Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 389: Aliens

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and Jonathan Dunn pay a visit to a little up-and-coming colony on LV-426 only to find themselves suddenly under attack by the history and legacy (and video game adaptations!) of the 1986 blockbuster Aliens.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, stop your grin and drop your linen. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronaut's episode. Whatever the hell number this is. I am Jeremy Parrish in space. No one can hear you number podcasts. And yes, that's right. We are here to celebrate the 35th anniversary of one of the most influential movies upon. video games of all time. That is James Cameron's aliens. We've talked about alien in the past, but now there are two of them.

Actually, I think there are more than two of them. We'll have to see. We'll discuss the story of this film. But we are going to talk about the movie, about the circumstances of its creation, and most of all, the prodigious impact that it has had upon the video game medium. You know, I tried to do a Star Wars episode many years ago now where I was like, wow, Star Wars is so influential on video games. And then everyone came into the podcast and was like, oh, we can't actually think of anything

that was inspired by Star Wars. So I felt really stupid about that. That is not going to happen this time. And to guarantee this, we have made notes. Anyway, who are we? Let's see. There's a Retronauts regular here in my ear. So who would that be buzzing in from Planet Elvis?

426 Good morning This is Diamond Fight Possibly an Arctorian I'm not sure I just got that reverence Yes Also over in the UK

Sneering at the Americans Who Dare to make a sequel to Alien Hello And well Good evening, good night Or something like that From over here I'm Jonathan Dunn

And I believe for you it's good morning, but not in like the good good morning kind of way, more like the good I should be asleep kind of morning sort of way. Yeah, it's the good morning, but it's the sun hasn't quite appeared yet. Yes. We'll try to power through this, you know, before last call. So, you know, they won't kick you out and turn the chairs upside down on the tabletops. But yes, aliens.

I would like to start this episode, as is often customary, by asking, each of you, what your first exposure and experience to aliens was. I'm curious to hear about it. This is not one that I saw back when it was brand new. And possibly neither of you did either because you were very young children. And this was R-rated. It was scary, although there was a nine-year-old in it. So, you know, who knows?

Yeah, Diamond. How about you? Yes. As you mentioned, yeah, I was only about nine or ten when this movie first came out. And I certainly had not seen Alien either. However, as a kid in the 80s, you know, we were awash in Alien and Aliens parodies. So I'm certain that I read the Mad Magazine coverage of Alien and Aliens. And, of course, the influences on games and other media started right away.

But I probably watched this movie once I got like my early teens. And so like the early 90s. and then like a lot of a lot more sequels are coming out also I would say around the same time right T2 T2 is going to be 30 very soon so I think as part of T2 I remember watching the original Terminator and then I think I was like oh what about these alien movies

so I think I watched Alien and aliens so I could go ahead and watch Alien 3 yeah so I didn't I didn't see any of these early films when they were new I watched them much later on video but as soon as I watch it them, I was really fully on board, even though, I guess, all the surprise had been gone, because, you know, again, these movies were huge hits. These movies were both made omages and parodied to death instantly. But when you sit down and watch them, even, I would say, even today, if you sit down and watch them right now, I believe they hold up very, very well. Yes. I, you know, as to what you say about the film holding no surprises, I would like to go out on a limb and say that doesn't matter. Spoilers are much less important than the process of getting to those points in the spoilers. Like you can describe the plot outline of this movie. You can read the plot outline on Wikipedia or whatever. And it sounds just like, okay, yeah.

But it's not until you actually see it, and you see not only the great visual effects and the impressive visual world building, but the incredible interplay between the actors, especially Sigourney Weaver and Carrie, oh, crap, I forgot it at last name, Carrie Hen. Like, it's just, it's just tremendous. Like, it really, that's what makes the movie. It's not about, like, yeah, some stuff gets blown up. Who cares? It's about like, why are these people doing this? How are they motivated? Why are they motivated?

What are they doing? Like, this is what makes this movie great because the human characters in this film really are human. They have so much humanity and so much depth to them. It's really amazing what, you have to credit this to James Cameron because he wrote and directed this movie. You have to really credit him for what he brought to this and then what the actors were able to, you know, reveal within the script and just how everything came together.

Really an incredible movie. What about you, Jonathan? Well, I mean, aliens came out in a very good year. In fact, it was the year I was born. So you're absolutely right that I did not see it. A banner year. You're absolutely right in the fact that I didn't see it when it was new. And I would hope your parents didn't see it.

And your mother was like, oh, my God, what is this thing I'm carrying? inside of me. Yeah, I mean, goodness me, for her sake, I hope that she didn't see that because she would have been, you know, about six months pregnant with me at the point when it came out. Gosh, that would have been a heck of an experience. Yeah, anyway, so it was quite a few years to I ended up seeing it. I remember

always being a little bit transfixed by the box for the alien films in the local video store. And I remember sort of, I've always very cautious. maybe drift over to the horror section on a little visit when we went in there to, I mean, it probably inevitably went labyrinth for the 400th time. No shame in that. Also, a 1986 film, also highly commendable.

Also, quite terrifying in its own right. That's true. And equally awash with extraordinary visual design. But the time I finally kind of got around to watching it was actually more from an academic point of view, because it was when I was doing film studies in school. And it was at that point that sort of the whole world of film opened up to me really and really fed into my life and what I was doing and the, you know, the choices I was making in terms of my career. And I remember talking to my film studies teacher and saying, you know, I really want to kind of,

I really want to sort of step up the way I'm thinking about. film because I wanted to go to film school and he said you should really watch the alien movies because there was an opportunity coming up to write a I believe what you would call a paper in an exam on on basically a free topic and you had a choice of different things you could do and he said you should really try and attempt this this question that's on representation of women in horror and basically there was no need for me to watch any other film to get an idea of exactly what that meant than the alien films. And I bought the alien quadrilogy, which we know is not a word.

They did their best, though. They did. They really did. And as someone who gets blamed for creating Metroidvania, although I didn't, I'm sympathetic to their actions here. Everybody loves a portmanteau. You know, it's a marketing win, easy. and yeah and so I got the

I got the box set I started watching my way through Alien I was absolutely blown away I started watching my way through aliens I was absolutely blown away and it

those films those two films I mean particularly really fed into what I wanted to talk about in this essay and yeah I just absolutely fell in love

with the universe and with all of the thinking behind all of the design what everything represented the writing, the characters, everything. I just, I poured over it. I couldn't get enough of the bonus features. And, yeah, I've been a huge fan of the series ever since.

Wow. You know, I don't actually know when I first saw this movie from start to finish. I think it must have been some time in the mid to late 90s. It was just one of those things that was kind of ubiquitous in culture, as Diamond said. Like, as soon as this movie came out, everyone was like, that's the thing. That's the thing I'm ripping off. That's the thing I'm making an homage to.

And so I saw, you know, it would be on cable or whatever, and I would see glimpses of it, you know, flashes of it. So I had some familiarity with it. I think I was at like, you know, someone's house and they'd be watching it. And I'd kind of see like five minutes at a time. But the first movie, Alien movie, I actually saw all the way in its entirety was Alien 3. And I knew enough about the series to get it. And actually, now that I think about it, maybe my first real exposure to the alien franchise was the aliens comic from Dark Horse, which came out in the years running up to the actual Alien 3 and told a much better story about the alien world than Alien 3 did.

So, yeah, I came into this movie really belatedly and had a lot of kind of skewed perspective about it. but I've been really impressed by just how well it came together. I'm not a huge James Cameron fan, but Terminator and aliens are both excellent films, just top-notch. I like Alien better than aliens, but only somewhat. I mean, they're very different films, and both are equally impressive, innovative, and influential in their own way. Yes, well, obviously aliens could not exist without alien to be there,

But, yeah, I would say revisiting them, I personally feel like aliens is my favorite. But yeah, it doesn't, yeah, the movie doesn't work without alien to set the table, but I prefer aliens. I mean, I think I'm with you, Jeremy, because I mean, I think the original alien is an absolute masterclass in atmosphere. There's very, very few films that kind of really establish and sustain an atmosphere of that sort of intensity all the way through. I remember like something that occurred to me when watching, certainly both of them I mean they're for obviously for both films being sci-fi films they're two very very different genres

one is horror and one is action you know I don't find I still find the original alien scary I've never found aliens scary it's incredibly fun but it's not it's not a horror film and I think there's something that sort of always bent my mind a little bit

it's trying to think of sci-fi as... Like, what is sci-fi as a genre? Like, for two films that really kind of define the genre, neither of them are really pure sci-fi. They're just... They're window dressing for two other genres.

Like I said, horror and action. And, yeah, it's interesting to see, like, what those specific sort of codes and conventions of sci-fi do for those genres. I mean, it's mad to think that they're... You know, they're such different films. And, you know, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection and, et cetera, of the series, you know, sort of go on to do riffing on the same things. But to have two films, a sequel and an original, be so, so different in terms of their tone is, yeah, I mean, it's rare.

It's very, very rare to get something like that in a movie franchise. Yeah, this movie should not work, honestly, considering what it was, what it was building on and considering James Cameron's kind of CV to date when he created this movie. So this was his third film as a director, if you're being generous. His first film was Piranha II, which was a very troubled production. And he stepped in when basically the producer of the film drove out the original director. And it was pretty disastrous. And basically everyone in the industry said, don't put that on your resume. So his first real creation was The Terminator, which,

He shopped around, tried to get created for a long time. There's this kind of, you know, you can read about it. And I'm sure there are some histories. I was reading J.W. Rinsler's The Making of Aliens, a huge coffee table book with lots of photography, but also tons of interviews and just like an enormous volume of text about the creation of the film, some of which is very particular and some of which is very interesting. But basically this was a process where he was trying to get this film, The Terminator, made, and had trouble lining up the production of it. And so these other opportunities came up. One of them was writing the script for First Blood Part 2. And the second opportunity was writing and directing aliens, although the studio wasn't crazy about giving him aliens.

It started out as a film with a $30 million production. And when he said, yeah, I'm going to write and direct, they said, well, we'll give you 12 million. You'd have to make this movie for $12 million. We were kidding about $30. But he pulled it off, despite some overwhelming odds. He wrote it. His girlfriend, actually his wife, they had just gotten married. Gail Ann Hurd produced it.

They actually had a working relationship for a long time and just, you know, spent so much time together. By all accounts, he's a very difficult man to work. with, but by all account, she's a very difficult woman to work with. And so that friction just lined up, they were difficult in just the right way and became this kind of powerhouse Hollywood team. And she would be the one who was kind of not calling the shots on set, but making things happen kind of, you know, on the business level and keeping things running and pushing back against, you know, resistance and smoothing things over the studio. So it's, you know, there's a a really interesting kind of backstory behind this. But that is how a guy who had filmed a movie

and a half was given control of a sequel to someone else's movie. And it was a long process, too. I mean, this is, this film came out in 1986, which is seven full years after the first film. So it was a long process. There was, there were stops. There were starts. And yeah, a lot of it, I think, started, things really started rolling after. after his movies actually came out and made a name for themselves. You know, The Terminator was 84, Rambo First Blood Part 2 was 85. Those were both hits. And so that got a lot of, I think, attention on him.

