Aliens: Colonial Marines Benefits from Fox Creative Freedom

The developers at Gearbox who are working on Aliens: Colonial Marines have been given a lot of freedom by 20th Century Fox, the company that holds the rights to the intellectual property based on the well-known series of movies.

Brian Martel, who is the chief creative officer at Gearbox, has talked to Gamespot about how the developers are working with license holder Fox, saying, “They’ve given us a lot of freedom at 20th Century Fox. Fox has been really cool about it. They want us to stay within the canon of the movies, so this game takes place after Alien 3,”

He added, “But it is a spiritual sequel to Aliens, so it really lets us be in the boots of the Colonial Marines. But Fox also let us delve into the aliens hive life-cycle and those kind of things. So we’ve been able to dig in there and kinda create new aliens that make sense for gameplay because making a game is very different than making a movie, so you need different requirements.”

It seems that the Gearbox team is pretty interested in digging as deep as possible into the history of the aliens, both in order to create the sort of believable game universe that players love and so that they can create the backstory needed to introduce new types of enemies to the game.

Variety is a big selling point for Gearbox and they simply could not just use the types of aliens that were portrayed in the movies.

The developers are also saying that, apart from Fox, they are also listening to the fans that talk about the game on the official forums and are making game design decisions based on the feedback they are offering.

Publisher SEGA and the team at Gearbox were quiet about Colonial Marines for some time, prompting some to believe that the game was canceled, but a launch date is now set for 2012.