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Weaver, 'Alien' cast reprising roles in new game

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Sigourney Weaver and the cast of "Alien" are virtually returning to the starship Nostromo.

The actress who portrayed unflappable officer Ellen Ripley in the "Alien" film franchise is reprising her role in "Alien: Isolation," an upcoming video game set after the events of the original 1979 film. Weaver, who recorded new dialogue for the game, says she picked up right where she left off as tough-as-nails Ripley in filmmaker Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece.

"It was eerie how quickly it happened," Weaver told The Associated Press during a recent interview. "Honestly. I had to start with this sort of sign-off, 'This is Lieutenant Ripley of the starship Nostromo.' You know, that paragraph. I felt like no time had passed. It was really strange, actually. If anything, it was more affecting to me to read it again 35 years later."

The bonus "Crew Expendable" and "Last Survivor" levels, which will be available to those who pre-order the game, will allow players to portray Nostromo crew members Ripley, Dallas (Tom Skerritt) or Parker (Yaphet Kotto) as they explore the doomed ship and coordinate their efforts with Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) and Ash (Ian Holm) to lure the menacing alien into the airlock.

If there's Joansy DLC, that'd certainly explain why none of the lights in the game work properly.

There's been far too much pain with the last few Alien games to make me want to preorder this without seeing some reviews first.

Exclusive pre-order content, you say?

I can hear the alien breathing.

I’ve played lots of videogames, lots of run-and-gun shooters in which I happily charge down a corridor into certain death. Not this time. I’ve got my back pressed against the wall of an abandoned spaceship, and I’m inching down a hallway, my head darting left and right, looking for danger everywhere.

And I wonder, is this the one? Is this the Oculus Rift demo where I rip the headset off my face and bolt, terrified, out of the room?

I don’t get scared by horror movies or horror videogames. Sure, you can startle the hiccups out of me with a well-timed jump scare, but that only proves my lizard brain is firing on all cylinders. For the most part, I feel a pronounced disconnect between the frightening scenario onscreen and the safety of my living room. I don’t understand how some of my friends cannot bear to even pick up the controller and walk down a hallway in Resident Evil.

So it came as quite a surprise when I found myself so truly on edge that I almost lost it while playing Sega’s Alien: Isolation demo on Oculus Rift. The game, shown at E3 this year, is a custom VR prototype based on the survival horror game coming to PC and consoles October 7. More than that, though, it’s another compelling demonstration of how Oculus Rift has the potential to make gaming so immersive that the fantasy becomes reality.

Sega won’t say whether it plans to make the Oculus version a full-fledged consumer product, but it would be crazy not to. I’d played VR demos in which I truly believed I had been transported, but also demos where I felt like I was watching a bad movie on a really huge screen. Alien: Isolation was very much the former. The clever hook of the console game—exploring a lonesome world inhabited only by you and a lone alien, which you spend the entire game avoiding—is a perfect fit for Oculus.

“Like everyone else, we got very excited by the idea of Oculus Rift when it was first going into the Kickstarter,” said Al Hope, creative lead of developer The Creative Assembly’s console division. His team already was working on Isolation when Oculus launched its Kickstarter drive two years ago, and it seemed the two would work well together. Several Creative Assembly developers backed the crowdfunding drive, and they got Isolation running on Rift as soon as their initial development kits arrived.

Sitting down for the demo, I endured the now-familiar ritual of having an Oculus rep place the development kit over my head before clamping a pair of headphones over my ears. And then it began.

Suddenly, I’m walking down a quiet, seemingly deserted hallway on an abandoned spaceship. The demo runs on DK2, the latest version of the Oculus development hardware, so it is clean, vivid, smooth. Lifelike, in other words, and utterly believable.

I’m admiring the steel grey detailing of the hallway, the hum of the distant machinery reverberating through the ship, and how it all feels a bit like a VR version of Metroid Prime when something catches my eye. Uh, is that a dead body at the end of the hall? Yes. Yes, it is. I start getting anxious: Is this guy going to come back to life and jump-scare me? How close do I want to get? I approach him, cautiously. I find myself suddenly worrying about what might be behind me.

“Hey, turn on your flashlight,” the Oculus rep says, just loud enough to break reality into this alternate world. Like a moron I do. Holy crap now there’s light shining on the dead guy’s face. He’s slumped against a console, his vacant eyes staring ahead down the hallway I’d just walked. I don’t like looking at this. It’s a queasy, uncanny sensation. I move on, more slowly.

The Rift added a level of interaction and immersiveness to Alien: Isolation that even its developers did not expect. There’s a crate in the hallway. As in console games, I can press a button to crouch behind it. I don’t think to do so, but Hope told me later that I could have lifted my butt just a bit, elevating my head and peering over the crate without without giving away my position.