And I think that probably eased the wheels of the money factory. It's like, oh, okay, these movies are actually well received. Let's let's give this guy from Canada a chance. And, you know, maybe he won't screw this up. It's really interesting that you're talking about the size of the budget for the film. because, I mean, most, I mean, the rule is generally when a, you know, when a studio kind of commissions a sequel, they want it to be, you know, bigger, better in every single way possible. And, I mean, one of the things that makes aliens so good, I mean, one of the things that makes a lot of horror films good is the small budgets that they work with, because it means you have to, you have to work with less, you have to be more creative, you have to show a lot less of, you know, of the villains. and of the monsters because you can't afford to show much more.

And, I mean, Alien was made for about, I think it was about 10 or 11 million, something like that. And, you know, I mean, they make so much out of that. They make so much out of it. But for a studio to turn and go, right, we're going to give you, okay, we're going to give you more, but we're only going to give you just a bit more to do something of the scale.

And just the, I mean, everything about aliens is a million times bigger and more explosive. and more bombastic than anything that came before. It seems that way, but when you look, there are only a few more speaking parts in this movie than there were an alien. You had like this very small cast, an alien, very tight-knit. They're all picked off one by one.

And here you have basically the space marine contingent. You know, you have the people that they talk to briefly on the space station at the very beginning. You know, I think the, the spacemen who find Ripley's pod, out in space have a few lines of dialogue, but that's basically it. Otherwise, it's, you know, the marine crew, Newt, Burke, and there's like one colonist who talks, unless you look at the extended cut. So it's bigger in the sense of it doesn't take place all on the same ship, although it does

take place almost entirely on the same colony, and only in a few locations within the colony. It's just you have a lot more aliens and a lot more shooting. And that's really what makes it seem bigger. You know, you have a few exterior effects shots of like the drop ships and stuff. But even, you know, even in the first movie, you had the kind of some exterior shots when they were, you know, first finding the space jockey. Yeah. So it's a, I think the great trick this movie pulls off is seeming bigger than the first film. But it's really not. it's just much, much louder. Like, you know, it's much more tightly scripted.

I mean, Alien famously wasn't really scripted that heavily. It was very naturalistic in terms of dialogue. Whereas here, this is, you know, James Cameron is known for running a very tight ship. And he allowed a little bit of ad libbing some of the, you know, like Hudson and, you know, a few of the Marines kind of just said stuff, said stuff off the cuff. but for the most part it was just very like boom boom boom hit your marks

like this scene leads into this scene leads into this scene and there is no time to rest the aliens are everywhere you are being assaulted you are right there with the Marines it's hell you know how are you going to survive

there's no chance to stop and catch your breath whereas alien is much more about the silences about you know Ripley running through the corridors of the ship that's about to explode

constantly checking behind her. And you never see the alien through most of that. When you do see the alien, it's like checking the cat during the escape sequence. It's nowhere near Ripley. So alien is very much about

what's not there, and aliens is very much about just being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of everything there. Yeah, I'd say it's absolutely spot on. It's, again, it's clever use of what they have. You know, I mean, as a filmmaker myself, I often say

all you need is like all you need is one really really good expensive looking shot to convince the audience of what they're watching is of a much higher value and you know back in back in the day that would be like right can we get a helicopter

if we can just get one helicopter shot to open the film all of a sudden everyone's going to go oh wow okay right and it doesn't matter that the rest of it was shot on a shoe string or it all takes place in one house because you've got those things and you know I mean that's something

that's very, very smartly done. Because, I mean, 16, 18 million budget, that's still not a huge amount for a film that, like you said, appears to be the size that it is. But, yeah, it's very, very sort of clever techniques to make it appear so big. And a lot of that is just simply the volume. Yeah, I would love to see them make some of the upcoming alien movies

for the equivalent of $12 million. Like, really force the cast and crews to really improvise. to really improvise and really work around, you know, the limitations that people like Ridley Scott and James Cameron had to work with. But instead, they're probably going to be like three or four hundred million dollars. I mean, can you imagine any kind of tent pole action movie being made for less than a hundred million at this point? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, it's what it's what makes the film so good. You know, certainly these first two is the interaction between the characters. Like you said, it's very natural. It's very, it feels very human. And I remember something

that struck me when I saw Prometheus in the cinema was that they seem to make the active choice to not have that. I think there's like one of the early, early moments in the film where one of the, one of the members of the crew tries to talk to one of the others. And you're thinking, okay, cool, here comes some nice sort of repartee. Here we go. Here comes like the nice character, kind of relationships and dynamics and he says something and the guy says don't talk to me and it's like so so you actively don't want to do that okay that's fine that's fine but also you know that like you said that's what makes these films so special it makes me care about so much more in the film it's uh you know that's the stuff that's really that's really important yep i think

one of the fun stories behind the scenes of this movie is a fact that they did send most of the actors who played the Marines on a sort of boot camp. So they would all work together and train together and practice these routines together. And they said that one of the last things they shot was the drop ship sequence where they're all sort of hanging out and being friends. And they shot at the end because by that point, they would have spent some much time together and they would be, you know, they'd be used to each other. And they would be having fun together. However, they made a purposeful choice not to include the lieutenant, Gorman, and a couple of the higher up, say, oh, you don't go to the training. So that way, there was a, there was a deliberate separation

there. And that's, you see it on screen. You see it from the very first, the very first shot. Like, oh, yeah, he's over there, we're over here. You know, who's that guy? Oh, we don't, he's, he barely, you know, he's, he's, he's in charge, but he doesn't know what he's doing. He's barely been out there before. Same thing that Steven Spielberg did, but saving private Ryan left, uh, left Matt Damon out of all of the, all of the hard boot camp work. And they absolutely hated him for it. I knew I had heard that anecdote, a very similar anecdote somewhere. Yeah, I was saving Private Ryan.

But, you know, it's worth mentioning the actual war connection because this was a film very heavily based on Vietnam and, you know, the Vietnam conflict, which, you know, at the time was still very fresh in America's psyche. It had, you know, just finally kind of collapsed barely a decade earlier. And Cameron did write the script for aliens and First Blood literally. at the same time. Like, he had a set amount of time to write both scripts and said, okay, I can write this many words a day, and it's going to take me this many hours, and that's what I'm going to do. And he just, like, powered through these two scripts at the same time. So, yeah, all the research he did for Rambo led into aliens.

And then, of course, Sergeant Apone is, in fact, played by a Vietnam vet. So, like, he was someone who actually knew what it was like to the point where he was actually an American expatriate because he had grown to hate America after his experiences over there. And so he moved to England. So, yeah, there's kind of a lot sort of happening in terms of subtext, you know, the idea of this force of train soldiers with just incredibly powerful weaponry that is utterly. and completely, utterly and completely unsuited for the situation that they're in and for the opponent they're facing. Right. They should be, you know, on paper, it looks like the Marines are indestructible.

You know, they've got all these forces, you know, depending, I think it's in the extended cut, like Hudson actually goes and explains their entire armament and they enlists every single thing they own as they're flying down to the planet. It's like, we've got all this stuff. We're the ultimate badasses. And then, of course, yeah, they're quickly, you know, somewhat controlled. There's a slight contrivance with the whole don't shoot in here, but still, they are quickly and almost entirely wiped out by forces that are just, just angry, just angry monsters. They have no guns, but they're really angry and they have two mouths.

Not even angry. They're just doing their thing. Like, that's what they do. They're like, oh, food's here. The delivery arrived. Right. So, yeah, there are a lot of stories about the creation of this film. I don't think we have time to really get into all of them. But are there any other kind of making of stories you'd like to highlight about this before we start talking about the film itself. Well, I just think one thing of interest for me personally is a fact that the movie clocks in at two hours and 17 minutes, which is on the long side. And Cameron had to really fight for that because apparently the studio wanted something that was closer to two hours because, you know, the short of the movies, the more times

it can play in the theaters. You know, this is from an era when it was very much about, you know, what can we get in the theaters? And there were arguments. I think at one point he threatened to quit if they didn't, if they didn't let him put the extra stuff in there. But of course, he shot much more than that. And depending on certain TV airings, some segments would be shown later. But eventually, and if you buy it today digitally, you have access to the so-called special edition, which is two hours and 37 minutes. And it has a lot of extra stuff in there that just was not included in the original movie. And I think we can, we can talk about it later, but I think some of it is good and some of it is probably doesn't need to be there at all. But Cameron likes it. So he's very

excited about the long, long version. Yeah. So is the special edition different than the extended cut? I think there are probably two different words for the same thing. Okay. Because depending, I mean, the version that most of us saw, I think, is the one where Ripley wakes up. Ripley has to give a report. Ripley is basically, you know, reprimanded and almost fired.

And then, you know, smash cut to, hey, Ripley, we, you know, that colony you said was, might be in danger. Yeah, they stopped answering our phone calls. Can you go with these Marines and go check it out? And, like, that just happens in a sequence. Whereas this extended special version, you actually get some footage and you see the colonists and you see what they're doing and you see Newt and her family go out and they find the old alien ship and her dad gets a face hugger on his face. And I don't know.

I honestly hate that version. Yeah, it doesn't actually add much. No, I feel it takes away a lot. I think it destroys the tension of the film. I think, one, seeing that Newt, Newt specifically is the one whose family finds the xenomorph out of, you know, like 150 colonists, that's contrived. But also, it just, it destroys the tension.

Like, in the original cut, you don't know what happened to the colony. I mean, you know, it's called aliens. You know, it's like, hey, this is Rivley's story. She's going, huh? What's going to happen? Are there going to be aliens? but you still don't know. Like they go to the planet and they're not met with a host of aliens just swarming their ship and trying to destroy them.

