The Alien and Predator franchises have been landing all sorts of wins recently with some great movies and shows. Step outside the new big (and small) screen entries, and you’ve got plenty of comic books and video games to chew on, too. It’s all looking healthy again, and after Predator: Badlands, the promise of a new AvP movie feels closer than ever before. But what about the iconic crossover video game series?
Beyond the movies, the Xenomorphs and Yautja have a long history across comic books and video games, and it didn’t take long before their separate success stories on the pages were combined into the original Aliens vs. Predator comic book series (1990).
Plenty of Alien and Predator video games have explored stories and settings that would’ve been great to watch unfold on the silver screen, with the Aliens vs. Predator first-person shooters (FPS) representing a peak for both properties in the gaming sphere. Their mix of brutal action and creeping horror across several entries holds up even today, and with the buzz around a new cinematic encounter on the rise — plus the Xenomorphs getting lots of new game projects — we’re shocked AvP hasn’t menaced PC or consoles since 2010.
All of their strengths, none of their weaknesses
Whether you stick to Rebellion and Monolith’s FPS classics or go weirder with the deeply underrated RTS Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction, it’s clear that most of the studios that took a crack at the IP perfectly captured the unique appeal of the conflict first seen in the comics.
For game developers, each separate universe is an enticing sandbox to play in. Put together, they led to refreshing action-horror games that would’ve been hard to get made without all that IP power attached.
Forget about the movies released in the 2000s, which kept the deadly war in a present-day continuity. The most basic reason why the Aliens vs. Predator games rock is that they felt like a pitch-perfect mix of the classic Predator movies and Aliens, Colonial Marines included.
Whereas the Dark Horse-published comic books often pushed for far stranger plots, the AvP games always asked variations of the same question: “What if Predators were thrown in the middle of James Cameron’s movie?” It worked time and again due to the developers’ craft and attention to detail, and it’s a shame the powers that be have yet to explore such a fun concept on the big screen.
This also applies to the atmosphere: One moment, you’re hunting down puny soldiers as a Yautja hunter in the middle of an alien jungle. Next, you’re bursting from a chest and looking for a place to hide to grow into an adult Xenomorph and scurry around vents.
On the human front, all the carnage turns into a traditional nightmare as you take the victim’s-eye-view in a cosmic slasher. Few FPS campaigns are as varied and inventive, and the aforementioned real-time strategy spinoff also kept things unconventional with its distinct units and tactics.
There’s nothing out there quite like it
Even when you made the jump to the multiplayer side of things, the tension remained. As the Marines, heavy firepower and smart positioning were the key to victory against the alien horrors. Xenomorphs, meanwhile, tried to overwhelm humans and Yautja with a mix of speed and stealth (camping while glued to a ceiling to jump-scare enemies never got old).
The more advanced tech and tactics belonged to the masked hunters; Predators were the trickiest species to master, but also the most flexible due to their arsenal of both advanced projectile weapons and melee killing tools (plus the iconic personal cloaking device).
Asymmetrical multiplayer games are still a thing, but in the age of family-friendly hero shooters and horror-themed online games like Dead by Daylight that have a single killer or monster terrorize a small party, we have nothing like the unpredictable and terrifying team deathmatch experiences the AvP games provided. It could be argued that some of the old games’ DNA survived through the horde-based sections in Aliens: Fireteam Elite, but plenty of other games are doing those with a different skin.
Even if you stepped outside of the deathmatch modes, Monolith’s AvP 2 – easily the series’ best when it came to online MP – offered truly unique (albeit naturally unbalanced) competitive experiences like Survivor (Xenomorphs have to turn entire servers of marines into new drones), Evacuation (get to the dropship), or the more diehard-oriented Overrun (attack and defense rounds with limited lives, Counter-Strike-style).
When you factor each species’ unique abilities and play styles (plus a surprising amount of unique classes) in, it’s impossible to find anything like it nowadays… unless you return to those ancient online battlegrounds.
Games can go where movies dare not
It seems certain that a new AvP movie is approaching (20th Century Studios boss Steve Asbell is keen on the idea), especially after the last Predator flick essentially threw the Yautja into the futuristic Alien timeline. Still, there are limits to the sort of green-blooded encounter we could get on the big screen.
Alien: Romulus (as well as the FX/Hulu series Alien: Earth) proved there’s renewed interest in old-fashioned Xenomorph horror as long as things don’t get Prometheus/Covenant-levels of muddled again. However, it seems that Predator: Badlands didn’t have legs nearly as long at the box office despite all its glowing reviews.
Going into a potential big-screen crossover, Disney and 20th Century Studios could decide to bet big on the biggest space horror showdown ever. Still, without a large safety net and the added pressure of making things as bloody as possible for the hardcore horror crowd, we’re not holding our breath for a massive, action-packed encounter when it happens.
The power of these two franchises is at an all-time high, and it’d be smart to grow Alien and Predator in more than one medium. It’s high time we had another showdown between these sci-fi legends.
We love gunning down (and hiding from) the Xenomorphs well enough, but let the Yautja take on them again, please (and let both of them snack on some tasty marines, of course).
