- [creepy, hard-hitting electronic music]

- The intro and outro videos for each campaign were pre-rendered, and they were done by another company. One particularly interesting one is the intro to the Predator campaign, which featured a Predator sneaking up behind a marine and then, essentially, blowing up his head with his plasma caster. Something that was cut for the final game, 'cause it was felt to be a bit extreme. My name is Tim Jones. I was the lead artist and producer for Aliens Versus Predator. Our late stage decision to make all mission environments playable by all three characters created a set of immense technical and design challenges, but in the end, it was this endeavor that helped make the game a classic. There was certainly quite a lot of pressure making a game based on a license, although, back then I think, we probably put more pressure on ourselves than the publishers and the license holders did. We were obsessive about getting everything right, because we were such huge fans of Aliens, and Predator, and the whole franchise. And so, it was more down to us to make sure that we were on top of things and making sure it was as true to the movies as we could make. So, back then, most games had static, baked lighting that was essentially baked into the textures or like, using light maps that just wouldn't change as you were playing the game, whereas we took a very different approach with AVP and the engine we were creating for it. And so, all the lighting was fully dynamic, which, computationally, was challenging back then, with the power the PCs had, which was certainly very limited compared to what it is today. But, we felt it was a core part of what was so exciting about the Aliens films, in particular, is because the play of light and dark, that sense of atmosphere, and horror, and peering into the dark, and Aliens jumping out of the dark. We played on that very strongly, I think, with a marine who would have to use flares to light his way around, or uses an image intensifier to light things up in green so they could see. But, as soon as there was a light around, it would totally bleach out your view. The Aliens are all about, like the fear of the dark, and the unknown. And, that's something that we really strongly wanted to get across in the game, and so dynamic lighting was really key to that.

- Remember, short, controlled bursts. [scanner beeps]

- Eight meters. Seven. Six.

- The audio came from quite a lot of different places. We did some Foley recording. Some of it we sampled off of the movies themselves. It was actually quite later on that we actually got access to some of the original sound files that the audio designers on the movies used. So, it was a mix of things, and a lot of it was a bit of a make-do and mend, and just trying to make the game sound like the movies as closely as we could. [scanner beeps]

- We went into some real obsessive detail about making sure the motion tracker and the smart gun and the pulse rifle, and things to us were really iconic sounds, really nailed the feeling of how they sounded in the movies. [gun fires] [Alien shrieks] One of the other big challenges we had when it came to setting up the gameplay in the game was the waypointing for the AI. Basically, the information that tells the AI how they go, where they go in the environment, the routes they can go, up the walls, around the ceilings. That wasn't automatically calculated, that was all created by hand, by us, placing little volumes and nodes and links across the environment in a painstaking fashion. Still, occasionally, have nightmares, flashbacks, to visions of vectors and cubes all linking together that I was having to painstakingly place. The aesthetic art direction for the game, the intent was always to make it as close to the movies, and realistic as possible. Now, you look at the game now, and that seems like a little bit of a stretch to claim that it was photorealistic or something, but that was certainly our aim. We were trying to source from photographs, real models of the characters, grabbing images from the VHS tapes of the movies that we had at the time, to try and match stuff as closely as we could. If you remember what it's like, trying to freeze frame a VHS tape, and then take a screen grab of that, which required a pretty dedicated video card at the time, it's not like you can just put the file up on YouTube and grab it from there, it was pretty involved. I think the thing that made Aliens Versus Predator unique, and still does, is that we tackled all three of the main species, the Alien, the Predator, and the human marines, and you were able to play as all three of those species, and they all had very different perspectives on the gameplay, things they could do and indeed their motivations in the game. So, the marine is probably the most familiar of the species to most first-person shooter players. Certainly was then, you're playing as a human being. You were probably the most vulnerable of the characters, in many respects, in that an Alien or Predator could kill you, pretty much out of nowhere, almost immediately. But, the key advantages you had was strength of firepower. So, you had the really iconic weapons like the pulse rifle with the underslung grenade launcher, which could tear through Aliens pretty quickly.