They have to, you know, kind of descend into, you know, into Hades essentially and kind of pass a point of no return in order to actually even encounter the Xenomorphs. So taking that away, taking away that tension by basically saying, yep, here's the colony. Yep, here's, you know, a face hugger. That's how it's going to go. I don't know. It just really takes away a lot. It's like if there was a Star Wars cut where you see Luke whining on the planet, you know, as soon as the droids escape from the Corellian Corvette that's trying to get away from Darth Vader Star Destroyer, you know, if you saw that, like the way Lucas had originally written it and filmed it, that would suck. Like, you want to meet Luke.

later when he's like, oh, hey, you know, here's all this stuff happening to these droids. Where is this going? And then who's this kid? I don't know. Like, if you, if you introduce him earlier, it just kind of takes away the mystery of it and also slows things down. And I feel that's exactly what happens with this version. Like some of the stuff that has added, you know, especially the stuff about Ripley's daughter. And, you know, like the kind of just how adrift she is, 57 years after she went into Deep Freeze and how disconnected she is from the world at this point. That adds a lot of gravitas to her story

and also a lot of meaning to the relationship between her and Newt. But then seeing like, hey, it's the alien facehugger. Hey, hey, guess what's coming later? I don't know. It just doesn't work for me. There's also a few nice scenes, I think, that she and Michael Bean as Hicks share that are just, they're a bit longer in the long

version and the, there's some, even in the theatrical release, there is some, they get some banter and they're like, they're almost flirting when he shows her like the weapons and she's like, oh, show me everything, like, you know. There's some chemistry there for sure. Right. But there's even more in the long version. They have like a little, they have a little cute moment where, like, they tell each other their first names because Ripley and Hicks are their last names.

So they do have a cute moment where they tell each other their first names and she goes off to get newt. And so there are little things that I like in the extended edition. I personally like the turret gun sequence. I think it's just cool how there's, you know, people staring on a screen with numbers and yet it's still scary. I don't know. I guess it's still tense to watch the, watch the ammo countdown to zero. But, yeah, the extended stuff with a colonist, I think is not good. I think the, yeah, I'm with you.

I mean, the shorter version is, I mean, there's very few examples where making a film longer makes it better. I can think of maybe two examples of that. For me it's about narrative consistency and you know you're

with Ripley through from her perspective pretty much through the entire film and you're discovering things with her and breaking away from that by showing sort of the scenes with Newt and her family before meeting her

it changes, it totally changes your perspective of how you're sort of experiencing the story and it removes you from your relationship with Ripley. And I mean, like you said, it's so much more effective when you're discovering things as they are because you're living with it then really in the moment. And I think certainly with Newt, you know, the fact that because, I mean, seeing it in the extended car, it's Chekhov's little girl, you know, you know that you see her and you're going to see her again. But when you first discover Newt in the film, in the theatrical cut,

and she's this little wild, like, feral thing, and you see, like, actually, then where she's sort of set up in her little camp that she's made and trying to sort of piece together what's happened with her and how she's got to get to this state without having known it, you know, that makes the character so much more effective. Right, the little picture, the picture she has of herself, And you can see, oh, she used to be, yeah, she was clearly a very happy, you know, productive, bright little child.

And now she's been sort of crushed because of the trauma she's experienced. It's like you don't need to watch her on scene act with her brother and her parents to get that. It's much more effective to just see it and just see her face versus this photo of her. And that's that's much more powerful. I agree. All right. So the story here, the message here is watch the shorter cut, the theater. critical cut.

All right. So really quickly, the lead cast here, I mean, this is pretty much everyone. Obviously, Sigourney Weaver is Ripley, Ellen Ripley. She was, you know, this is very much her movie, and that was a conscious choice by design. That was something that James Cameron was really thought was important. Like, he really pushed hard to get Sigourney Weaver back in this movie. And she was pretty disinterested for a long time. And he had to really talk her into, like, no, I have a vision for this film. And it's not just a money grab.

But the original, the original alien, she's not really the main character. Like, you go through about half that movie thinking, oh, Dallas, the captain, he's the main guy, he's going to save the day. He's Captain Kirk, you know, a little world weary but wise. He's going to make stuff happen. And then, no, he dies. He just gets wasted. Or worse, actually, if you see the extended cut of that. And it's not until the final third or so that Ripley really emerges as kind of, you know, the so-called last girl. if you want to put it, you know, in horror movie trope terms. But she's the one who was kind of the voice of reason, the, you know, warning, like, we've got to do the quarantine and everything. And naturally, you know, as the cautious one, she's the one who deserves to survive. That's the morals of an ethics of horror movies. So she didn't really have that much of a chance to shine in the original alien. And she's a phenomenal.

Sigourney Weaver is a phenomenal actress. So it seems only fitting. You know, to create an alien movie that is about Ripley and just really let Sigourney Weaver live in that role a little longer and really shine. And, you know, that's, to me, like the heart and soul of this movie is Ripley and her relationships that she forges in the course of this. And, you know, the sort of humanity that she clings back, you know, claws back to after the traumatic experiences of alien and, you know, just the horror of waking up almost six decades after she went to sleep. Like, that's a lot to recover from.

And this movie is about, in a lot of ways, her kind of coming to terms with what happened to her and also, you know, facing down a much bigger version of the horror that sort of ruined her life and coming to terms of that. So there's also Lance Henriksen as Bishop, Carrie Hen as Newt or Rebecca as she may be known. This was the only film that she was ever in, which, you know, I respect the fact that she decided acting was not for her, but she was great in this. Like, she was a natural talent, and everyone who has, you know, been interviewed about this film has said, like, she was a natural.

And the chemistry she had with Sigourney Weaver and with a lot of the, you know, the Marine actors was really, really great. Like, she just, you know, had a knack for it. Kind of some dark horse casting. The villain of the piece is comedian Paul Riser. Like, it's so disarming because you know Paul Riser as like this goofy kind of, you know, sometimes sort of smarmy, sometimes charming, but like generally just kind of harmless and indefensive guy. But here he's that same character. He's that same persona. but also evil.

It's funny how he introduces himself and he goes to outright state, oh, but don't let that fool you. I'm actually a nice guy. It's like, no, you are not nice. The fact that he has to, you know, say that is kind of your sign. He, you know what it is? He says it out loud because he's trying to convince himself he's a nice guy. That's what it is.

I buy that. Let's see, Michael Bean is Hicks. And Michael Bean had previously worked. Actually, both Lance Hendrickson and Michael Bean had previously worked with James Cameron and Terminator. Lance Hendrickson was a police detective, but of course, Michael Bean was that guy. Kyle Reese. Yes.

John Connor's dad. That's the one. Which is funny because he's also the template for Solid Snake. He actually came into replace James Ramar, who had been hired as Hicks and had to drop out. So Michael Bean actually came in as a quick replacement and suddenly had this huge role. And he just, you know, he's a champ. He nails it, but it's funny how, despite their history, he wasn't actually the original choice for Hicks.

Then you have Bill Paxton as Hudson, who is maybe the most memorable of the Marines, certainly the most quotable of the Marines. And then the one casting choice that I don't think holds up in the year 2021. And that's Jeanette Goldstein as Vasquez, a very blonde, very white, woman playing a Latina. Like, she's great in this role, and, you know, she has, like, this super ripped physique, and

everyone's like, you know, basically she's the manliest of all the Marines, even though there's, like, these big dudes around her, and she's this very small woman, but, like, apparently Jeanette Goldstein was out of work. She was trying to make it as a stage actor in the UK, and they're like, oh, we don't want to cast Americans and stuff. So she didn't have anything to do So she just went to the gym And got like ripped as hell

And so she went in for the casting And they were like Yes, okay I just saw your biceps and you have this role But yeah, she does play it in Brownface the whole time Which is a shame Yeah, it's not ideal is it I mean it's always a bit

It's always a bit sad when you watch back And see that sort of thing In some good films like short circuit I mean that is I mean if you haven't covered that on this show, that is very problematic from this point of view. Yeah, I don't think they made short-circuit video games, so I think we're off the hook on that one.

It's good, good. Any excuse not to watch that is a good one. I think, I mean, as a character, like you said, I think it's a very effective character. I mean, she has one of my favorite lines in the film, which is, you know, when asked, does anyone ever mistaken you for a man? She replies, no, there's her view. which is just fantastic. But I think it's such an important character to have

to offset Ripley. Because, you know, I mean, I mean, I could, well, I have gone on and on about the representation of women in this sort of genre. But the idea that in order to be a woman in an action film, you have to be this really masculine, ripped short hair, You know, you've got to make yourself as much like a man as you can in order to be successful in an action film.

And it's great to have that there because Ripley is not that. Yeah, I mean, she's absolutely badass. She knows how to handle a gun. But above all else, in this film, she's a mother, you know, and actually to sort of to contrast that to go actually, you know, you don't just need to do a thousand pull-ups to get, strong. Being a mother, actually, is enough of a source of motivation and power, and you don't necessarily need to try and turn yourself into a man to hold your own in an action film. And I think having that as a counterpoint to Ripley as a character with her development is so important to how effective Ripley's arc is in the film. Yeah, there are several women characters in this

film, and all of them are tough in a different way, and all of them have incredible competence. in a different way. They're all really well drawn. You know, especially compared to alien where you had Ripley, who was basically shut down by everyone until everyone started dying. And then she's like, well, I guess I'm going to save my own ass. And then you had Lambert,

not Lambert, Lambert, who basically as soon as she saw the alien just shrieked, froze, and died. But here you have, you know, you have Ripley, obviously. You have newt. You have Vasquez. And then you also have a couple of soldiers and you have the pilot. I totally blinked out on her name. Like she's cool and competent and she probably would have saved the day if not for the fact that there was an alien that snuck in behind her while she was flying around and like stuck its mouth through her skull. You know, kind of hard to recover from that. But all the women in this are really, you know, very memorable and just great characters in very different ways. And, you know, that is a

testament to James Cameron's writing because that's something he says, you know, he placed a lot of stock in and a lot of value in and really wanted to include, I hate to use the term strong female characters because it's such a cliche and it usually doesn't mean that. But, you know, he did want to have memorable and self-possessed women. How's that? Well, I think the story from the first movie was always that the characters were written as basically neutral. And They didn't cast them necessarily, like Ripley was initially written as a woman, but they cast a woman to play that role. Whereas I think these characters are definitely written and cast and purposely made to be women and to show that, oh, this is a, what's the word, an equal fighting force, I guess, not just all guys, as men and women, they're working together and they have a good relationship, and this is a team, which of course is not, certainly at the time, and I don't know about the state of the current military, but I mean, certainly in the 80s, the U.S. military was not that. Yeah, it was just...

James Cameron recommended that everyone who took on a role of a Marine in this film read Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. So that's kind of where his head was at. Also notable is Al Matthews, an actual Vietnam vet, American expat, as Sergeant Apone. And he was a great addition. Like, he's one of the most, I think, iconic characters in sci-fi. and, you know, to the point that Halo basically was like, hey, let's just have Sergeant A-Pone as a character.

And even though he died, he dies in the first game, let's bring him back because he's just that great. Also notable creative development types, Sid Mead and Ron Cobb handled production design, both Ron Cobb had worked on the original alien. Sid Mead, of course, had worked on, God, what hadn't he worked on? He was, you know, Tron and he did some, like, Star Wars, Star Trek stuff. I can't remember. Anyway, just legendary guys.

