Randy Pitchford: “I'll tell you this: We love Aliens. You guys know that. You guys did a cover story, you know how much we care about it. We're working our butts off on it. I think when it comes, people won't be disappointed, but right now it's really not up to us to talk about it.”

“I think Sega is really interested in everybody focusing on the AvP game they've got upcoming, so they're focusing all of their communication around that. And frankly, as an Aliens fan, I'm looking forward to that, too. We'll see when that comes,”.

 

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."