The sci-fi movie Alien Resurrection was released in 1997. The videogame for Sony’s PlayStation, published by Fox Interactive and developed by Argonaut Software in the UK, started development in 1996 but was not published until 2000. What happened?

Words by Richard Hewison

IN THE KNOW

» PUBLISHER: FOX INTERACTIVE

» DEVELOPER: ARGONAUT SOFTWARE

» RELEASED: 2000

» PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION

» GENRE: SURVIVAL HORROR

DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS

STARGLIDER II SYSTEM: ATARI ST, AMIGA, PC, MACINTOSH YEAR: 1988

STAR FOX SYSTEM: SNES YEAR: 1993

CROC: LEGEND OF THE GOBBOS (PICTURED) SYSTEM: PLAYSTATION, VARIOUS YEAR: 1997

» Jez San founded Argonaut Software in the Eighties and received an OBE in 2002.

The fourth movie in the Alien sci-fi horror series appeared in cinemas five and a half years after the melancholic Alien 3, and by the late-Nineties, several Hollywood film studios were having a go at videogame publishing, rather than licensing their IP to others. 20th Century Fox set up Fox Interactive in 1994, founded by former Time Warner Interactive executive Ted Hoff. Over the next nine years, Fox published nearly 50 titles including original games as well as TV and film properties based on Die Hard, The X-Files and Alien Resurrection.

Working at Fox Interactive in Los Angeles in the mid-Nineties was experienced games producer Gary Sheinwald, who was a close friend of Jez San, founder of Argonaut Software in the UK. Started in the early Eighties from his bedroom, Jez had developed Argonaut into a multimillion-pound plc by the late-Nineties, creating globally successful games like two Starglider titles, flight simulator Birds Of Prey and helping Nintendo to develop the Super FX GPU for the SNES console, as well as the phenomenally successful Star Fox game that first used it.

When the idea of a game based on Alien Resurrection was first proposed at Fox, Gary knew who to recommend. Argonaut already had a working relationship with Fox, thanks to its multi-platform 3D title Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos. Most of the development team that had recently completed the unrelated game Alien Odyssey for Philips Media Inc were moved onto the official Alien Resurrection game. At that early stage the team had little information on the plot, and so Argonaut used the time to develop a game engine, employing a top-down 3D view, similar to the recent PlayStation release Loaded. As it happens, that approach fitted in with early versions of the screenplay, as Gary recalls. “The game was initially developed as a top-down parallax scroller because the original movie idea was for the main spacecraft to be like a tower block in space, on many levels.” Work began on the game levels as a research and development exercise, and a robust top-down system complete with a level editor was in place early on. Argonaut also got to work on a game that was to briefly appear in the film, and that work initially took precedence over the licensed game that was to follow. By early 1997, film production was well underway in Hollywood, making it the first Alien movie in the series not to be made in England.