- This is an M41-A Pulse Rifle.

- What's this?

- That's a grenade launcher. I don't think you wanna mess with that.

- The motion tracking smart gun, so it would track your targets, which was particularly useful against Aliens in the dark, so, even if you couldn't see them, it was automatically tracking them, and you could just open fire and tear them to pieces. Basically, all the things to try and make the marine feel slightly more comfortable in all those dark spaces while things were trying to kill him. The Predator, he's probably the most powerful of the species. He's a hunter, he has a number of different vision modes that we based on what were seen in the movies, like the iconic thermal vision, where everything goes blue and you can see the humans in white and yellow and red. The heat sources, which, you didn't get much detail with the environment there, but you could really see your targets at a distance. We added a special vision mode, which hadn't been seen in the movies at the time, for being able to see Aliens, as well. And, you had your cloaking, so you could basically make yourself invisible, so that the characters of the enemy wouldn't be able to see you. And, he had some really exotic weaponry, like a plasma caster that could blow people apart with one shot. We had a spear gun that you could pin body parts to walls, and we had the disc that you could throw, and it would track targets, and tear them in two at the same time. The Alien is actually quite fragile, and susceptible to being taken down by a plasma caster or a pulse rifle from one of the other species, but has the enviable ability to be able to see in the dark wherever, and to climb walls and ceilings, and leap very fast, and kill things in one swipe, or with one tail stab, or with a punch through the head, with a jaw attack. And, I think we measured of the speed at it at one point. If you were going full tilt, and you were leaping as well, I think you could actually break the speed of sound, moving that fast, as the Alien in AVP. As we got further through development, we were getting to the point where we had a set of levels for each of the characters that was proving to be really fun, and really cool, but we discussed amongst ourselves, we really like the different perspectives of the different characters, and it's something that we really wanted, collectively, to see how far we could take that. And, it seemed like we were missing a trick if we didn't allow you to experience each of the environments from each of those perspectives, yourselves, as a player. So, it was a challenge we took upon ourselves, to try and find a way to make each of the environments work for each of the characters, even though we hadn't originally started to plan it that way. The brief we were working to earlier in the project was that each of the species would have their own campaign, their own set of levels, and that was all we had to worry about. So, that's what we focused on, making those levels as good as they could be, for each species. The late-stage decision to make all the missions playable by all three species in the game proved to be an immense technical challenge, but it was well worth it in the end. The human is ground bound, can run around, and make small jumps, but basically, they're stuck on the ground with their guns and their flares. And, they're very much susceptible to the Aliens, which can crawl on walls, and ceilings, and leap out of ducts, and attack them from any angle out of the darkness. And, as a player, if you play as the Alien, you can do exactly that. So, the environment is totally your playground. And, the Predator was similarly ground bound to the other human, but could jump a bit further.

- [Announcer] Warning, Alien presence detected.

