Aliens: Colonial Marines is an upcoming first-person shooter set in the Aliens universe, being developed by Gearbox Software.
They are doing everything they can to make the game feel as close as possible to the Alien films, and even had famed designer Sydney Jay Mead (aka Syd Mead), who designed the vehicles for the films (as well as movies like BladeRunner among many others), design the game’s gear. The game will even include four-player co-op.
And now we have learned that in addition to all of the above, the game’s story is being written by the writers of Battlestar Galactica. According to an interview with shacknews, the writers kept themselves busy during the recent writers strike by creating “a whole season’s worth” of material for the Aliens: Colonial Marines game! Very impressive.
Here is the full quote below from Shacknew’s interview with Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford:
“One thing that’s cool is some of the people we’ve been able to work with to help us [on Aliens]. The guys that write the Battlestar Galactica series, Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, they wrote our script. They’re amazing guys. They gave us a lot, too. We could make a whole season of TV with the stuff they gave us. [laughs] We profited from the writer’s strike, let’s just put it that way. We talked with a lot of people, but those guys are so good.
And then a lot of the concept guys that helped make the movies. Like [Aliens concept artist] Syd Mead, that guy walks on water. And to be able to go to his studio, his house, and then have him draw a bunch of stuff. “Here’s when I designed the Sulaco back when we made the first movie. Here’s the original artwork. You want a copy, Brian?” And Brian’s like, “Yes.”
And now he’s designing all the new stuff, because the Sulaco’s a big ship and we only saw a bit of it, so you get the guy who designed it to design the rest of it. And he’s awesome, he designed so much stuff. And then like [concept artists] Keith Thompson, Craig Mullins.. anybody who knows these names knows what we’re talking about. This is no joke.
It’s a big team. And we’re also working with people from all over the world. We’ve been working with a lot of amazing talent at other studios. I don’t know how much of that will be used in PR, but there’s a lot of people who care about this franchise. The opportunity to build a dropship, or build a pulse rifle, or build a smart gun, that’s a pretty cool opportunity–a lot of artists would want to do that. So we have our core Gearbox team, but we’re also finding a lot of folks around the industry now, guys who are on top of their game.”