Stan Winston handled the special effects. They obviously wanted H.R. Geiger to design the new aliens for this, but he was under contract to Poltergeist 2 and was not allowed legally to contribute to this film, which is something that he was very upset about. And then James Horner composed the music kind of, although that was a very messy situation, much like the production of this film. And yeah, so like his compositions were kind of chopped up and just pushed around. And then other music, like some of Jerry Goldsmiths, Jerry Goldsmith, is that who composed

the original? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yes. Some of his music was brought in from the first film. So kind of a mess. but he still, didn't he win an Oscar for it anyway? He was nominated for her original score.

Ah, okay. It's very distinctive as a lot of just sort of what sounds like weird percussion, like pipes hitting thing. Like, it's a really bold musical choices, I think. And it was thrown together in a hurry. It had been cut to pieces. I know part of the score that was ended up not being used, ended up being used again and die hard.

But the big takeaway, at least for me, if, you know, if you grew up in the 90s at all, You might, you've heard this music before because a section of the score, if you look it up now, it's called Bishop's Countdown, that music was used in trailers just throughout the 90s and probably 2000s too. Like, they love that music. It's just this, you know, this buildup of tension. It's perfect for any trailer. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, da, dun. Like, that's just, they used it forever because it matches any scene you want to match it to. That and the percussion from the end of Peter Gabriel's Rhythm of the Heat

are like ubiquitous in trailers, or at least were for a long time. Yeah. All right. So that's that's the backstory for the movie. We don't need to talk too much in detail about the plot itself. But, you know, obviously this movie follows on 57 years after the original alien from which Ripley signed off as the only survivor of the Nostromo. And she's found floating derelict in space. No one got her message. And people are trying to, you know, salvage the pod that they find. And it turns out, oh, there's a live woman in here. Whoops. so she's recovered and discovers that basically everything that tethered her to the world is gone and because she blew up in a very, very expensive mining ship and can't actually prove that there was an alien running a mock in it they're like, well, you're kind of basically grounded.

You can't do anything. You can't be a pilot anymore. Like she had basically nothing to live for. Even though at this whole time, you know, it was known behind the scenes that, yes, there actually was an alien. And even though the Wayland-Utani Corp, I believe, is gone or something. I can't remember exactly.

They talk about it, I think, in the extended version. You know, they still have their eyes on planet LV-426. And so a colony was set up there a while back, and now 150 odd people are living there. And then they stop reporting in. So Ripley goes off with a bunch of Marines to figure out what the heck is going on. and they send a company man Burke along to bring back some samples so they can create superweapons. A distrust of capitalism and corporations is a really key element of the alien films, which is why it's so ironic that it is now owned by Disney.

I think one of the stronger points of the movie that I think, I certainly I think noticed on repeated viewings is how quickly they said. up, you know, just how textual the evil sort of corporate nature of this world is. You know, you mentioned that, you know, Ripley is found in space by a salvage crew. They're disappointed. They thought they were getting, you know, a free find. Oh, we found the ship full of stuff. They thought they were, they were hit the jackpot. But they're like, oh, man, there's a person here. They're like, oh, no, there's meat inside the shell. Yeah. And likewise, you know, you have the, the meeting and everyone there, and, you know, at least, at least someone there must know the alien is real, but they're all treating her like she's crazy, and they're, you know,

their final report, like, well, you're not going to jail, but you are in big trouble, lady, for blowing up our expensive spaceship. Burke, clearly, you know, you find out later in the movie that Burke took her word 100% and sent the colonists to go find the aliens, so he basically made them, made them all die, and his excuse was, well, if we took more caution, then there wouldn't be enough money. You know, like, that's basically what he says. He phrases it differently. So just the, you know, it's funny to me as someone who grew up as a Star Trek fan.

And I watched a lot of Star Trek before I ever saw this movie. So I definitely had the Star Trek ethos in my head. Like Star Trek is a movie, Star Trek is a series about people in the future who have moved beyond corporations and moved beyond personal wealth. Except the phringy. They go out in a space. If they find a space pod, they're excited like, wow, what are we fine? Who's this? You know, are they from the past?

Are they from the future? Are they a shapeshifter? we can't wait to find out whereas in this movie and this series it's all about how do we make money off of this oh she's alive god damn it um well let's i don't know let's see we can get a face hugger to impregnate her with an alien spawn and sneak her through through customs yeah i missed that episode of star trek there's something nice about that that contrast though between like the um the sort of utopian ideals of something like star trek uh just uh yeah and uh and and it's something like this, totally subverting that with its capitalist, oh, it's, yeah, yeah.

All right, so Ripley meets the Marines, the Marines land and delve into the colony. No one's there, but they do eventually find a small child hiding in a little nook that the aliens can't get into. And she's the only one who's managed to stay free. And eventually they find all the colonists, they have transmitters, you know, they're wearing their Alexes or whatever. And they find them all clustered in the same spot, which just happens to be the reactor,

the nuclear reactor that powers the colony. And so they go there and whoa, they're all in cocoons, which if you've seen, you know, the extended cut of the original alien, like that's something that was established in the first movie. The aliens would capture people and keep them alive

to stick little alien babies inside of them to explode out and make new aliens. So basically, all hell breaks loose because one of the aliens, there's a chest burster that comes out of a woman and it freaks the Marines out. They blow it up. And all the adult aliens are like, whoa, our babies. And so from that point on, it's just sheer chaos.

I think this sequence, though, I think maybe has went a long way because the fact that all the Marines are wearing cameras. And so you get shots of the Marines, you know, in the fight and you see what they're doing. but you have Ripley and Gorman and I guess Burke sitting safely in the vehicle sort of just watching these feeds and you see sort of the cameras start to cut out one by one and you see their vitals go low and you see all these crazy things happening and so Gorman of course is immediately you know seized and he doesn't know what to do and Rip was like run away get out of there so I think this is this is a really great tension even though even though the audience kind of knows more than some of the characters which is not always ideal but I think you get this great sort of cutting back and forth between what they're seeing, what's actually happening, and how it, I think it builds the confusion and just the overall tension and how fast, you can really see how fast the numbers are dropping as you see cameras cut and vital signs go to flatline. So basically things go horrible and they do manage, like a few of them managed to escape in

their big airport vehicle covered with armor. Thanks to Ripley. Thanks to Ripley. She saves the day, but they break an axle. She starts driving it. Yep. So basically they kind of regroup, and while they're sort of regrouping, Ripley takes a nap along with Newt, who's, you know, basically scared to be around anyone except Ripley.

And Ripley wakes up, and there's a facehugger skittering around, and she realizes that was Burke who tried to do that to them. And that's basically, you know, like. his true intentions are revealed, but it's okay because he dies soon after, because he's a piece of crap and no one feels bad about it. But this is kind of the beginning of the end game where the aliens decide to go after the Marines that are holed up, and they do their best to fend off the aliens. They have these auto cannons that keep just burning through, churning through bullets and aliens, but there are more aliens than bullets. So then you have the the extremely memorable tracker scene, you know, with the motion trackers from the first

film, like there's a better version here that shows, you know, relative distances to moving objects and all of a sudden the moving objects are literally on top of the characters and they're like, what the hell is going on? Just so much tension from, you know, things like the video cameras, the use of technology, I guess, to create tension here. As you mentioned, And, you know, the numbers dropping and signals cutting out and things like that. Like, this is another case of that with the motion trackers. They're like, there's aliens everywhere, but we can't see any of them. What's going on?

And, of course, they're in the ceiling and the floor. Yeah, just some really great imaginative action scenes here. I love the motion trackers. I love how they're established because they use them to find newt. So you've got this extended scene where they're walking around the colony and no one's there and everything's dead. And they're like, oh, well, I guess everyone's, I guess area secured. And like, what do you mean secured?

Well, I don't know. It's secured. And then they get a motion. And so they're using these things. And the trackers aren't just visual. They have this great sort of clicking sound, almost like a synthesizer, like just a background, like a click, click, click. And then beeping as things get closer or farther away. So you've got visual, you've got audio.

Like, it's so effective. It's so effective in getting you excited, even though you're not actually seeing anything. You're just, you're hearing some weird noises and you're looking. looking at some spheres, but it's like, oh, no, what is that? And yeah, by the end of the movie, when they're being overwhelmed, you know, they can't even understand, like, what do you mean? Four meters, that's inside the room, like, but they're looking in front of them and they can't see anything, but you as the audience at this point, you're with them, you're just as scared because you know something's coming and you just like, where are they? And then you find out

they're just, they found a part of the base that was not on the map. So at this point, Ripley, you know, she's very unhappy about the presence of aliens. She's been advocating to nuke them from orbit, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be safe. But it turns out they don't have to do that because the site is going to nuke from within. which means they need to get the hell out of there. But unfortunately, Fierro, that's it, the pilot Fierro. She gets an alien jaw to the skull and crashes their pickup ship.

So Bishop has to go to like a remote tower and guide their main ship, I believe, in to pick them up. And so he goes off to do that. Meanwhile, Newt is taken by the aliens. and it seems like a tragic end for that child. But then Ripley hears her scream as she's, you know, being carried away. So she goes and single-handedly tries to track down Newt because at this point everyone's either dead or incapacitated. And so this is kind of the incredibly tense showdown with, you know, the two moms basically facing off against each other. She goes and basically, you know, is armed with a flamethrower that can wreak havoc on the alien nest.

But then there's a queen who's like five meters tall and just towering over her and has the ability to kind of psychically control the warrior aliens and can apparently like cause the facehuggers to burst out on command. That was weird. I mean, it makes sense. Like, what, what are the, you know, what, how do the aliens communicate? It could be like this kind of psychic link or something. It could be spheromones, you know, uh, because they don't, they don't speak. And they, they don't, there's nothing that approximating a language. So there must be some other way they are shrieking.

Yeah. But they're intelligent. So. Hmm. Yes. So I, I really like the uneasy truce that is established here. Like, Ripley just comes in for Newt. and she, you know, kind of wordlessly makes it clear.

If you mess with me, I'm going to torch the hell out of your babies. But if you give me my kid, then I'm going to go away in peace. And the alien queen actually is like, you know, makes it clear through her body language that, all right, you, I'm not going to try to call your bluff. We'll go our ways here. But then Ripley is the one who breaks the truce. The good guy breaks the truth. And she's like, you know what? I've got my kid to hell with yours and just burns the hell out of the place.

She shoots grenades into the queen's ovipositor. It's brutal. It's just absolutely disgusting. And obviously the queen's not happy about it. But while she's freaking out, Ripley takes Newt and gets on the drop ship and escapes. And that's the end. Hooray, the movie ends. Happy ending.

Okay, that's not actually. Almost. Almost. The queen does follow her, gets on. Is it the drop ship or the Salaco? that they're actually on. She gets on the drop ship without being seen. Okay.

