Aliens

Aliens refers to James Cameron's 1986 sequel, which turned the single-monster horror of the first film into small-squad action against an entire Xenomorph hive, and the first video game adaptation followed the same shift: Konami's arcade game Aliens (1990). It was a side-scrolling brawler in which up to three players fought through corridors as the film's marines, picking up weapons modeled on the film's arsenal (a pulse rifle, a flamethrower) and mowing down waves of creatures up to a final confrontation with the Queen; it remains one of the more fondly remembered movie arcade tie-ins of its era, helped along by its co-op play and inventive graphics drawing on scenes from the film.

The same period brought home conversions for 8-bit computers and MS-DOS, plus a Japan-only release for NEC's PC-98 computers that never officially reached the West — reworkings of the same formula for weaker hardware, with mixed results and noticeably simpler visuals than the arcade original. Much later, Game Boy Color received a far more modest take, Aliens: Thanatos Encounter, a top-down action game set on a remote space station and aimed more at younger players; it is far less remembered today than the arcade original and mostly comes up as a curiosity in surveys of licensed handheld games.

The series' long silence was broken only by Aliens: Colonial Marines in 2013, whose development was plagued by years of delays and work farmed out to outside studios — the finished game differed noticeably from the material shown before release and left players and critics disappointed, an outcome still often cited as an example of the gap between marketing and the final product.

Real redemption arrived only in 2021 with the cooperative shooter Aliens: Fireteam Elite on PS5, PS4, Xbox and PC from Cold Iron Studios. Players form a three-marine squad, each with one of several combat classes, facing Xenomorphs and altered variants in the period between Aliens and Alien 3; the game runs on a horde principle close to titles like Left 4 Dead, where players must hold off increasingly strong waves of enemies while managing limited ammunition. Further campaigns and content followed into 2022 and 2023, and for fans it was a welcome confirmation that the Aliens name could still deliver a modern game that stands on its own after Colonial Marines.