thing’,” creative lead Al Hope says. “To label it is to have some kind of power over it. And those people do not have any power over this thing. It’s not the xenomorph, it’s death.”
The ban on naming was just one of the ways in which Hope and his colleagues set about restoring fear and respect for the alien – a reverence that had been diminished over decades of franchise spinoffs and videogame adaptations. “I was really adamant that the alien would completely dominate the frame, control everything and look down on the player,” Hope says. “And not be these kind of angry dogs that scuffle around.”
No one asked Creative Assembly to make Alien: Isolation. The studio had just finished making Viking: Battle For Asgard, a rarely remembered action adventure game about a war between the Norse gods. The team needed another project, and Hope knew that Sega, the company’s owner, held the licence to make games based on Alien.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/1131753731.jpg]
“It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pitch something,” he recalls. “Games always seem to focus on the James Cameron Aliens experience, and that’s quite a natural match for a videogame. But if you could take someone back to the Nostromo and let them experience what it’d be like to try to survive against Ridley Scott’s original alien, that’d be like nothing else. No one had ever done anything like that.”
Hope’s boss at the time gave him a week and a handful of developers to come up with something. They built a mood piece of sorts, in which you could briefly explore a series of Nostromo-style corridors, before finally confronting the alien. The monster unravelled from the ceiling before the player’s eyes. “Just one would demand your respect,” Hope says.
This proof of concept was kept largely secret while 20th Century Fox mulled over the proposal. Nevertheless, anticipation, driven by word of mouth, began to spread within Creative Assembly. “It was very, very exciting,” says Simon Ridge, who animated the face-huggers in that first demo. “There was a buzz around it.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/3757305530.jpg]
Once the Isolation team got the green light, they needed that enthusiasm to carry them through what was a “really challenging endeavour,” as Hope puts it. “There were very few guiding lights.” Alien: Isolation wasn’t going to be a shooter, despite taking on many FPS trappings. Nor was it going to be a traditional survival horror game, stocked with a series of readily defeatable enemies. There were no other games Hope could point to as reference points, to help align the team behind a clear vision. Instead, he gave them a roleplaying scenario: if we released a tiger into the office right now, what would you do? “There are no guns in the studio, so I can’t shoot it,” Hope says. “I’ll probably hide behind my desk and be quiet and try and make sure it can’t see me. To get to the fire exit at the other end of the building, I’ll carefully peek and make my way from desk to desk. Maybe I’ll pick up something and throw it, distract the tiger, and then I’ll make a break for it.”
While the threat of a tiger might be an underexplored motivational tool in game development, it remained as a thought experiment – one that helped define Alien: Isolation’s central experience in the minds of its creators. Even so, there was a lot of soul-searching along the way.
“Are we actually doing the right thing?” Hope recalls asking. “It’d be so much easier to just give the player a gun and let them shoot it dead, then come across another one and shoot it dead. I was just adamant: no, we’ve gotta stay true.” Where most action games were power fantasies, Isolation was in many ways the opposite. It was about being underpowered, underprepared, and making tough choices in a nightmare situation – whether that’s which desk to hide behind or what gadget to cobble together with your limited resources.
“I loved the idea that we were just creating these spaces at a high level,” Hope says. “We drop the alien and these other elements in and tell the player, ‘OK, get to the other end – you deal with it’. That felt like the right thing to do, rather than choreograph specific jump scares. For me, the magic of the experience was that everyone enters that space in the same location and exits in the same location, but has their own journey and their own story to tell in between.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/7351177713.jpg]
This is Isolation’s enduring power, and the reason it still sometimes tops fan lists of the best horror games ever made. Creative Assembly recognised that a scripted sequence, even a frightening one, is comforting to the player – a signal that an unseen designer is sculpting their path and taking care of them, that an end they will see is part of the plan. In contrast, Isolation offered no such comforts, making the player entirely responsible for their own safety and eventual escape from the ship.
“After a certain point, we’re not really teaching any more,” Hope says. “You’re just using your natural instincts to adapt. That felt really powerful and in keeping with the whole idea of what we were trying to do.”
The lack of scripting had enormous knock-on effects for the development team, which set about creating entities on the doomed Sevastopol space station who were driven by their own senses – maintenance synths and human survivors who relied on their sight and hearing to locate and respond to the player, typically violently. Alien: Isolation became a deeply systemic stealth game, with much of its pacing defined procedurally on the fly.
“We used to talk a lot about managing tension and release,” Hope says. “If the player has a really close encounter [with the alien], a near-death experience, then they have a chance to breathe before it starts again.” This breathing room, governed by multiple systems running beneath the hood, prevents the game from becoming unrelenting. That said, the silence can be just as terrifying as going mano-a-mandible with the creature.
“We really are standing on the shoulders of the giant,” Hope says. He evokes the first deadly encounter in Ridley Scott’s movie, in which technician Brett searches for the Nostromo’s missing cat amid the jangling chains and dripping water of the ship’s hangar. “There’s no alien on screen, but you’re white-knuckled, projecting your worst fears about what’s going to happen,” he says. “I thought, that’s probably going to happen for us – that people feel as scared or even more scared when the alien isn’t on screen. It’s this information war: what do I know versus what does it know?”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/FDpZP3gBZQ1730455282791.jpg]
To some extent, all stealth games are battles for information – a round of Battleship in which the fall of footsteps or a glimpsed torch gives away the location of a patrolling guard. With Isolation, Hope and his team went further, demanding that players make tradeoffs to receive the information they need. “One of the things I was really keen on was that everything has a cost,” he says. “A really good example of that is the motion tracker. It pierces through walls and can show you things you can’t see, but when you hold it up, we blur the background. You gain information, but we take some away, so you have to switch between the two. If you’re gonna survive, you really need to think about it.”
Alien: Isolation’s pièce de résistance was the AI that made its constantly hunting alien effectively autonomous. It navigated vents and corridors according to its own whims, reacting to visual and audio stimuli with the horrifyingly acute sensory power of a perfect organism. Although it was often out of sight, the monster never cheated when it came to finding the player, according to the people who created it.
“It might be difficult, maybe at times a little bit brutal, but it had to be fair,” Hope says. “Because I believe it’s quite an instinctual game. That means you have to trust the rules of the world around you. A loud noise will draw the alien. If you’re quiet, you’re definitely increasing your odds of survival.” Into that reliable ruleset, the movements of the alien introduced an unpredictability that meant no level was ever the same after a reload. “You always had to be on your guard.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/N3Qiez8Hl1730455302924.jpg]
These essential concepts of fairness and trust go hand in hand with believability – the one word which, unlike ‘xenomorph’, Hope repeated constantly to the team during the game’s development. “The player has to believe in what’s happening on the screen, because if they don’t it just falls apart,” he says. “We were really trying to view everything through that lens to ensure that you had this experience that could actually get the heart racing, and the palms sweaty. Because you’re having this emotional reaction to a flatscreen TV.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/xlYb2dj2v1730455081150/3337153031.jpg]
Once the alien was in view, it was Ridge who helped ensure it was convincing as a ...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, Christmas 2024