“You can just, millimeters over the top of the environment, peek at the world around you,” he said. More such opportunities revealed themselves to Hope and his team as they play-tested their game with Oculus added in. A pile of massive concrete pipes strewn about a construction area provide a measure of cover in the console game, but Oculus lets you lean in and peer through individual pipes. You can hide in lockers like a frightened nerd in the console game, but Oculus lets you lean toward the vents in the door to glimpse the hallway beyond. While crawling through an air vent, you can crane your neck to look around the corner.

These aren’t features Creative Assembly deliberately programmed into the game’s design—they simply happened once they dropped Oculus support into their existing code. As they come upon these fortuitous accidents, the team is polishing them up so they work even better. “It’s a really physical experience,” Hope says.

I was about to learn just how true that is.

I INCHED SIDEWAYS DOWN THE CORRIDOR, MY HEAD DARTING LEFT AND RIGHT, SCANNING FOR THREATS.
After I determined the dead body was not going to do anything, I saw something that surely was: H.R. Giger’s unmistakable alien, wandering the hall in search of prey. In search of me.

For now, it didn’t notice me. But I was on alert. I was looking everywhere for an escape route. I wanted to be anywhere but here, inside a spaceship with it. My brain started fighting itself. I had to consciously remind myself it wasn’t real, it was just a game. And in that moment I started to think about the videos I’ve seen of grown men playing horror games on the Rift and tearing the headset off in terror. I contemplate what would happen if I did exactly that.

I continue down the hallway. It’s no longer the casual saunter I’d so easily affected when the demo began. My back is to the wall, and I am inching down the corridor, trying not to make the slightest sound, my head darting left and right, scanning for threats. And then it happens: The alien finds me. I turn to my left to see him skittering toward me on all fours.

I didn’t think to run, and wouldn’t have gotten far if I had. It raised a spindly hand, claws sharp as razors, and brought it down. Game over.

I removed the headset, calmly, and pondered what I’d just experienced. After getting over my initial feeling of accomplishment over having mostly kept my cool, I was just blown away by how quickly and thoroughly Isolation on Oculus had pulled me into the experience, and shifted that experience from “hey, cool, virtual reality!” to something approaching actual fear.

“It’s really interesting, going to watch people play and seeing them initially look around quite naturally, being interested in the environment,” said Hope. “And then as the alien gets closer, you see their body physically react. They become tense. And then when the alien does ambush them, they reel back physically in their seats.” One player, he said, upon being attacked by the alien, threw their head back in a desperate attempt to avert their eyes from the carnage.

And yes, they have had testers rip off the Rift, throw it across the room, and run out screaming.

And yes, they have had testers rip off the Rift, throw it across the room, and run out screaming.

I guess there are people out there who are that feeble-minded. Unless every story ever about people running out of cinemas showing The Exorcist was just made up.

Sounds amazing. You wouldn't catch me playing System Shock 2 on one of those things. It was bad enough on a shitty old CRT.

The acid test for the difference in fear response types is The Blair Witch Project I find, personally that shit me right up

I don't play scary games (or watch scary films really) as i'm too much of a wuss, but interestingly not because of my "lizard brain" response. I'm actually pretty much unshockable when it comes to things like that, my fear comes from what I imagine rather than what I experience.

The acid test for the difference in fear response types is The Blair Witch Project I find, personally that shit me right up

Sigourney Weaver on Alien: Isolation – 'It's going to be wild'

They say don't meet your heroes – and usually they're right. Work on a film magazine for a few weeks and you soon discover that the actors you once idolised are often spoiled, petulant monsters who would rather be anywhere else in the world than in stuffy hotel room answering your dumb questions.

Then Sega asked if I wanted to interview Sigourney Weaver.

Due out in October, Alien: Isolation is a terrifying survival horror video game, set 15 years after the events of Ridley Scott's original movie. A remote space station has picked up a distress call from the Nostromo and now contact has been lost with the facility. In an ironic act, Weylan Yutani has sent out Ripley's daughter Amanda to investigate. When she arrives, she discovers something has gotten on board the dark and claustrophobic station. Something … alien.

Early previews of the game have been hugely positive – it is a nightmarishly tense adventure; with Ripley playing a long cat-and-mouse game against a cruelly relentless xenomoprh sporting advanced artificial intelligence. There are no pulse rifles, no massive shoot-outs. Just exploration and fear.
Return of the Nostromo gang

In July, Sega announced that developer Creative Assembly would be adding two bonus missions, both set during the original Alien movie. In "Crew Expendable" the player selects one of three characters then takes part in the action just after Brett's death, the aim being to lure the monster into an airlock. In "Last Survivor" you're Ripley, desperately activating the self-destruct sequence before legging it to the Narcissus shuttle. Most of the cast returned to record new dialogue for the sequences. Including Weaver.

I said yes, I would like to interview her. But I was worried.