And then once they get back on the main ship, she emerges somehow and tears Bishop apart, and then they have the big fight with the checkout. There's a lot of check-off stuff in this. Does check-off power loader, this check-off cigarette lighter? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, the power-loader sequence is like the battle between Ripley and the five-meter-tall alien queen. like, you know, there's some real anime to this

and this, you know, was hugely influential on subsequent anime, I'm sure. It's, you know, the idea of a mech, basically, mecca, but in kind of a, you know, like a realistic sense. Like, there's some pat labor about this, basically. But she pummles the crap out of the queen, and it's slow and brutal. And the whole time, Ripley, or not Ripley,

Bishop is like they are kind of not dying, but been in horrible robot agony. Newt's, you know, run off to hide and eventually Ripley chucks the queen out the airlock because that's how you kill an alien. And that's the ending, the happy ending. The other character who survives is Hicks. Hicks, yes. He gets acid in his face, but he lives. He lives.

But he's incapacitated from the fight because he's in, you know, agony. but he does live. And then Bishop, you know, is still whatever passes for life for a robot. And they go off, you know, return home. And then everyone dies in the next movie. So it's all kind of pointless. But at least this movie was very well made. And, yes, the Sins of Alien 3 can be a discussion for another time.

We should get to that eventually. Just one tiny clarification I want to clear up, though. So they escape with Ripley in the vehicle. They have the conversation about nuking them from orbit. that Burke is like, you can't just blow this up. It costs money. But at that point, Hicks is the only person left in charge because Gorman is just like, he has a concussion or something.

So their plan was to escape right away, but that's when the drop ship is taken out and crashes. And then they hole up and like, oh, well, we'll be fine if we just hold up in here and we're safe. And then they notice that the reactor's going to blow up. Like, oh, well, so I feel like they kept finding ways to sort of offer the audience hope. It's like, no, that didn't work.

Oh, we'll be safe. We hide here. No, we're not safe anymore. oh, but now we've got the upper hand. No, we don't have the upper hand anymore. I feel like there's a really great rise and fall throughout all those beats that eventually just leads to the overwhelming invasion. It's a very, very successful piece of writing in terms of sort of pushing where the breaking points of the script are. Because very often you'll get, say, for example, James Cameron went,

you know what, I really want this film to end with Ripley in a massive mecksuit fighting a massive alien. okay, how do we get to that point? And it's something that's so, I mean, it's often lampooned in horror films and it's parodied now, even in horror films itself, when you see people just wantonly making terrible choices about why they're doing stuff. You know, I say, no, I'm going to go into the basement on my own without anything to protect me. But like at every single point in this story, you know, you can see that they're making the best

decisions they can and they're thinking no right okay this is our only choice our only choice now is to do this or it's like okay we're going to be here stranded for 17 days that's not going to work right okay so we have to do something about this um and uh yeah at every point i mean it helps when you've got somebody so slimy uh who's actually trying to sabotage um the uh you know what what what what rippley and well everybody else is trying to do um but i like i like the fact But it's in terms of management, in terms of crisis management, they're absolutely doing their best. I agree, yeah. Everyone's making, like, it's good writing.

They're making smart choices, and it's all kind of hopeless. But the fact that even, you know, three or four characters managed to survive is remarkable. You know, it's a much better success rate than in the first alien, where there was just one survivor. Well, like, and Jonesy. So two survivors. But, yeah, like, it's a really well-made, really well-written movie, even though I don't like it as much, quite as much as Alien, just because I like the slower, more like soak in it and live the terror kind of sensation. And I'm not even a horror movie fan, but it just works really well in Alien. But this is, like, a tremendous piece of filmmaking.

And it's easy to understand why this was so influential and so many people have referenced it, ripped it off, homage. it like it's just it's really an incredible film i should point out that you know we're recording this in 2021 and i just recently saw the new zack snider film army of the dead and the one thing i took away from that movie and so many people did take away from it it's like there are beats from aliens just straight up in that movie like not even not even homage it's practically quoting the movie at times and there's and there's a latina woman who wears the headband who blows yourself up. Like, it's just, it is, it is outrageous. It is outrageous how much, you know, I think some of this stuff is, is just natural and some of it's just great tension, you know, an elevator

ride with a countdown, great. But this movie has really been literally ripped off. Even, even 35 years later, people are still just, well, I'll just, I'll just make aliens, I guess. Thank you. With a purposeful grimace and a terrible smile, join Nikki and Wyatt as we stomp our way through the history of Toho's Dai Kaiju films in Discuss All Monsters. Are you telling me we're going to discuss all monsters? We won't stop until there isn't a monster left to discuss. Smash that play button like Godzilla and King Kong smash an 18th century Japanese pagoda.

Only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. We're the Spirit Hunters, and we're a show that treats Hunter Hunter and you, Hakkishu's author as the center of the universe. Some weeks, we do linguistic analysis, so the Chinese meaning of this character is to smelt or refine, but so the changed meaning, in Japanese it means to temper. Other times, we get absolutely smashed. So we take one shot every time. Yuske uses the Raygun. One hour later. This is the least coherent episode. I think your pirate is haunted. I think you...

We're watching. You can find out more about the spirit hunters right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. And, of course, there have been authorized and fully licensed renditions of aliens in other media, such as in video games. And that's what we're going to talk about now, because this is ultimately Retronauts, a classic video gaming podcast. So even though we spent an hour talking about a movie, we're, you know, those are very, it's a very germane topic to

video games, especially since there have been quite a few games based on aliens. And we're going to kind of breeze through these because most of them are not really worth talking about. But I will say that aliens was a doubt. adapted into video games almost immediately in both the U.S. and I guess Europe and also Japan. So all over the place. Huge hit. Very popular around the world.

In Japan, it was actually called Alien 2. Yes. I don't think the aliens works quite as well in that language. Well, yeah. Japanese is a language doesn't really do plurals. So it's always just been called Alien 2 here, which is really funny why one of the games is called Aliens, Alien 2. Yeah.

I do not have any familiarity with the computer games. I've scanned YouTube and I'm like, eh, but one of them was made by Activision and one of them was made by Software Studio. The Activision one looks more tolerable. The Software Studio one, not so much. Any thoughts on these two? Anyone? Well, I found the Activision game was interested in me in the fact that they sort of, you know,

like a lot of games of this era, you know, it's early, it's barely 8-bit. And so I think a lot of it's like, well, how do we take this very complex movie and make a game out of it? Well, we'll just make a series of small games and you just go, you just sequence through them. So you've got like a flying part, you've got a shooting part, you've got this sort of almost like a tower defense, like you have a flamethrower and you're killing aliens as they approach you. Actually, it's more like, yeah, it's like plants versus zombies, except you have a flame thrower. And then you've got a maze game, and then you've got, you know, find newt. And then, of course, it all ends with a first person boxing game. where you are in the power loader and you have to fight the alien queen.

Wow, Telleroboxer, 20 years early, 10 years early. Yeah, it does look that way. It really does. Yeah, this is kind of like the summer games, the winter games of aliens. Just a lot of individual little events, none of which are great. But I guess overall hold up to kind of give you the sense that, hey, we made ourselves a game that's based on the movie and recounts it very literally. you. The other game looked a lot more intriguing to me, but unfortunately, if you watch it on YouTube, I feel like you get almost nothing about what's happening. It seems to be a first-person maze game where you have different people, like you've Ripley and you've Marines, and you're sort of choosing where to go through this giant. And I mean, really, like, 256 room sequence, and you're trying to get safely to the end. And I could not follow the action from a video standpoint. But it looked very interesting, and I'm sure it probably was extremely tense to play because you had no idea

where you were going. I had a little look at that as well. I mean, these games were, I mean, you know, obviously out probably just before I was born and a little bit after. So I didn't manage to get to, you know, get to the arcades to play them. But having

a little watch of it, yeah, especially this little, like maze game, I mean, goodness me, I had no idea what was going on. I was watching it and just thinking I mean, the ambition to, I mean, it's like this with any sort of early games, especially in the 80s where there aren't these reference points for making games, and especially if you're making

a movie tie-in game, like you said, trying to make something that is giving you a little bit of a taste of what the film's like ends up being essentially a series of mini-games because there aren't the, there aren't the blueprints for the games at that time. But to come up with the idea of that sort of first-persony, type maze game and it's a huge concept it's incredibly ambitious to do it especially given the extraordinarily

limited tech that was there but I think you're absolutely right I think something about the pace that you go at which is so slow and so considered in terms of every move you're going and because of the size of it as well the tension must have been absolutely extraordinary sort of hearing

hearing those sort of I guess you'd call them sounds coming out of some tiny little computer speakers or something. Yeah, it must have been an extraordinary experience. I do love the choice to have the close-up. You can always see a close-up of your character's eyes. It's almost like Doom Guy, but it's five years or five years.

It's like six years early where your character is like looking and sort of turning their eyes left and right. And I feel like that's, you know, it's a crude rendition of the actors, but it's like it's, I think it adds to the sort of the feeling you get. It's immersive, even though you're looking, you're looking at your. character's eyes, which you shouldn't be able to see. But it's like, oh, no, you're, you know, you're scanning the area. You don't know what's going to happen.

I think it's, yeah, ambitious is a good word for it, even though I can't really make heads or tails of it just on video. Yeah. Much more comprehensible through video and just by playing is aliens, Alien 2 by Squarespace for the MSX computer. There was going to be a Famicom Disc System version, but it got canceled. and honestly, it's not a great loss. It's just kind of like Ripley walking, shooting stuff,

and then occasionally a giant Xenomorph shows up, and then you do the exact next thing in another level, you know, slightly different graphics, and the Xenomorph boss at the end has more hit points. But that's it. And just not that much going for it. But I do believe this has a Nobu Umatsu soundtrack, so that's probably good.

It's early. It's early Uyematsu. Okay. So not quite Final Fantasy, although this was the same year as Final Fantasy. Wow. Okay, probably much more familiar to most people. Certainly I played this a few times back in the day in arcades was 1990s aliens by Konami, an arcade game, which, you know, at the time that I saw it, I was like, wait a minute, this is the company that did Contra. I'd played a lot of Supercontra in arcades.

