Rebellion and Atari tell us all about making the Jaguar's cult creature feature

The Alien movies have been one of the most influential of all film franchises for the videogame industry. A key inspiration for the ‘bio-organic’ style of a huge number of 2D titles in the Eighties and Nineties, notably the ‘Giger-esque’ visuals of R-Type and Turrican, the distinctive, dark futurism of Ridley Scott’s original Alien inspired countless budding pixel-artists. The saga has spawned dozens of licensed arcade and domestic videogame titles, from platform shooters to scrolling beat-’em-ups and lightgun games, and a range of successful first-person corridor shooters on multiple platforms. The Jaguar outing of Alien Vs Predator represents perhaps the biggest leap the licence ever made in the gaming world, throwing in Fox’s second most famous creature, the Predator, and presenting, for the first time, a realistic, first-person rendition of close-combat inter-species warfare.

The interactive clash of franchises promised a whole new level of immersion for movie fans – facehuggers bursting onto the screen, Predators decloaking right before your eyes, and the whiplash tail of xenomorphic terrors, all experienced from a perspective planted firmly amid the chaos. Developed across three separate continents, with design and programming teams from Oxford-based developer Rebellion, and support from Atari in Sunnyvale, California, the game was an intriguing, and sometimes strained, exercise in Anglo-American relations. At its best, Alien Vs Predator re-creates aspects of the strongest two Alien movies, combining the fear and tension of the original film with the all-out gunplay of Aliens. But at the time of its inception, the Atari Jaguar was only at prototype stage, and it wasn’t even a certainty that the game would be a first-person shooter, or even appear on the system at all.

Rebellion’s Jason Kingsley remembers the moment he first learnt of the existence of Atari’s ‘top secret’ console, evidently a surprise to even Atari’s own UK-based personnel at that time. “We went to see Alistair Bodin of Atari in their huge office building and warehouse in Slough (complete with brown Hessian wallpaper and not many people in the office), to present a 3D dragon flight simulation for their new Falcon computer,” he reveals. “He thought it looked great and asked Bob Gleadow, Atari’s UK managing director, to come down to see it right away. When Bob saw it, he commented that it could be a great title for their new console. Alistair was surprised and asked, ‘What new console?’ Bob replied, ‘The Jaguar’. It was the first anyone outside of a very small group in North America had heard of the new machine.”

James Hampton, Atari’s producer for Alien Vs Predator, reveals that the project originally started on Atari’s handheld console – the Lynx. “When I first started working at Atari, in the autumn of 1992, one of my first assignments was taking over as producer on a number of Lynx games. One of these was Alien Vs Predator, being developed by UK-based company Images. The Lynx Alien Vs Predator team had been assembling a demo that featured a game with a Colonial Marine and a Predator going through corridors of an Alien-infested space station. The Lynx games got put on the back burner, however, as Atari was shifting its production efforts over to the Jaguar launch.”

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