“The first Alien film was the main reference point and we wanted to honor that,” says Simon Ridge, the animator responsible for the alien’s movements. “There’s not much of the actual alien itself on screen, so it was about evoking the feeling you had when it was on screen, which was that it was quite strange. Pretty scary.
“I started looking for different things that evoked that feeling of eeriness and strangeness. I watched Nosferatu, the original old school Dracula. We also looked at dinosaurs and saw how their feet were on the ground. I remember putting a lot of effort into making the feet feel really graceful. And given the alien’s ability to be very, very fast at the same time, I thought that would add to these strange contrasts. It was about creating a mixture of all sorts of things and then hoping that the fusion would create this weirdness, this oddity.”
New generation of fans
Animation was just one ingredient in the dynamic cocktail of fear that Creative Assembly put together. They have developed a dynamic and reactive audio system because unlike most survival horror games Alien: Isolation was neither choreographed nor written. They reproduced the lo-fi sci-fi art movement that defined the films, from the monitors with clunky buttons to the dirt and grime encrusting the metal walls.
