10 Years Later, Alien: Isolation Still Benefits From One Vital Design Decision

Even a decade after its release, Alien: Isolation remains a standout experience.

It's a monumental example of adaptation in video games, thanks to the fact that developer Creative Assembly was packed with fans of Ridley Scott's 1979 film, Alien, and an incredibly tight, detailed focus on the fidelity of the movie's setting. It also set a bar in horror game design, with the alien operating on a set of reactive artificial intelligence rules that made it terrifyingly unpredictable and unstoppably lethal.

It also stands apart from other games based on the Alien franchise, which tend to ignore Scott's original film in favor of iterations on Aliens, James Cameron's sequel, which moves away from straight horror to feature more action--and a bunch of well-outfitted, smack-talking Marines. Creative Assembly instead pitched an Alien game, not an Aliens game, one that would focus on making the creature feel like an unstoppable, unknowable predator instead of a horde of animals players would mow down with pulse rifles.

"The goal was to transport you back to that time and place, that 1970s view of the future, the kind of lo-fi sci-fi aesthetic of that first movie, allowing you to encounter and try and survive against that original alien--where just one alien could be terrifying, which is really different in terms of video games," director Al Hope told me in a recent interview. "The fact that you can play it today and get that experience, get that feeling--as part of the team that made it, that's so rewarding."

Alien: Isolation recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and rather than fade into obscurity as time marched on and new game releases took attention away, it instead seems to have grown in popularity over the years since its release. Streamers and content creators seem to keep finding the game, and new ports have been released on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android. The Switch version also got a fairly expansive physical collector's edition release from Limited Run Games last year--fully nine years after Alien: Isolation first came out.

It seems that there's not just a fanbase for Alien: Isolation, but a growing demand for it. On the anniversary, Creative Assembly announced it has started work on an Alien: Isolation sequel, with Hope returning as its director.

"What's really incredible is that it seems to have grown and snowballed over time, over the last decade, as more people have found it and people talk about it," Hope said. "It's still in the conversation around the scariest games and best Alien game, or whatever. One of the really rewarding things is people are still finding it for the first time today, and having a really fantastic experience. And, you know, considering it's a relatively old game now, or could be considered a relatively old game. And, yeah, I think that's just a testament to the fantastic work that the team did, because it was a labor of love. But, yeah, it's just immensely rewarding that people are still playing and talking about it today."

What makes Alien: Isolation so frightening is how much the game reacts to the player's actions, beginning with the impressive AI running its alien. The creature is designed to seek players out using its senses, and when it can't find you, to search the station in a fairly systematic way. Another AI, an underlying director, will sometimes direct the alien in your direction if you've gone too long without an encounter, or away from you if the tension has been high for a long time.

Other systems also work dynamically to increase the tension and fear when things get intense. Sound design is a huge part of what makes Alien: Isolation so effective, and it's full of reactive elements to ratchet up the fear--including ramping up the music as the situation with the alien gets more and more harrowing.

"It was interesting for us because we had this idea that the creature wasn't going to be choreographed and scripted, which is what typically occurs in this kind of game," Hope explained. "And I seem to remember this kind of penny drop moment where we realized, well, we can't just ask the composers to create a wav file that we'll just hit play on and it will play out, because it will completely disconnect with what's happening. Because the creature and the drama and the action is completely dynamic and unpredictable, we're gonna have to do something completely different, and that felt like, wow, okay, this has a really big impact on everything, and especially the music, because the music needs to be able to support tension, anticipation, action, and we don't know what's going to happen."

We kept getting, 'We need more deaths. Everyone's dying all the time. We need more deaths.' Like 90 different death cues."

"So much is going on under the hood with the music, to get on with the mixing of all the ambient sounds and local sounds," he continued. "We're doing some really fun and pretty clever things, where, when the alien is getting close, we might push the music so we have this emotional content that's kind of being more present than what the player's receiving. But, say there's an alarm going on in the room, we'll actually duck that down, so it's almost like we're replicating the player's focus on the alien so everything else doesn't matter. It's doing really quite brilliant, interesting things to really enhance the experience. And so what you're receiving is this constant, ever-fluctuating soundscape that's being remixed in real time."

In keeping with the heightened demand for Alien: Isolation, the 10th anniversary also saw another long-awaited release: the game's soundtrack. It's now available on streaming services, and a vinyl and cassette edition are available for preorder from iam8bit.

Creating music that could work dynamically with those systems was a challenge unto itself, as composers Joe Henson and Alexis Smith, who together make up English duo The Flight, told me. Alien: Isolation wasn't the duo's first game--they'd previously worked on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and LittleBigPlanet. But on previous games, the pair was learning how music in games worked. Isolation was the first big game where they were able to do exactly what they wanted, Smith said, and they were drawn to its low-fi, '70s-inspired aesthetic.

While Alien: Isolation's approach to music seemed like a complex problem to solve at the time, the pair said, it didn't actually end up being that difficult to write music that could be used dynamically. It mostly required creating different layers of tracks for each level: an exploration layer for when the player wasn't under threat, a more intense layer for when the alien was present but not hunting you, and a "you're about to die" layer, Smith said.

"What I remember mostly is making this third layer, which was the 'you're about to die' layer, and it's all very well, making a five-minute ambient exploration piece," he explained. "In order for it to be able to go into this 'you're about to die' at any point, we had to make a five-minute 'you're about to die' layer. We were young and green and really wanting to put our mark on the first game we were going to be proud of, so we did these completely bespoke five minutes. We didn't copy bits. We did ups and downs and going with what was happening in the music. And it works really well. But they were exhausting [to write]."

