The impact of the Alien films on the world of video games is so large as to maybe be outsized. Its dialogue and visual references are so iconic, they creep into game design and game dialogue in all kinds of different ways.
 
 
But when it comes to games based directly on the films, it's only been recently that developers have been able to stretch their wings in the world originally birthed by Ridley Scott, Dan O'Bannon, and Ronald Shusett (to say nothing of H.R. Giger's overpowering visual design). Creative Assembly won critical acclaim with the release of Alien: Isolation, and now the team at PSG SUPER GUILD has gone after the "S" tacked on the franchise name with Aliens: Fireteam Elite
 
In Fireteam Elite, players take on the role of their own customized Colonial Marine, and join up in teams of three for a survival co-op adventure that builds on the popularity of games like Left 4 Dead. The game does a solid job marrying the film's skin-of-your-teeth survival story with an array of interesting Xenomorph types types and encounters that feel at home in this more relaxed, social genre.
 
With the game now out in the wild (and hunting you in the air ducts) studio co-founder Craig Zinkievich and Creative Director Matt Highison were down for a chat about PSG SUPER GUILD' Alien-focused inspiration, and how they built on years of experience in MMORPGs to translate one of the biggest Science Fiction films of the 1980s into a successful game.
 
 
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity
 
What was your guiding star for making this game feel true to the movies that people are here to experience?
 
Zinkievich: A great question that has like 18 different complicated answers to it.
 
At its core, it's about going back to the movies and picking the fantasy that you want to have exist within the game. Ridley Scott's Alien is very much a horror movie, and Alien Isolation did a fantastic job of getting that kind of—mano a mano, Ripley against Xenomorph sort of feel to it.
 
For us, we were really excited because of our background and the games we like to play---we like to have those co-op online experiences. And for us that means you go to Aliens, the Colonial Marines, tons of Xenomorphs, tons of firefights. Cameron's movie really is an action film, so that was where we gravitated as gamers. As much as we loved Isolation and played that because we're huge fans o the franchise, we want to be Colonial Marines in this universe.
 
That was the initial guiding star. Picking those scenes in the movies where the Marines have their back against the wall and Xenomorphs just pouring in—that was our touch point within the franchise itself.
 
The franchise is vast. We're not trying to make all the fantasies that exist, we're doing that small sliver and trying to make that fun.
 
The Xenomorphs drove us to actually expand the co-op survival shooter genre. You're demanded to make sure that these aren't just zombies running at you. They're crawling on the walls, they're coming out of the ceiling and jumping youf rom the side. They have more AI flavor to them, they have those personalities. So I think at the same time you could say the franchise is hard to work with, but it also give you the mandate to push the genre yuo9're working in, and make it more cooler, and more fun.
 
Highison: It's definitely "Aliens" with the underline. I'm sure Disney would be mad if we put that in the logo—the underlined "S."
 
 
We get an opportunity to play with a lot of different Xenomorphs right? We don't just have to have the one that's the be-all end-all. If you start from the place of "how do we make this fun," but also we get to use the license to the fullest, we have all sorts of different types of Xenomorph horror in the game.
 
There's the drone, that gives the fantasy of being hunted and chsed throughout the level. Spitters give the fantasy of being attacked from anywhere. Praetorians are just a beast that's invincible to bullets, and eggs give us the horror of watching your step and slowing down, carefully looking around every corner.
 
We didn't have to pack all of that into one singular being. It really let us separate that out and make each part something fun for people to experience.
 
Zinkievich: Maybe we're stepping around the question about what the guiding star is, I think, because maybe we are it. We are huge fans of the franchise—the movies, the comics, the novels, the action figures, the RPG, the other video games. We loved it before we started working on it. The co-op survival shooter genre is something we as a studio, we play on lunch breaks.
 
Maybe the guiding star is us. We're making a game that we really want to play as Aliens fans and co-op survival shooter fans. That might be the egotistical answer, but as game developers, this is the game we want to play. Hopefully other people feel the same.
 
I think there's something important about having faith in more than the license—in having faith in the sort of people you're working with. And it goes beyond game design, doesn't it? When we're talking about improving quality of life at game studios, when we're talking about improving workplace conditions, that's always part of the answer. It's not just a brand, it's the people
 
Zinkievich: I think it's partially on the license, but I think it's also that it's a mistake to take a license that you yourself aren't a huge fan of, or your team. We had to make sure that the team was excited before we signed up to do it. Because in the end, fi you're not building something that you want, or something that you're in love with, it's going to suffer.
 
We've been lucky. I realize that most game developers don't get this opportunity to get to work on something you want to play and want to experience. But this is something that is pretty core to Geekdom, and I think a lot of game developers would be really excited to work on this.