How Creative Assembly Built Its Perfectly Evolved AI Xenomorph

In 2014, game developer Creative Assembly made gamers scream, cower, and hide behind the sofa with survival horror Alien: Isolation. Set 15 years after Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, Alien, Isolation follows Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, on a quest to discover what happened to her mother while reckoning with the same perfectly evolved organism in the process. The game’s complex enmeshing of interactive and unscripted AI, sound, and programming systems, combined with its renown for breathing new life into the survival horror genre through its first-person perspective sees Alien: Isolation regularly cited as the greatest Alien game of all time. So how did a game developer known for ports and real-time strategy games create one of the most notable modern survival horrors? It all began with one man and a movie novelization.

Game director Alistair Hope originally made games with secondary school friends, a few of which nearly came close to being published. He began at Creative Assembly in 1996, registering as the eighth employed person at the company and beginning as a trainee artist on an Australian NFL game, which he says taught him the importance of understanding the audience you are making your game for. His first introduction to Alien was actually through Alan Dean Foster’s novelization before seeing the movie, which he read cover-to-cover over and over again. Once he finally saw the film, the poster for the iconic 1979 horror was plastered above his bed, with the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack regularly playing on repeat throughout his house. To Hope, he’s always understood the idea of Alien as ‘Ridley Scott’s haunted house in space’ and had wondered for a long time why people hadn’t tapped into that idea more. Around 2008, the Creative Assembly console team had just delivered Viking: Battle for Asgard and were spit-balling ideas for its next project. “I knew that Sega had the license to make Alien games, and this team needed something to do — so why don’t we make an Alien game?”