Ripley, and by extension Weaver, is my teenage hero. I watched Alien with my parents when I was far too young, on an old VHS rental copy; then when I was 13, I snuck in to the cinema to watch James Cameron's sequel, a brilliant, terrifying experience that had me sleeping with the blankets over my mouth (to protect me from face huggers) for several months. I sort of enjoyed Alien 3, I tolerated Resurrection.

I always thought Weaver as Ripley was amazing, though: tough, enigmatic, physical, guarded. She was the perennial outsider, her crew distrusted her, and later the marines and prisoners abused her. But she always knew better. Something in my fragile and lonely teen self related to that. I wanted to be Ripley.
The terror of video game conversions

For her part, Weaver was nervous about the game. She's been here before. "Oh yes. I've been approached a number of times to do video games, but this was different - it had so much story, so much character, it was sort of more emotional and at the same time, it seemed like it would be a very visceral experience. You have to go through that ship on your own - it's going to be wild for people to do that.

"The film has really held up - I think because of the way Ridley shot it – and it really takes that material... it's a homage to what he did so brilliantly, but it also takes it in a really creative direction."

Of course, you could argue that any actor is going to say this about their latest project. But then, heck, Weaver doesn't need the money, she doesn't need to curry favour with Sega, she doesn't need to be in a stuffy hotel room in New York talking to a series of journalists. But on time, and with a small group of staff, she walks in, smiling and welcoming to everyone. She speaks with passion and interest about the game, and about how it reminded her of the original movie.

Which is exactly the effect Creative Assembly was hoping for.
Reanimating the Alien

The team has been obsessive about recrafting the retro-futuristic look of Scott's set design. When work began on the game, Fox opened its huge Alien archive to the developers and they trawled it at great length.

"There was a lot of stuff that hadn't been in the public domain before," enthuses Hope. "Everything from blueprints to continuity polaroids, to photographs of the set from different angles, which gave us an amazing insight into how the environment was constructed. We were all really familiar with the film but it wasn't until we got the archive that we saw high resolution images of things like the costumes. It means we could study and understand them, and then replicate them in the game."

He's in no doubt about what his favourite discovery was. "[Fox] found an eight-track reel and didn't know what it was - it was in the bottom of an old cardboard box that hadn't been opened for 35 years. I just said, I don't care, just send it to us. It was the original sound effects archives - lots of weird noises, moaning sounds - you even had the 1970s British sound engineers calling out the take numbers prior to the recordings. We could take that source material and put it in the game."

So how did Weaver feel treading those dark corrifors once again? "Oh, it was so spooky!" she laughs. "I spent so much time in those corridors and huge hangers. Films take so long to shoot, and as a young actor I was constantly wandering around and thinking, gosh, how great it is that they've built these wonderful sets for us, not thinking that it's really for the viewer.

"But yes, it took me back - the attention to detail, especially to Ridley's humorous often bizarre little touches, the odd little toys and gizmos - they really worked hard to get that. It seems like a labour of love."
No such thing as franchises

I ask her if she realised at the time that Alien would be a phenomena, that it would last. As an actor, she had been reticent at first about taking on a sci-fi role. She'd studied drama at Yale, famously with Meryl Streep, starring in a succession of avant garde and classical theatre productions. She didn't want to be Princess Leia.

"I remember Ridley pulled out some sketches of the sets and the alien itself, and the eggs... I realised I'd never seen anything like this in a film. I just thought, I want to be part of that.

But in those days, you never really thought about creating a franchise. What we were interested in was taking this very sparse script and, with a wonderful group of actors, bringing people into space, in this very new way. It was space as a real environment, a working environment, with people griping and bitching. It was no longer this sleek Kubrick-style sterile environment, it wasn't fantastical."

Indeed, Scott famously went to great lengths to make life difficult for the actors, hoping to accentuate the troublesome relationships between the characters. He had the set built as a claustrophobic complex of small rooms and narrow corridors, just so they couldn't get away from each other.

And he wound them up. Before interviewing Weaver, I spoke to the game's creative lead, Al Hope, who said that during the voice recording sessions, the cast happily gossiped about the filming process. "Yaphet Kotto, who played Parker, was talking about how Ridley Scott had told him to antagonise Sigourney off camera," says Hope. "He wanted them to be at each others throats."
It was not about feminism

I talk to Weaver about how she got the role of Ripley and her legendary audition (she was originally up for the role of Lambert, but her performance led to a last-minute switch). And of course, Ripley's famous gender switch. "In the original script that they bought, it was all male characters. Walter Hill and David Giler changed it... but having Ripley as a woman wasn't a big feminist statement - they thought no-one will ever guess this girl will end up being the hero. That's why they did it – for the surprise factor."

