Cliff Bleszinski, creator of Gears of War and founder of Boss Key Productions, has revealed that the defunct studio was once in talks to create a new video game based on Aliens. The Alien franchise was one of the many famous properties acquired by Disney after its merger with 21st Century Fox last year.
Bleszinski co-founded Boss Key Productions in 2014 after departing from his prominent position at Epic Games in 2012. The developer’s first project was the ill-fated LawBreakers, which launched to critical success but suffered commercial failure. There were a number of reasons that LawBreakers didn’t catch on, and Bleszinski believes his own “woke” politics were a factor. The studio tried to recover from the financial loss with Radical Heights, a battle royale game in the vein of Fortnite, but it too was unpopular and became generally derided. This ultimately led to the dissolving of the company in 2018, but it seems that Boss Key had a number of other games in the works before it shut down.
Bleszinski has now detailed one of those games on Twitter - one that was going to be set in the Aliens universe. In a series of tweets, Bleszinski said that Boss Key had been talking with 21st Century Fox about making a new game for the franchise. Apparently, the game was well into the pre-production stages. “Ripley would be alive and be your ‘Cortana/Anya.’ You’d play as grown Newt. On Earth,” Bleszinski stated. “Weyland-Yutani are weaponizing the aliens in a Black Mesa style facility and, of course, all hell breaks loose.” Newt would also have been accompanied by a new “robotic pal”, appropriately named Casey after her doll in the film.
Bleszinski went on to say that the game would have been a first-person shooter, and would have ignored all canon events after the ending of Aliens. He also added that he had never been interested in working on someone else’s IP, but that there were two exceptions: Aliens and Transformers. According to Bleszinski, the reason the game never came to fruition was because Disney bought out 21st Century Fox and the idea “got lost in the shuffle, darnit.”
Boss Key’s conceptual title joins the ranks of other intriguing Aliens games which have never seen the light of day. However, there are plenty of other Alien games in active development even under Disney, including another FPS from Cold Iron Studios. In spite of the loss of Boss Key and its hypothetically interesting game, it looks like Aliens fans still have much to look forward to in the realm of video games.
Next: 10 Scariest Things In The Alien Franchise, Ranked
Source: Twitter