And this has, actually, I would say, a less appealing aesthetic to it, but at the same time, I was like, you know, I don't know, like, I was savvy enough about video games at that point 30 years ago that I could still be like, huh, that's kind of weird, right? Like, this is the Contra people. And here's a game that, or here's a, you know, a property that Contra totally rips off. Like, even though I hadn't seen aliens at that point, I still knew, like, Contra just stole the, the, the, hell out of this series, this movie. It's so strange to me that, you know, you've got this arcade game and the, the hero is very clearly, closely detailed, made to look like Ripley. Like, right down to the fashions, you know, like, she's even wearing, like, her future

Reeboks. Like, you can see everything about her, like, this is Ripley. But she has blonde hair, like short, curly blonde hair. It's such a weird, I guess someone looked at the sprite maybe and felt that they needed to change the color to make it stand out more, you know, kind of like. Like how the original, the Ghostbusters cartoon, they all have crazy hair colors. But when you look at this game and you see how much it looks like Ripley but then has this big blonde hair, kind of like, why did they? It's, to me, it was always distracting.

Even as a kid, I was like, that doesn't look like Ripley. Why, why did they make Ripley blonde? Well, it's possible they don't have the likeness rights to Sigourney Weaver. It could be. If you look at the flyer for this game, they, I've written about this. this flyer in an article I wrote for U.S. Gamer a long time ago called Crop Top Chronicles. Oh, the cropped-up lady? Yes.

It's the same crop-top sleeveless t-shirt that was passed between men and women for all the photographs on Konami's 1980s arcade flyers. There is a blonde lady wearing the crop top and, you know, like cargo pants with a bedraggled child next to her. and she's blonde, so they did not have, you know, Sigourney Weaver or any any recognizable actors on this flyer. It is, it is a, you know, a blonde crop top lady. And so my thinking is they probably didn't have the rights to depict Sigourney Weaver herself in the game. So, you know, at that scale, like, how do you differentiate this character

from the real human being? You give them a different hair color. And hey, all of a sudden, when have you ever seen Sigourney Weaver with blonde hair? That's not Sigourney. That's just some other lady. So there you go. Maybe it's just a very subtle crossover with Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest. Oh, that's right.

She did show up with blonde hair in Galaxy Quest. If you look at the Japanese flyer for this, it's just got a really great airbrush painting of a xenomorph. Like no Ripley, no newt. just a xenomorph like tensing up to lunge at you in a kind of access tube and there's like fire exploding behind it. It's a great, great painting. Not a not a photograph of an off-brand Ripley. Although there is a photograph on the back of the flyer of a xenomorph like breaking through a very flimsy looking wall that's covered with slime. So you know, you get what you can, I guess. Anyway, the game itself is okay.

There's a lot of xenomorph types in this. I don't know if you guys remember the Kinner action figure series from the 90s. That might have been before your time or just not your jam, but they kind of concocted all sorts of different aliens. There was like the bull alien, the gorilla alien, et cetera, et cetera, the scorpion alien, where they kind of, you know, like fuse the xenomorph design with. of animalistic or characteristics of these various creatures.

This takes that and just runs with it. There's like dozens of different xenomorph types. They're all over the place. They're all like pastel colored or neon colored. It's a pretty like kind of a garish game actually, but you are killing a lot of aliens. This is basically, you know, the three-minute sequence in which Ripley descends into the reactor core with a

flamethrower extended to like a full 30-minute game. There's people in there too, which is kind of a weird choice. They look like zombies, so I don't know. It may be the ideas that they've been infected somehow, but yeah, in between the aliens, you're shooting at people who shoot back at you. Yeah, this is

something I noticed in a few of the games as I surveyed them and look through them for this podcast, is that a few of them take some liberties with the source material And one of those liberties is saying, well, when someone is infected by a facehugger, they don't just stick around in a cocoon waiting for the alien embryo to explode through their chest. They actually, like, wander around trying to kill dudes. So that's, I think that's what's what was going on here.

Anyway, we jump ahead to There were other games based on the alien license, such as Alien vs. Predator, but those are separate. We are talking specifically about games based on aliens. And the next is 1996 Alien Trilogy for PlayStation by Probe. creators of Diehardt trilogy the same year, apparently. And even though this is based on Alien trilogy, it's not really. I mean, it's Ripley, and it's a first-person shooter, and you're shooting at the aliens.

So I feel like they very clearly knew that they were invoking the aliens image, you know, because at that point, you know, you already had Alien and Alien 3, which are too very not about shooting the aliens. Right. You know, Alien, they have no guns, and Alien 3, they have, like, I don't know, like a lava pit or something. thing, I forget. It's a molten lead pit. Aliens was the one about shooting the aliens, and that's what this game gives you. So Alien Trilogy is actually the first, I think it might have been my first exposure to

really what the Alien series was about, apart from, you know, the sort of the VHS boxes in the local video store. Now, I had a Sega Saturn as a kid, which is one of a few who did. Someone out there had to do that Exactly, you're welcome And I remember seeing Alien Trilogy being covered in Sega Saturn official magazine And I mean there was always something very very Just very impactful about the image of the xenomorph

And I remember being particularly sort of intrigued by any sort of first person shooter that was out at the time because that was this was the first time I had a console that could, or even a computer that could do like first-person games. So I remember being particularly drawn to things like Doom and Exhumed and an Alien trilogy as well, thinking, you know, I couldn't imagine anything cooler than being in a first-person game. And it's, I mean, in terms of a first-person shooter from that sort of era, it's not bad. It's not bad. It's got sort of a decent sort of atmosphere to it. Like, one of the things, I mean, it's an incredibly common element in all alien tie-in games, apart from the alien versus predator games, is that there's so many xenomorphs than there are in the films, which, you know, essentially the video games turn xenomorph into just foot soldiers and grunts.

It's like every, oh, there's another xenomorph, bam, bang, bang, oh, it's dead. Okay, there's another one, bam, bang, bang, oh, it's dead. You know, whereas obviously in the films, just one xenomorph is enough to, you know, just clearly you can have an entire film, just about one xenomorph, essentially. And it's something that only really sort of struck me when I was refreshing my memory of this game and having seen it and looking at some clips on YouTube and just seeing like, gosh, like, man, they really made out that xenomorphs were easy to kill. That is, it's famously not the case. Yeah, I mean, certainly they chew through a lot of xenomorphs in aliens, but they also have, like, stationary turret guns, which, by the way, I don't think we put this in the notes,

but the turret gun sequence here is something that has shown up in a lot of video games. Like, you have to do that literally, like, this exact thing in Half-Life 2, where you, like, set up, you know, you set up turrets and try to defend your point by having these auto guns. But, you know, those are like mounted machine guns that just blow through the aliens. When it comes to, you know, a single person with a gun, you're probably not going to fare very well against the xenomorphs. So, yeah, they definitely get nerfed for video games. Some more so than others.

We're not talking about colonial Marines here, but good Lord. Yeah, so Alien Trilogy definitely is guilty of that. But it does have good atmosphere, like you say. In terms of, you know, console first-person shooters, it's pretty high up there for the era. I mean, it didn't solve the main issue of first-person games at that time in being able to look, you couldn't look up or down. Right. Which is mad when you watch or play like Doom or Wolfenstein and stuff like that. and you know if you're so used to sort of modern first person games

not being able to have that and there's like really early on in alien trilogy you've just got to navigate just you know there's obviously several different levels and steps going up to different levels and stuff like that and and you've got little little facehuggers running around and I remember being like trying to get my head around how just the mechanics of shooting something that was that looks like it was was above or below you, how that actually worked, because I was like, I'm shooting at it. It's working, but I'm clearly not aiming at it. I'm just in that right direction.

But, you know, there weren't blueprints for games that did any different. Like I said, you know, at that sort of time. Yeah, first-person shooters with, you know, vertical aiming were pretty rare. I think Dark Forces had it, Marathon had it, but you didn't see it very often. You know, it wasn't until mouse look and right analog sticks became conventions that we really kind of moved to that, that, you know, more fluid modern era of first-person shooters. There weren't enough buttons to do it on the, you know, on like an older controller. Exactly. I am not able to say whether or not the next game, aliens online, an online first-person shooter by Mythic Entertainment from 1998,

Had aim vertically up and down, I never played this, and I know nothing about it. Yeah, this was a game I never heard of until I started doing research for this episode. It was a fairly short-lived game, apparently, because it debuted in 1998, and it was an online game only. It was tied to something called GameStorm, which I did not own, and apparently once GameStorm was sold to some larger company, and it all just went away in 2000. So you can find this game on YouTube, but I don't know if there's any way to even play it at this point, it was a, it was an online FPS and you basically picked your side. You could be the Marines or you could be the aliens and you could sort of choose how your character looked a little bit and you could choose, I guess, you know, if you're a Marine,

you could choose your guns. If you're an alien, I guess you could choose your body type. So conceptually sounds like fun, but also it was all online and it was online 25 years ago. So there's no way to, there's no way I can know how to experience this today, unfortunately. Let's see. Next up is Aliens Thanatos Encounter, which, even though I love portable games, I never heard of this one. It's a Game Boy game from 2001. Who was playing Alien games on Game Boy Color in 2001?

Hello there. Oh, too self. Yeah, it wasn't good. I'll tell you that now. But yeah, I remember, I mean, I was always obsessed with, I mean, I, once I had a Sega Saturn, it was joint, had it joint with my brother. But I always felt that, like, handheld games were kind of like my thing. And I always loved trying to find the games and buy the games that were real, like, technical showcases for the system. And this is a game that sort of, sort of fit that bill.

I mean, it's a top-down perspective, very much like classic GTA. There was a really bad GTA port, actually, on the Game Boy Color as well, which not relevant right now. But this game is made by a company called Wicked Witch Software, who I hadn't, I mean, I obviously looked that up in prep for this. And they've mainly just on American football games. Sorry, I believe you call it football games, I think. That's fine to clarify it because I would have assumed soccer if you had said just football. And I mean, this company has no sort of like reputation in terms of doing anything like action-based or anything.

Um, but it is, it is just top down. You're a marine. You're shooting aliens. That's it. There isn't really any link to the films at all. Um, but yeah, unfortunately, it was, it was actually quite impressive, um, on, on the Game Boy Color. The fact that it had, uh, screen scrolling and everything. And there was lots of, lots of colors. It was a Game Boy color only game as opposed to one that was backwards compatible. No, forwards compatible with the Game Boy. Um, but yeah, more than that, definitely worth. the miss. But I remember being being really drawn in, but again, by the artwork on the box and seeing that, seeing the xenomorph, I think it was like a bright, well, in my head it was orange, the box. It was really, really, so stood out with this big image of a xenomorph, you know, on the shelf in my local sort of shops and seeing that and thinking, oh, my mum definitely wouldn't want me to buy this, but I'm going to find a way to play it anyway. It is, it is orange, yes. It's so funny that you say they made football games because the top-down perspective, they just They looked like they could easily, if you take away their guns and put the ball on their hands,

I can believe they could throw a touchdown. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a pallet swap of Madden, really. All right. So next up is a very different kind of game. Aliens Extermination, a 2006 VR-ish game. It's not actually VR, but that's what they called it.

