Penitent’s Josh Sawyer has an interesting story to tell about Alien video games past.
A year on after the release of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, Josh has revealed that he worked on an Alien game himself! He was already at Obsidian at this point, so he likely was not the main game director. But he does explain all that, so I’ll let him share the story himself.
Josh shared this thread on Twitter:
“I got to work on an Aliens RPG for SEGA from 2006-2009. Obsidian didn’t have directors at that time, just leads who were all considered peers. It resulted in a lot of dysfunction when the leads didn’t agree on how to do something.
Progress on the game was very slow, especially when it came to creating workable game levels. We had another game in development with SEGA at the time, Alpha Protocol, and SEGA (understandably, IMO) shelved Aliens in favor of AP.
There were a lot of cool ideas in the works, but you don’t ship ideas! The biggest lesson I learned from the experience is that if you don’t have playable levels, you don’t have much of a game (there are some exceptions, of course).
I was happy to play Aliens: Fireteam Elite because the overall setup was similar: small team, 3rd person, with an emphasis on deployables and support actions. The similarities ended there, but it was nice to see the idea could actually be fun in practice. RIP, squad.”
In the last tweet, he also shares in development models of the characters that would have appeared in this cancelled Alien game. You can see those characters below.
Now, let’s put this in context. The years 2006 to 2009 were the end years of the 6th generation of consoles. That would have been the age of the PlayStation 2, the original Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, and on a technicality, the Sega Dreamcast.
This was the transition period right before video games evolved with HD graphics.
The games in this generation that would have defined what this Alien game would have been like were the likes of Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metroid Prime, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Also of interest is that Fallout 3 released in 2008. While it would be presumptive to assume one title could get another cancelled, if there was one generation defining game that could have made that happen, Fallout 3 just might have been it.
You may not personally know it, but the Alien franchise is genuinely one of the more venerable licenses in video games. That includes classic arcade games and many of the first notable first person shooters. In fact, Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation pioneered the twin analogue stick control and movement system we take for granted in first person games today, shooters and adventure games alike.
This is one game that could have been part of that history, but as Josh himself notes, it wasn’t all entirely in vain. He opines that part of what his team in Obsidian was going for then was achieved now in Aliens: Fireteam Elite. That’s a ringing endorsement if there ever was one.
