Aliens its a dream. I cant remember how many times I watched ALIENS in college. Its action packed, its a shooter. You are a colonial marine fighting the xenos. Its classic, it’s the sequel we wished we got (it doesn't exist), but its in interactive form.

We are working on Aliens, its going very well. We had a really good publisher with Sega. We decided with Sega that we were going to pause the product. They had a couple of things going on with their company. Was beneficial for both of us, to say okay we are gonna hold this for a little bit and we were able to work on, specifically Borderlands. That actually helped this product.

 

Now that we are back on it, we are able to kinda get some fresh eyes, that maybe weren’t on the team before, to look at some of the gameplay, and things that we were doing before, some of the story elements and we’re able to kind of, ya know really look at it with a new vision. And what we're going to do with that product. Its not changing a lot, its a little bit of things improving. We have done some things to improve the engine in ways that we couldn’t do before. There’s learning's from Borderlands and some of our other products, we were able to really do something neat with the engine, so I’m excited about that, I think its going to be very specific to the look and feel of what people expect out of it.

Aliens is one of the murkier Sega topics. The company announced in 2006 that it would publish three games based on the famous chest-bursting movie monsters. Sega showed Aliens Vs. Predator at this event, demonstrating how games can play as a human marines or a Predator. Still under wraps is what playing like an Alien will be like. But this game wasn't expected to be the first Aliens game from Sega. That was going to be the Gearbox-developed Aliens: Colonial Marines shooter or the now-cancelled Obsidian-developed Aliens RPG.

 

"The Gearbox project was moving along," Hayes said, recalling when the decision was made to take Colonial Marines out of the lead position. The game wasn't as far along as Aliens Vs. Predator, which originally wasn't backed by Sega. It was being made by Rebellion for publisher Vivendi, until that support ceased following Vivendi's 2008 merger with Activision. "There was an opportunity for us to take that." Its development progress put Gearbox's game into the second slot, to be released "a good period after" AvP, according to Hayes. The RPG won't be third because "it just wasn't coming along to the plan that we thought."

 

Might the newly announced, Ridley Scott Alien prequel project be a source of Aliens inspiration for Sega? "We're quite excited about that and buzzing from the news of that," Hayes said. But of the third game, Hayes would only say, "We'd like to think we'll be doing a third project but at the moment we haven't confirmed what the third project will be."

GS: “And that was about Alien?”

RP: “Yeah, yeah. And that's crazy, right? I was sitting with Ridley Scott, and he pulls out this dusty old book that looks like it hasn't been moved for 15 years. He blows the dust of it, and he opens it, and inside are his personally hand-drawn sketches that were the original storyboards for Alien.”

 

GS: “Wow. That came out in 1979…”

RP: “Yeah! Then he goes through these things telling you what he was thinking. He tells you of the backstory behind some of these things that inspired us when we were younger. I kept thinking, "Holy crap, I can't believe I'm sitting here." It's one of those cool life moments. We were there because we wanted to do something awesome with this property he created that nobody was really doing anything with.”