Basically, a first-person shooter for two people. It's basically time crisis or the Jurassic Park game, but with aliens. I've never seen this in arcades. No, I had to look this one up, but 2006, the movie would have been 20 years old at that point, but still really, really popular, so why not just have a game about shooting aliens? But yeah, the Marines don't even have names. It just, they're just like, here are your characters, here are your plastic guns, go ahead, shoot the aliens. You are left meat and right meat.

It's a game I remember seeing the cabinet actually in arcades. I mean, I think I did anyway. Like, I remember seeing something aliens branded. I'm just, just Google an image of it now. And it does look, it does look familiar. But yeah, again, there's just something, I mean, there's something so powerful about the branding of alien, just the text. text and the font of it, and just that that sort of front-on image of the xenomorph that, you know, it sort of goes along with all of the alien sort of stuff.

There's something so, I don't know, something so grotesque about how shiny its head was. Never played it, though. But like you said, I'm sure it was exactly the same as any other arcade experience where you have a gun. Pretty much. It seems to be, yeah. But finally, we get to the best of the crop, and that is 2011. 11's Nintendo DS game by Wayforward and Sega, Aliens Infestation. So good. I'm a fan of this one.

Someone made a know that it's very chatty and that's true. But before Dark Souls took the world by storm, it had a cool death mechanic. Dark Souls didn't invent death mechanics all on its own. Other games were doing interesting things too. And the death mechanic here is that you have a squad of Marines. They are basically your stock. of lives. And each marine is different, has different stats, and you take them out, go exploring in this Metroidvania style adventure. And when one of your Marines falls, I believe there is a

chance that they are taken by aliens and can be rescued. But I think you have a, it's been a while since I've played, but I think you have a limited time in which you can do that. But you do have the opportunity to kind of, quote unquote, recover lives, I think, by rescuing. your comrades. Anyway, it's a very cool game. I would love to see this resurface at some point. Yeah, I absolutely love this game. I think it still holds up today.

I had a little play of it earlier, and it's good. I mean, way forward are a fantastic company, you know. I mean, they probably the Shanté series is what they're most known for. But they also did the brilliant mummy demastered game in the last couple of years. I know that's not retro.

but they certainly make a good stab at making it appear like it is. But yeah, aliens infestation like you said, a Metroidvania set up works so well for an alien game, I think. I mean, you know, I mean,

Metroid for a start, I mean, it's very zeitgeisty that Metroid and Alien sort of came out around about the same sort of time. There's a lot of sort of crossover of style and subject in that. And I think there's something about the sort of the gated progression that feels very claustrophobic when you're on a when you're on a spaceship there's

just the general sense of exploration that just works really really well i mean this game this game looks really really nice i like something i've said on on my podcast several times is that games moved to 3d too quickly uh and that there was a there was probably another good like five or six years of fantastic work to be done in terms of 2d games uh before uh developers really got a handle on on how to make 3D games properly and how to make the most of it. And so I always loved it when, uh, when, uh, when like a good new 2D game would come out. And the DS was lucky, lucky you to have owned a Saturn, huh? Exactly. Exactly. Um, yeah, I mean, absolutely, I mean,

rock solid with 3D games performance from that console, said no one. Um, but, I mean, the DS was a powerful console, you know, I'm, you know, you had games like Super Mario 64 and Metroid Prime Hunters on it and stuff like that. So to see like a good solid 2D game come out and they back that up by going, okay, yes, it's 2D, but the gameplay is fantastic. The artwork is fantastic.

It's got great sprite work. It's got really good bosses. It establishes a fantastic atmosphere. Yeah, it's really, really solid. And like you, I'd love to see it resurface. I think if that was upscaled, really, really nice sharp, pixel art in HD. That would be a great adventure. Great game to have a go on.

So did I get my descriptions of the game systems correct? It's a, yeah, it's a DS game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like on the, I mean, a lot of developers didn't really know how to use the DS, the second screen, certainly. I can count on the fingers of about, well, three fingers, games that really utilize the touchscreen or a second screen for something that wasn't just inventory management or a map. You know, like drawing sigils to seal demons? There's always that. There's always that.

But yeah, I think, I mean, but the second screen in this was just to see your stats. In fact, the second screen from memory, it actually looks a lot like the, just the main UI from that original aliens computer game where you just see like faces and stats and stuff like that. But it's nice. It's got that same feel that you're, you know, that you're walking the ship with one of these little communicators. Is it all like an echo locator or something like

that? Yeah. Nice. All right. So there are other games based on aliens, but they are not eligible to be discussed because they are past the 10-year cut-off retro date for retronauts. So too bad other games, including Colonial Marines. But I would like to very briefly talk about just how many games ripped off. This is just a cursory list of games that have just totally swiped just about everything from aliens. So the first thing on here, I did not actually know about this because I did not own Doom back in the day, but the aliens total conversion mod for Doom? Yes. So I didn't have a gaming quality PC in the early 90s, so I didn't get to play Doom until probably like 1995 when someone with a proper PC showed it to me. So along with me being completely, you know, having my mind blown by regular Doom, this guy also had, oh, well, you can mod the game too. you can put other stuff into it. It's like, what do you mean? And he showed me aliens TC, which allegedly is the first total conversion, hence TC. And basically, you know, we've all

heard stories about, you know, Doom mods where you shoot Barney or whatever. But this is an actual mod where you, it's almost an entire chapter based around fighting aliens. So there are alien enemies. There are aliens sort of set pieces. There's audio from the movie. There are weapons from the game. The chainsaw is replaced by the power loader. So you just walk up on your punch aliens with your, you know, your big hydrolog claws. It was, you know, obviously, this is, it's a fan work, of course, but it was, it was very popular and it was, it was an early, it was an early favorite in the mod scene, and it was just something that I play, it was, to me, it was like the one, two punch of like, oh, here's

doom, doom is amazing. Oh, but people are also making their own doom stuff, and this is also amazing. And it's, it, it evokes, you know, these fun memories of a movie that was still very, very refresh in our minds at that point. So if we talk about, you know, all the, there's plenty of corporations who just stole still from aliens, but this is, I think, a fun case of, well, this is a fan who just took a lot of stuff from aliens and made a fun game out of it. And if you read interviews with the guy who made it, eventually he did get around to developing games on his own and, you know, making his own stuff, which is, you know, good for him. But at the time, this was just sort of a really

impressive, you know, pre-social media, pre- YouTube, you know, this is probably, you know, I played it in 95. I don't know when it was actually made, but really early fan work that just really encapsulated this hit movie and married it to the then very new first-person shooter genre. All right. Obviously, we mentioned Contra earlier, and specifically there are a lot of alien bosses that resemble the xenomorphs and the final battle. all takes place inside the body of the alien king, queen, whatever it is, the alien ruler, Red Falcon, you blast through its guts and blow up all the eggs that it somehow has

inside while shooting its heart. And it's just extremely gigaresque, yes. All right, xenophobe, that's a good one. Yeah, that was a, that was a ballet arcade game from 87. It had a very distinct look because on the screen were three sort of separate vertical hallways because it supported up to three players at once and each player sort of walked the hallway and sort of had to go between certain rooms and each level is basically a new like space station or derelict spaceship and you have to go in there and you have to shoot all these aliens and the aliens they're not complete Geiger ripoffs but they're very they're very similar to the ones in the movie and just you're just shooting you're shooting a lot of them and you know you have to

set off the self-destruct, then they just escape. They spit acid also. Yeah, it's very close. And I think, you know, the fact they chose, you know, they chose the word xenophobe, which is a word that it's so obscure at that point that I think the attract mode even defines it for you, because otherwise who's heard of that word at that time. Because they couldn't call it, you know, you can't call a movie alien because it's not a license product.

It's like, what? What's a word for people who don't like people who aren't like them? Racist? No, no, the other one. Zenophobe? Okay. Let's call that one. Bigot?

Yes. Okay, so I wrote down Alien Syndrome, but then after looking further, that also debuted in 1986, and I don't think Sega made games that fast. So it's probably just a coincidence and great timing for Sega that they had that. Could be parallel thinking of that one, yeah. Yeah, or it could be an alien homage. Hmm. But definitely, you know, a really exciting game about shooting lots of aliens. So certainly if you saw the movie and you, You went to, you know, a pizza parlor or a ski lounge, and you saw this, like, oh, great, I would like to play this game. And you can even play as a male or female protagonist. So, you know, it has a little bit of the equality that is so essential to the texture of alien.

And I'm pretty sure that game has a self-destruct feature, too, like a bomb is a bomb that goes off. It could be. I mean, that's what you're trying to do in xenomore, or xenophobe also, is self-destruct each of the space stations. Hmm. Okay, so definitely inspired by Alien. Alien Crush by Naxat. The pinball game where you are basically flinging a ball round inside a layer of aliens being swarmed by xenomorphs. I did put something in here that is not a video game, but the brood from X-Men.

I mean, it's so, like, so blatant. Like, Chris Claremont, how did he not get sued? It's wild. And although, in fairness, that was something he created, like, right after the first alien. So the whole, like, hive thing that it has and, like, the queen thing, that was actually something I guess he came up with before James Cameron. So maybe James Cameron was reading some X-Men. I don't know. Someone wrote Conquers Bad Fur Day, please elucidate.

Well, I mean, Conquers Bad Fur Day is just kind of wall-to-wall parody, really. it's a very silly game that riffs on a lot of things but I mean I don't know how the licensing worked for it I don't think they licensed anything I mean you absolutely fight the xenomorph in a big yellow loader mecksuit as a boss there's no I mean they're not even they're not even trying to hide it they're not even saying oh yeah this is a little riff on it

or like it's some, like a woodland badger or something with like another smaller badger coming out of its mouth. It's like, no, this is, it's literally just a flat out xenomorph and you're in a massive yellow loader suit. It's, yeah, I mean, so you can't even call it a parody because it's just, I mean, if you, well, obviously, you do have to switch out, uh, Ripley for a foul mouth squirrel. But yeah, there it is. There it is. I mean, like I said, they rifts on a lot of, of pop culture stuff. and, yeah, aliens is no exception. I mean, the whole idea of, like, like you said,

like with the mech suit, it's very anime. I'm not sure where that convention necessarily stems from. I think probably trying to tie aliens to a game like Kirby Planet RoboBot is probably a bit too much. But certainly conquers bad for a day. Yeah, it's shameless. Yeah, satire is a hell of a defense. It gets you a long way.

Yeah. All right. I think, Diamond, do you put Resident Evil here? I did because I've had a lot of Resident Evil on my brain lately, and just the fact that in the movie, Burke actually name checks the company's bioweapons division, and the fact that Resident Evil, even from the very first game, this talk of bioorganic weapons and all the stuff, like, oh, we can use this thing. We found, you know, this is an experiment.

