20 Things You Didn’t Know About Alien: Isolation

Taking a closer look at what made Alien: Isolation a terrifying success.

alien isolation
Creative Assembly

Winner of numerous awards and ranking at the top of many gaming lists of 2014, Alien: Isolation has cemented itself as one of the most notable - and terrifying - video games of the last decade.

Set 15 years after the events of Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien, the video game sees players as engineer Amanda Ripley - the daughter of Alien's Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Determined to uncover what happened to her mother, Amanda finally gets her chance to find closure when she's offered a position on a crew to retrieve the flight recorder from her mother's ship (the Nostromo) when it's recovered by a salvage team and taken to the Sevastapol space station.

However, after arriving, she gets a first-hand experience of what happened to her mother when she encounters a Xenomorph for herself.

Contained within an atmospheric environment, evocative of the original 1979 film, Alien: Isolation delivered a nerve-shredding survival horror experience thanks to the alien's revolutionary AI system.

We all know that this is one of the most uncompromisingly frightening video games to date, but here are some other things that you probably didn't know about Alien: Isolation.

20. Amanda Is Modelled On Weaver's Mother, Who Was An Older Amanda In Aliens

alien isolation
Sega

Being Ellen's daughter, it only makes sense that the character model of Amanda would bear a resemblance to the actor who portrayed her mother for four films.

However, rather than basing the character model on Sigourney Weaver, the team at Creative Assembly based the character's appearance on Welsh actor Kezia Burrows - who provided the motion-capture for the character - alongside photographs of English actor Elizabeth Inglis - Sigourney's own mother - during her younger years.

Using Waver's mother instead of the Alien actor herself may seem like an odd choice, but this decision is closely connected to the film series.

In the director's cut of James Cameron's Aliens, Ellen is shown a photograph of her now-deceased 66-year-old daughter. And that picture is one of none other than Inglis.

It just goes to show just how much attention to detail went in to developing this game to make it as close to the series as possible.

Contributor
Contributor

Glasgow-based cinephile who earned a Masters degree in film studies to spend their time writing about cinema, video games, and horror.