“I’d always been a huge fan of the first film,” says Alistair Hope, Alien: Isolation’s director, of the original 1979 movie . “But everyone was always focused on the Aliens experience, given its natural connection between aliens and shooting. We felt that if you could create a game that took you back to that feeling of being on the Nostromo, hunted by that first alien – that would be something else.”
By the early 2000s, Sussex-based developer Creative Assembly had already established itself with a solid range of sports titles, but the real breakthrough came with Shogun: Total War. After that hit, and the Total War series’ subsequent success, the developer’s landscape changed, ultimately tempting Sega to acquire it in 2005. Just over a year later, Sega also acquired a licence to make games based on 20th Century Fox’s famous Alien series, planning ‘multiple titles’. Creative Assembly, coincidentally stuffed with Alien fans, put its hand up.
Hope wrote out a short proposal for Sega. “It wasn’t very much – outlining the kind of cat-and-mouse gameplay of being hunted by this unpredictable predator,” he tells me. “I was keen for it to be closely associated with Alien, taking advantage of the wonderful production design on that film, a sort-of low-fi sci-fi Seventies view of the future.”
But the move away from the prevailing emphasis on action – a perhaps inevitable focus since James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens – was the thing that swung it. “We thought, let’s re-establish this thing as being the ultimate killer, a creature confident and in control,” continues Hope. “So, it went to Sega, through to 20th Century Fox, and suddenly someone is saying, ‘OK – go ahead, make it happen’.”