THE MAKING OF...ALIEN: ISOLATION

How a strategy-led studio built a survival horror masterpiece in Ridley Scott's image

- JEREMY PEEL

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.

“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.”