The day after tomorrow, August 15, the new movie Alien: Romulus will arrive in Czech cinemas, which, however, gives us a good excuse to write about it here as well, although it is not a game. This is because the creators had in mind one of the alien game titles, namely 2014’s Alien: Isolation from Creative Assembly, and paid homage to it in the new movie through a rather interesting easter egg.
Alien: Romulus returns to the beginnings of the film series, but in addition to the main inspiration from the first films from 1979 and 1986, there was also a place for Alien: Isolation. The presence of the easter egg and its influence on the game was revealed by the director Fede Alvarez himself, first in a reply to a few attentive fans on Twitter – we can already glimpse it in an old photo from the set – and now he also spoke on the Inside Total Film magazine podcast GamesRadar+. He stated that he played the game a few years after its release, around the time of the release of his horror film Don’t Breathe, probably in 2016. While playing, he says he realized that Alien can be really scary and well done even today, after which he began toying with the idea that he would like to make another Alien and scare the audience with the very creature, setting and tone.
Finally, many years later, he was entrusted with the direction of The Alien and he was given the opportunity to realize his ideas. Connoisseurs of the game may remember the so-called “registration points” in the form of telephone machines, which, when activated, served to warn of danger and save the position, but did not automatically represent a safe place where nothing threatened. And this is exactly what Alvarez alludes to in his film and uses typical “game logic”, where saving is a harbinger of an action that will most likely end in failure, in this case death. “Every time something bad is about to happen, you see the phone,” he explained. “When you saw the phone in the game, you thought, ‘Damn, I’m getting into something bad.’ It’s the same here. You will see that they are strategically placed throughout the film,” he added with a smile.
After all, isn’t it a bit of a spoiler for familiar players and experienced savers in games?