Electric Dreams offers up a retro delight that's completely Alien

Having failed miserably to bring Back To The Future to life on home computers, no one was expecting great things when Electric Dreams announced that it was working on Aliens: The Computer Game. And yet the result was one of the finest film licences of the Eighties. Martyn Carroll talks to designer Mark Eyles to find out what went right.

The display may be monochrome, but the Spectrum version displays some nicely shaded graphics.

Back in the 8-bit days there was lots of scary stuff, in the ‘ugh’ sense of the word at least. In-game graphics were often scary: all blocky and garish. Difficulty levels were scary too, with one-touch instant deaths compounded by a lack of lives.

Loading times were also scary thanks to our reliance on standard audio cassettes as the storage medium of choice. And World Cup Carnival was definitely scary. However, there were no games – perhaps besides Cosmi’s Forbidden Forest titles and the odd gothic text adventure – that really cranked up the tension and chilled the blood. There were no truly scary games except for Aliens.

Those who braved Aliens will surely remember the first time they played the game and felt the fear. Having arrived at the base on LV-426, you selected a member of your six-strong team and boldly ventured forth. You passed through several similar-looking rooms, getting further and further away from your team.

The queen alien, as seen on the Amstrad CPC.

No signs of any alien activity. And then your motion detector began to beep, slowly at first, but becoming quicker. You spun around the room, looking for the life form. And then you found it, rushing toward you with its jaws wide open. The beeping became a constant tone and before you could react, the screen blinked out in a shower of static. One man down, but at least now you knew a little about your enemy. It was large, fast and liked to eat your head. Some bug hunt this was turning out to be.

TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS
Aliens was released in December 1986, three months after the movie hit UK cinemas. It was published by Electric Dreams, a fairly new software house founded by former Quicksilva managing director Rod Cousens with backing from Activision. Unusually for the time, a full team was put in place to develop the new title. Mark Eyles was tasked with designing the game while Jon Dean was the producer, overseeing the various coders and artists.

“Activision had acquired a number of film licences at the time and Rod asked me to design the Aliens game,” says Mark, who had worked with Rod previously as Quicksilva’s creative director. This was months before the film was finished, so with just the script and the original Alien movie for reference, Mark spent two weeks putting a rough design together.

… continued

Aliens: Japan

The UK was given two Aliens games – Electric Dreams’ original and the US version. It was a similar story in Japan; only instead of the US version our friends in the Far East received a Japanese-only Aliens game for the MSX in 1987.

More intriguing still is that the game was developed by Square and is widely believed to be the role-playing behemoth’s first and only platformer. Playing as Ripley (who appears to be either naked or sporting a pink shellsuit), you bounce along the planet surface, Mario-style, shooting face-huggers, adult aliens and, yes, killer snakes.

It’s completely mad, but the soundtrack by well-known Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu is excellent, and the end-of-level boss battles against the queen are grandiose in typical Square style.