We can create super soldiers. We can revolutionize warfare. It's definitely a running theme in Resident Evil. But even just like, if you look at the end of the first game, you know, you get in the elevator, there's a countdown timer, you ride the elevator up to the top, and all of a sudden there's a big monster you have to fight, and it just, I feel like that is, and that happens so many times in Resident Evil, I feel like they know exactly what they're doing, in my opinion. All right, so also on this list, Dead Space? Yeah, I mean, dead space is, I mean, for a start, I thought of myself, okay, Dead Space, that's probably doesn't qualify for retro status, 13 years old. That's a bit mad.

but that I mean I think it's got more in common with the first alien film in terms of that sense of isolation and the atmosphere and everything but still I mean you've got a lot of sort of that body shock horror design with the aliens they're absolutely grotesque everything sort of just deformed and malformed and pulsating and oozing and yeah I mean just the idea of being on a spaceship being on a on a spaceship fighting aliens. I mean, like we said, the Alien series penetrates pop culture so much. It establishes so many things that it's impossible for anything kind of existing in that same sphere not to do some sort of riff on it. And yeah, this game's no different. It's no

different. You know, you've got things hiding from you. There's disgusting things bursting out of things. It's a fantastic game. Sounds delightful. Okay, there's a bunch of Saturn games on here. I have my suspicions about who added these. Enemy Zero, Metal Slug, Space Hulk. Yeah. I mean, of these games, Enemy Zero was the only one I actually had, which was essentially an FMV game. But the main thing it has in common is the tracking device where you'll hear, you'll just hear the beeps. And the closer the beeps are together, the closer the alien is to you. And the thing with Enemy Zero, though, is that the aliens are actually invisible. It was not a fun game to play I'll say that much

It was one of those Right towards the end of the Saturn's lifespan It was one of those four disc games But again, yeah It had that same sort of sustained atmosphere That we spoke about earlier With the tracking system With that sort of

That became the soundtrack You know the increased rate Of the beeping of the tracking system That's the thing that I remember from Enemy Zero And like you said earlier it's that in aliens it's almost percussive it almost sort of melds into the soundtrack

and that's yeah that was very much it Metal Slug, Space Hulk I mean they're Marines gunning down aliens with flame throwers that only comes from one place and yeah Space Hulk particularly that that was it may as well be an aliens game

it's again shameless you know I mean by that point I don't know how long you need to take how long it takes after a series has sort of come out to go, well, you know, it's not a direct homage of that or a parody of that. That's just part, it becomes part of the vernacular for sci-fi action or sci-fi horror. But certainly, you know, it draws from exactly the same playbook as aliens. Enemy Zero was a Ken Gino creation. So he certainly, uh, waved a lot of movie,

movie-like experiences into his game. So I'm sure there was probably some intent there to have memories of aliens I agree All right An obvious one Half-Life with the head crabs Sort of a different

life cycle But there for sure Kind of in the same note Halo Obviously Sergeant Johnson Is a dead ringer For Sergeant Napone But also the whole

Flood thing Is just straight up Hey we liked aliens Here we go Now the queen Can talk to you It's a fungus but it's still definitely the aliens.

Like the first time the flood appear and you're basically just in a room being overwhelmed by the tiny little infection forms and the bigger versions kind of start lumbering in at you. Like that is such a halo experience, or a, sorry, an alien's experience. It was, you know, to that point, I think one of the most convincing adaptations

of alien in a video game, even though it wasn't actually alien. Well, it was such a contrast to the start of the game where you're facing off against more traditional, like, armed, you know, not aliens, but they're like, you're fighting other things with guns, and then you get to the flood part where it's like, oh, now I'm fighting this sort of overwhelming force

that is just, they fight me by outnumbering me. Yeah, I mean, we'll have a Halo episode at long last later this year for its 20th anniversary, but there's a lot to be said about the way Halo mixes up its threats where you have, you know, kind of industry-defining, you know, genre, like reinventing intelligent enemies that you're facing through the first third of the game, and then all a sudden just the mindless hordes come at you, and then toward the end, it's a mix of both, and it's really, you know, it makes the combat and the sandbox in that game really interesting

and really enjoyable. Anyway, one final call-out, of course, is Metroid. It even has a boss named Ripley, or Ridley, sorry, as in Ridley Scott. Obviously, the first Metroid came out a month after aliens made its debut. Okay, it came out in Japan a month after aliens debuted in the U.S., and I think it debuted in Japan later. So clearly, Metroid was not based on aliens. But there was obviously some alien influence, just in the concept of the Metroid.

and the further you get into the series, the more, like, alien it becomes, for sure. Well, you get the baby Metroid. You've got, you know, Samis establishes a sort of mock mother relationship with this thing that is not her child. So, you know, this, it's pretty obvious. Yeah, I mean, particularly, I think the Metroid game that sort of riffs on Alien the most, I think, is Metroid Fusion, which is on the Game by Advance.

and there's something about the so in that you're playing against the SAX which is basically like a evil version of you that's been sort of created through some sort of alien something I can't remember but that sort of that one-on-one threat that you get with the SAX in that game

is that it feels like you're being hunted it feels like you're you're trying to outsmart this enemy as much as outgun it, in addition to obviously fighting all kinds of other alien life and all the parasitic nature

that comes with it. Well, and let's not forget the most recent entry in the Metroid Prime Federation Force, where you, You are playing as a space marine. All right. That's the invulks. I think that's enough.

We've talked for two hours here, and I know that it is extraordinarily late for Jonathan. I've got a six-month-old baby. I'm, you know, this is nothing. All right. Well, thank you for giving us your time. I mean, we could honestly just go down the list of, you know, xenomorph homages, alien references, like, hey, you know, Splatterhouse, Wanpaku Graffiti. You fight literally the alien. But, you know, it's, the point is this is just a part of pop culture fabric.

It's just there. Like, aliens is inescapable. It's so influential. And it's become that way because it is a memorable movie with its set design, with its action sequences. But also, it was just so well written, so well crafted. It's one of those rare films. that manages to hit all the right notes and just, you know, it's set out to do something and pulled it off with a plumb.

And even though it was a sequel to someone else's movie made seven years later, it should not have been a success. And yet, you know, made on a shoestring budget, relatively speaking, it was just, it just turned out so well. I mean, it's a phenomenal movie. And it does still hold up. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I watched it this morning. Well, yesterday morning, as it is for me now. And, yeah, I mean, it's probably the, I don't know, 20, 30th time I've watched it. Still, so, so good. I tried to put it on in the background while I did other things, and eventually I stopped doing everything to just watch it again. All right. So, yes, thank you both for taking the time to be on this episode.

Thanks everyone for listening. This was a long one, but there's just so much to say about this movie. and about the things inspired by this movie. And, of course, the video game adaptations of this movie. Anyway, that's Retronauts. If you enjoyed this discussion of aliens and aliens-related things, the good news for you is that you can listen to this podcast every freaking Monday on your favorite podcatcher

or other platform for listening to music and podcasts, except Spotify. We don't do that. Also, if you really enjoyed it and you would like to support us, And also benefit from your support, you can go to patreon.com slash retronauts. That's like retronaut as in a retro astronaut, not retro as in retro nothing. Go to patreon.com slash retronauts. And for $3 a month, you can subscribe to the show, get every episode a week early with a higher bit rate quality, no cross promotions or advertisements.

Or you can subscribe for $5 a month. And in addition to that, you get another episode every other Friday that's patron exclusive. And every weekend, you get a patron exclusive column and mini podcast by Diamond here, among, you know, some other occasional perks that show up. So that's, you know, for the cost of a venty frappuccino. And I guarantee that Retronauts is much healthier for you than that. So check it out, patreon.com slash Retronauts. That's my spiel.

Let's see. Jonathan, please, tell us where we can find your work and how we can support you and follow you on the internet and so forth. So my podcast, which is also part of the Greenlit podcast network, is Our Three Sense. That's O-U-R-T-R-E-C-E-E-C-E-N-T-S. I realized in hindsight that I'd called my podcast consisting of three homophones. So I do need to spell it. It's a video games podcast where me and two of my friends

have been counting down our top 100 favourite video games of all time. We're currently in our third season which is covering our top 10 games and we're breaking up the episodes by interviewing various people from the games industry as well

which has been a lot of fun. You can find all the episodes at www. www.hour3 cents.com on your podcast platform Facebook.com slash R3CC podcast on Instagram and Twitch. We've got a YouTube channel. Go there, search for Our 3 cents. You can find

loads of video content, streaming content, stuff like that. We also have a Patreon page, patreon.com slash Our3 cents. There's quite a few nice things are available there from like full bonus episodes exclusive to Patreon's deleted scenes, outtakes. There's bonus video content, there's access to the Patreon exclusive Discord channel. So that's pretty cool. And for Finally, we, well, if you like alien stuff, we have our own alien special coming out in celebration of the 35th anniversary of aliens, where we interviewed Keziah Burroughs, who's the actor who plays Amanda Ripley in Alien Isolation, the game. It's a really, really good episode. We talked to her a lot about her work in performance capture and some other games that

she's worked on and, yeah, revel in alien isolation. That's coming out on the 26th of July. or feel free to drop me a tweet at Jonathan Dunn. All right, and Diamond. Yes, so my name is Diamond Fight, and yes, beyond my retro's contribution, I am also on Twitter and Twitch as Fight Club, F-E-I-T, my last name, CLU-B, the noun, and lately I have been streaming a lot of Resident Evil and Mass Effect. Those are definitely games that take some influence from aliens, for sure. If you'd like to support me, of course, I welcome everyone to read my work at Retronauts,

but if you'd like to support me personally, I also have Patreon and Kofi, and it's also Fight Club on there. And yeah, I'm happy to be here, happy to revisit some fine, fine cinema that has completely sunk its prolongated mouths into every possible medium at this point. Right through its skull. Yep. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, doing stuff.

at Limited Run Games, and on Twitter as GameSpite, and creating things on YouTube, and of course doing stuff with Retronauts. A lot of things. I'm just doing things. It's wild. Anyway, that's it for this discussion of aliens. Thanks everyone for listening. If you are cool and want to listen to more Retronauts, good news.

There's more coming. We'll be back in a week. But in the meantime, someone please tell me how to get out of this chicken shit outfit. Game over, man. Alien, they say it's structural perfections matched only by its hostility. Even artificial persons are impressed. It praise our men. Don't need no special suit, don't need no no nukes,

and don't need no artillery to rip right through your chest. Aliens just stayed inside a living human host and have some concentrated acid for blood They mostly come at night yet Mostly their fate depends on whether there's an airlock whether they're in space and whether there's a chick who's just too fast to be cut But the pros have come to fight but the pros say they have They have to get a bell before 26 And nuke it from orbit like corporal hex

But they know Whoever said that there's no real monsters