"And loads of deaths," Henson chimed in, laughing. "We kept getting, 'We need more deaths. Everyone's dying all the time. We need more deaths.' Like 90 different death cues."

The music in Alien: Isolation is a big way in which the game links to the movie and works to convey its tone. Isolation's music uses portions of composer Jerry Goldsmith's score from the movie, but as The Flight have noted in the past, there's not actually that much music in Alien, period.

Isolation separates itself by using some elements of Goldsmith's original score, "threading that DNA" of Alien throughout the game, as Hope put it, while also adding its own sound with the use of other period-appropriate instruments, like synthesizers and electronic elements.

"That was an interesting discovery actually, while we're working on it, where, when we felt we were losing the Alien sound, we could just drop pepper in those--there are such strong sounds, not just motifs, just sounds from Alien from the score, that we could very easily kind of bring in and bring us back," Henson said.

We never thought about trying to compromise."

"It's not like a theme song; it doesn't, like, repeat," Smith said, to which Henson added that the memorable musical elements of Alien are more like "little bits" and small musical phrases. Other elements of the score, like clicking sounds and different noises, as well as analog elements from the equipment and instruments used to create those sounds, ended up being very useful in keeping Isolation's soundscape feeling like Alien.

"We kind of saw them as almost like samples that we could throw in with other stuff," Smith continued. "And because we love that film so much, and we love that score and everything, that's the way we kind of treated it. Not with too much reverence that we wouldn't do anything to it or change anything, but we knew how to--you know, as long as the electronics we were adding, as long as the stuff we were adding was as crusty as the computers on the space station, then we thought it would work."

Getting that soundtrack released "has been an epic struggle," Hope said. A version has been ready to go for the last 10 years--Henson and Smith created a listening version akin to a film score back when Alien: Isolation was in production--but the complex web of stakeholders, copyright holders, and contracts held it back.

The situation around game soundtracks has changed during that period as well, Henson said. The business of selling game soundtracks has grown significantly, which increased the incentives to finally make Isolation's available.

For The Flight, the release is a big one. Of all the games they've worked on, Henson said, Alien: Isolation is the one the duo gets asked about most often.

"We've got a 1 million sales thing here [for Alien: Isolation]," Smith said. "I don't know what the sales have got to, but it doesn't touch some of the games we've done. But for fan adoration and respect, from our peers, as well, it's the one."

"The big thing about this game is, this kind of launched us," Henson said. "So it's a really special soundtrack for us. I still go back and play the game with people I know. I've just actually given it to a friend of mine whose kids have just got into Alien. They're like 18, 19, and one of my friend's kids is absolutely obsessed with it. And now the calls I've been getting are brilliant. The whole family are terrified."

"I finally played the game with my eldest son last year, but he couldn't. He wouldn't," Smith added. "He plays games all the time. He wouldn't play it on his own. He refused to play on his own when it was dark, because I turn out all the lights. He was shit scared. I feel like there are a lot of people like that."

Replaying Alien: Isolation today, it absolutely holds up--the game is still as unpredictable and frightening as it was in 2014. But while it seems to continue to find its audience, there was a point at release that it seemed to struggle. Review aggregator Metacritic puts Alien: Isolation at an average score of 79, but there are scores that run the gamut, from several 10 out of 10s and 9 out of 10s, to a few that fall significantly lower. At the time, GameSpot gave Alien: Isolation a 6.5 out of 10. IGN reviewed it at a 6 out of 10. Reviewers lauded the game's fidelity in bringing players into its world, but some struggled with the difficulty and dealing with the alien itself.

I asked Hope if, looking back, there was anything he wished he and the team had done differently. His answer was short: "Ultimately, on balance, no."

I finally played the game with my eldest son last year, but he couldn't. He wouldn't. He was shit scared. I feel like there are a lot of people like that."

"I think we knew, by its nature, we weren't trying to please everybody, you know?" he said. "Some players might think it's too hard. So do we then make it much easier? But then the people who want something more of a challenge will be disappointed. So that's not even really a discussion we had, because we wanted to create this Alien experience which presented a certain level of intrinsic challenge if we were going to take it the approach that we did. ...We never thought about trying to compromise."

The uncompromising vision was, ultimately, the correct call. It didn't happen all at once, but Alien: Isolation has left its mark both on the extended Alien universe and on the horror game landscape at large. Fede Alvarez, the director of the newest Alien movie, Alien: Romulus, has cited Isolation as an inspiration for the kind of horror he wanted to conjure up with the movie, and he even included the iconic emergency phone save points from Isolation as Easter eggs in the film. Amanda Ripley, Isolation's protagonist, has also become a recurring character in ongoing Alien comics and other media.

Other horror developers have started to take pages from Creative Assembly's approach to its creature, too, leading to some terrifying new experiences. Games such as Amnesia: The Bunker and The Outlast Trials feel like different riffs on the idea, putting players in the same kinds of tense situations with unpredictable, unkillable antagonists.

The Switch and mobile ports, the collector's edition, and the soundtrack release all suggest a demand for Alien: Isolation that's been building, not receding. That goes for the sequel, too--Hope wouldn't talk about it, but said a continual call of a sequel is something Creative Assembly has received every day since the game's release.

Hope said he and the Alien: Isolation team are "immensely proud" of what they achieved with the game.

"The team did what we set out to achieve, which was to create that authentic experience that felt like it had never been available before--and we were just desperate to experience that and play it ourselves," he said. "Ten years later, people are still picking up, for the first time, having an amazing experience and talking about wanting more. So, you know, we're really fortunate for the people out there. They've really connected with what we did."