10 Video Games That Answer MAJOR Movie Questions
6. Aliens: Colonial Marines - Is Hicks Really Dead?
Amongst the last decade of Alien video game spinoffs, there have been several that play into the film franchise's lore and do some interesting things. Alien Isolation, Creative Assembly's interquel survival horror title, jumps off from a deleted scene from Aliens (1986) that shows the deceased daughter of Ellen Ripley. The game, in a stroke of genius, put the player in the space-boots of Amanda, searching for her missing Mother.
It's perhaps Colonial Marines however that provides a more surprising change to canon. Despite being a detestable and infamously bug-laden mistake of a video game, it at least undoes a reviled move that the films made.
Alien 3 begins with the shocking offscreen deaths of several major characters from the proceeding film, chief among them Ripley's surrogate daughter Newt and the beloved Corporal Hicks - a decision that confused and infuriated fans for decades.
Colonial Marines, in its DLC chapter Stasis Interrupted, reintroduces Hicks after he has been held by Weyland-Yutani for months. Apparently, he was awoken from cryosleep between Aliens and Alien 3 by soldiers and, in an ensuing scuffle, one of men who disturbed his long sleep wound up in his pod, explaining the body found when the ship crashed.
Colonial Marines is debatably canon but either way many fans will take this course correction of the beloved Hicks over Alien 3’s unceremonious and unfair death, especially since Michael Biehn returned to reprise the role.