Now, of course, the surprise factor is gone, but the Alien: Isolation team had the sensible idea of maintaining a female lead – with an obvious candidate. "When we started it felt like it had to be a female character - it's such a large part of the universe," says Hope. "We were extremely fortunate that we already had a character, Amanda, whose story hadn't been told. She is in no way a clone of her mother, but she does share some of those traits: courage, perseverance and clarity of thought under pressure."

Weaver loved the idea. "I thought it was wonderful – very daring," she exclaims. "I found it touching, too - I mean, I didn't even know she had a daughter until Jim Cameron created one for me. The idea that never having seen each other, Amanda would go into space, follow in her mother's footsteps... it was very moving to me."
Fear and reproduction

We go on to talk about the alien itself – what it is about that monster that still scares people. When Creative Assembley showed a demo of the game at E3 running on the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, one attendee ripped the device off in terror and fled the room.

Interestingly, Weaver says that Scott kept her well away from the actor who inhabited the alien suit ("I never saw him sitting down drinking a tea") – she barely saw the monster until that climatic scene in the shuttle. That has fed something in her, a fascination that she's been playing out ever since.

"I guess what interests me about the alien is that I still don't know what it wants," she says. "I feel like it's not interested in eating me, it is interested in me for reproduction, but there's much more going on - it's a much more multidimensional creature than a regular horror film. It's the implication that there are species out there like this. What do we as humans... I mean, what will we have to deal with that?"
We play as we dream... alone

Weaver doesn't play video games, but she seems interested in them. She has played Alien: Isolation, of course ("The flame-thrower is very good," she drawls) and is intrigued by the immersive story-telling possibilities of the medium.

"I think there's a whole new world, a bigger world, of using gaming to enter into stories and experiences," she says. That's going to be incredibly satisfying... the idea that you could enter into perhaps famous stories – you could enter into the world of Kubla Khan – I think that sounds fascinating. You could enter the movie in your own mind, you could enter great pieces of literature. I think there's a huge horizon there - I think many people will be seduced by this experience. It's unique and very, very exciting."

All through my life I have watched the Alien films, studied the critical theory (especially Barbara Creed on the "Monstrous Feminine") and played Alien games. I played the original Alien movie conversion on Commodore 64, a challenging and atmospheric action RPG that, like Isolation, never really allowed you to kill the monster – if you saw it, you were dead. I played the okay Aliens game from Electric Dreams Software, a prototype first-person shooter with jump shocks aplenty. None of them got close to the sheer, trembling terror that seems so natural to Alien Isolation. Of course there are worries about whether this can be maintained over a whole game; we've only seen a fraction of it – we've got to keep things in perspective. Other promising Alien games have crashed horribly, as Sega well knows. But right now, it's not hard to see why Weaver committed to this one.
It's like 1979 all over again

After the interview, I step out into the hotel corridor, shaking and excited. Al Hope is out there waiting. He tells me that a huge cheer went up throughout the studio when they got the call from Fox confirming that Weaver and the other actors would be coming back. "Recording them was an unforgettable experience," he says. "When we started, we had a dream we could do something like this, and to have those actors reprise their roles, some of them for the first time, it was magical.

"When they went into the sound booths and started recording their lines, it felt like being transported back 35 years to when we first heard Veronica Cartwright screaming, 'get out of there!'."

Weaver does another few interviews. Everyone comes out the same – elated, trembling, smiling. She is engaging and funny, and disarmingly friendly. She happily has her photo taken with some of the interviewers, and she didn't mind that one of my questions was actually a meandering and pretentious theory about Freudian messaging. I've interviewed actors before, plenty of them, but I was starstruck this time. Just utterly starstruck. When I left the room, along with elation, there was relief.

Sometimes, it turns out, it's okay to meet your heroes. Sometimes they're Sigourney Weaver.

Sega asked "You're a sweaty gaming journalist, right?" and I just erupted into sweat and hormones as I'd been found out.

I was then subjected to a quiz about the Aliens movies and I scored 10/10 surprising absolutely no one when I described the trigger guard on a pulse rifle for the perfect score.

It was a toss up whether I was going to write a glowing report on the new Aliens game as I had already been flown over to play a game or whether I was going to shoot my proverbial muck all over the page about how awesome it was fooling no one at all.

Sega then asked "Have you ever met a movie star?"

"A rhetorical question surely?" I chuckled to myself.

Then it happened.

A female. A movie star. But more than that she was a female movie star. The reveal was too much and I leaked fluid all down my inside leg. I knew that my write up of Aliens: Isolation was going to be a load of old moldy sausage drippings but now I had to make it special. Special for my love. She was a a wrinkly MILF, yes, but she was my wrinkly MILF. I knew this would be the best game ever without having to play it.

In terms of games, I had to stop playing Outlast on the PS4 as it was just too damn tense.

Believe. The. Hype.

At 10-15 hours for a playthough the main complaint (for some) is that its too long (?) , or at least the game seems slightly drawn out