- While we designed the environment to play to those abilities and strengths, the Alien environment, in particular, to make the most of the gameplay for the Alien player used much more verticality. So, you'd have to climb walls and ceilings to get into new places, and lurk around above the humans, and then leap down and kill them, and take them out, as you continue on your way. The solution we came up with for the marine was, we gave you a jet pack. Which, is arguably not necessarily, totally in line with the AVP franchise, at least not yet, but it was certainly a lot of fun. It didn't feel too farfetched for the kind of technology that the marines might be using. And, certainly, it solved a problem for us, and was a lot of fun, to boot. For the Predator, the solution we came up with was we gave the Predator a grappling hook, so you could basically fire out this grappling rope to any point in the environment, and then swing on it, very much like Spider-Man. So, it had full physics, you could be swinging around the environment. That was one of my favorite things that came out of the game. Well, it's like, not a traditional part you might expect from an AVP game or franchise, it actually turned out to be an awful lot of fun. And, a very interesting way to navigate an environment. The narrative of the game, again, was something that came in relatively late. We started with a series of missions, which we then had to go back and look at how we could string them together into a narrative. Coming up with a whole bunch of cinematics wasn't really feasible, and nor did it feel like it was fitting for the game, where it was better to be in the moment, in the game, playing it. So, one of the key solutions we came up with was to actually have mission briefings or background information on what's going on actually playing in the game, on monitors, in the environment, as you explored. Which, involved what was pretty revolutionary technology at the time, of us actually being able to stream a video on a texture in the environment, in the world, that you could watch while you were playing, or while being attacked by Aliens, and you could even destroy those monitors, and they'd cast light into the environment. And, it was a pretty exciting, fun way, to get a narrative across. It doesn't hit you over the head and make you go, "Right, stop playing, watch this now. "Now, get on with it." It was just in the background for you take in the story, if you wanted. And then, when it came to actually creating the content for those videos, which we conceived as mission briefings, people talking to camera, much like they did on the videophones in Aliens, which seemed like pretty advanced science fiction technology back then. And now, we take for granted, like talking to each other on Skype, with Facetime, or the rest of it. But, that was pretty sci-fi back then. There has actually been a couple of different iterations of those movies that are in the game in the original release, prior to the gold edition. They were actually acted by professional, American actors. We, as a team, didn't feel like they captured the urgency we were looking for. They were performed as if they were a man behind a desk, who is being quite separate from the action.

- Welcome to the main colony base, marine. Looks like the colonists shit a brick and pulled out.

- Attention all units, the Predator has accessed level four. All doors have been secured. Stay on maximum alert.

- For us, the game was always phonetic, dark, scary, atmospheric, and we wanted a little bit more energy in those. For the gold edition, we actually created versions ourselves, which I think you'll find, probably, quite a healthy debate online, if you look on YouTube comments about the quality of the acting, because we were basically doing it ourselves, and the fact that we were all very young at the time, and probably didn't look too convincing. But, we had a lot of fun with it, and I think one of the things that we did get across with them was a bit more energy. We had all sorts of atmospheric lighting, flashing lights. And, we threw in a bit more gore, and stuff, as well. Yeah, we filmed them all over the course of a weekend in the office. We had lots of bin bags down, where fake blood would be thrown around, and you had various of us played different roles of marines and scientists, and spaceship captains, and the like.

- This damned Alien can and will be stopped. There's only one of them, and it only takes one of us to kill it.

- The rest of us have pulled back to the cruisers. You need to get your ass down to the living corridors.

- One of the guys, he actually constructed some Predator wrist blades out of wood, that he'd sewn together, like put onto a back plate that could then go under Ed's clothing, and poke through his chest. So, it looked like he'd had a Predator blade stuck through him from behind, which, while he was filmed, it was out of shot, and then, he, in a rather melodramatic fashion, at the end of his few lines, would move upwards so the blade would go into shot, and it would look like he'd been stabbed from behind. And, it was hokey but a lot of fun to do, and added a bit of drama to the proceedings.

- Are you guys hearing this? Are you hearing this? These guys are...

- Yeah, it was good times, actually. Back then, for the game, we were dealing with very, very small amounts of video memory. We were limited to, I think, I think I've got the number burned into my brain, actually, of 30 128 by 128 pixel textures for each environment. Like, that's what we were allowed to use. The videos themselves were outside of that, but they themselves had to be very, very small files, like they were also 128 by 128 pixel size images, and they were compressed so very heavily to make them very, very small, that, each individual frame of them, really, is almost unintelligible, but the movement of them all together gets the idea across, what's going on. It was like watching the crumbliest YouTube video you've ever seen, but it worked. We were thrilled with the way that Aliens Versus Predator was received, both critically and by players, and the integration of the three species is something that we were proud of then, and we remain proud of to this day. Ultimately, making all three characters work together in the game, I think, was, arguably, the defining success of the game. So much of what people loved about the game was the atmosphere, the fact that it made them feel like they were playing the movies, and the different perspectives it offered. I think being able to make each of the environments playable as each of the species just helped crystalize and focus on that aspect of the different perspectives. It was a tough thing to pull off, and I'm really proud of what we did, and yet, I home it remains something that people will enjoy playing, one way or another, for a long time to come.