Since the 80s, there have been countless video games released based on the Alien movies. One of these was 2000’s Alien Resurrection, developed by Argonaut Games and based on the 1997 film of the same name. The game’s release had originally been intended to coincide with the movie’s release, but developmental hiccups delayed that plan by several years.

Fox Interactive, the game’s publisher, didn’t give any strict guidelines for the game and so, initially, Alien Resurrection was designed as a shooter with a top-down view similar to that of the recently released sci-fi game Loaded. A new engine and level editor for the licensed Alien game was created, and for a year the team worked towards a 1997 launch for the original PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Windows.

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Recently, a number of older builds of the PlayStation version of Alien Resurrection have appeared on the Internet Archive and other online sites, though it’s not clear who made these builds available or why. The game with its original overhead view is among the leaked files and, theoretically, it should be playable using a PSX emulator for PC. As of yet, however, no gameplay footage of anybody successfully emulating the leaked files with a top-down point of view has made its way online.

In addition to the overhead view, Alien Resurrection went through a couple of other stylistic metamorphoses during its development. In the beginning, members of the team began work on graphics for a game they believed would be based on Alien vs. Predator, and a prototype with sprites and hand-drawn textures was created.

Then the team at Argonaut discovered that they had a year to create a tie-in game for Alien Resurrection, and Fox Interactive began to send boxes of scripts, storyboards, and raw film footage every week to help with the game’s creation. The problem with this, according to some members of the development team, was that the script and storyboards changed constantly and, therefore, so did the game’s direction.

After a year in development, the game was approximately 60 percent complete when the higher-ups at Argonaut Games changed course entirely. Alien Resurrection would now be a 3D third-person action-adventure game, inspired by a newly released, groundbreaking title called Tomb Raider. This meant that everything created up to that point had to be scrapped, and a private screening of the movie in November 1997 didn’t help morale, either. Many team members weren’t thrilled with the film and, already stressed by a looming release deadline, about a third of the team quit the project entirely.

By late 1998, most of the development team was unhappy with the 3D third-person version of the game. A decision was made to switch once again, this time to a first-person shooter, and that’s the version of Alien Resurrection that ultimately launched in October 2000.

Alien Resurrection is available exclusively on the original PlayStation.

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Source: DSO Gaming, Eurogamer