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Did latency just drop sharply while I was away?
Image credit:Fox Interactive / namcos
Image credit:Fox Interactive / namcos
Aliens Online is not, in practice, anything like what we now call an MMO. It’s a team-based shooter in which marine squads descend to ravaged bunkers and derelicts to flush out the dastardly xenomorphs. You get to play as both the Marines, who have shotguns, pulse rifles and motion trackers, and the Aliens, who can leap into vents and enjoy map-wide “hive awareness”. But it tilts in the direction of an online society or at least, hangout space, with a space station menu that anticipates the hub towns of later MMOs, and some primordial RPG progression systems to keep people invested.
“It had voice chat, which in 1998 was crazy,” Firor recalled. “And it had the little screens, like in the movies where you could see what your squad mates were looking at, if you looked down in the corner. Which again, 1998 right? That’s crazy technology.” The game’s asymmetrical design anticipatesRebellion’s polygonal 3D shooter Aliens vs Predator, which released just a year later in a powerful show of how quickly 3D graphics tech was changing at the time.
26 years on, Firor’s memories of Aliens Online’s development are fading, but he has a few highlights, not least the spectacle of an actor donning a rubber outfit to mo-cap the game’s Alien sprites. “I remember working a lot with the audio guys, who had got access to the soundtrack and all the sound effects libraries from the movie,” he said. “So it’s very authentic when you go in.” Among the audio design’s nastier tricks is that your Marine character sucks in their breath when they scry something alarming, often panicking you before you actually work out what they’ve seen. I dug up a build of Aliens Online on a game preservation site after interviewing Firor, and found the single player experience to be an entertainingly creepy variation on Doom. Still, I’d have liked to play Aliens Online at its height, for the sake of those nested squad-cam feeds.
Firor also looks back on the development of Aliens Online as a “magic” era in budding online gaming, when the internet was still a fantasy for many, and interactions we take for granted today had to be unpacked at length - not least in conversation with journalists.
“I can’t overstate this enough, and you’re almost old enough to remember this, but it was magic, right?” he told me. “The whole concept just blew people’s minds - that you could log in and play together or against other people online. And then the fact that you could do something other than shooting them, when Everquest andUltimacame out, right? This whole virtual life thing, it was just considered magic.
“It was hard to explain to press just what we were doing, because they just couldn’t understand the concept. It’s like wait, can we see other people? No, you don’t see the people, you see their avatars, right? To get the concept across was just very difficult to people who didn’t even understand what the internet was, because back then it was still dial-up. You know, 2400 baud modems, maybe 56.6k, right?”
Aliens Online (1998) PC (*1998 - †2000)Watch on YouTube
Aliens Online (1998) PC (*1998 - †2000)
Did Firor himself anticipate the current enormity and ubiquity of the internet while peering out from that pixellated Marine starbase, back in 1998? “No one had broadband back then, so it was a different time, but we could see the possibilities. I don’t think we saw the consequences of having everybody online all the time and having so many of them. But absolutely, games likeElder Scrolls Online- we could see that from 1996. Maybe not at that graphical fidelity, but certainly the technology.”
While Firor regards Aliens Online as a piece of “Stone Age technology”, it and Mythic’s other late 90s adaptations were formative in all sorts of ways. “The technology that we used for all of those games rolled forward to the next game, the next game, and that eventually became Dark Age Of Camelot, because we already had a client server, we already had multiplayer,” he said. “And then of course, many of the people that made Dark Age Of Camelot then came with me and worked on Elder Scrolls Online. You can definitely draw a path between all of those games.”
After poring over Aliens Online’s prototypical MMO fixtures from the late 90s, I’m curious to see how an MMO developer today might adapt James Cameron and Ridley Scott’s best-known brainchildren. My recommendation would be to resist the desire to sprawl, eschew the transparency and slickness and griftiness of latter-day always-online service games, and contrive to make things feel as claustrophobic and disjointed and isolated as the Nostromo’s farthest corners. Give us an MMO that feels like the product of the same universe as Lieutenant Gorman’s APC helmetcam display, and Ripley’s worn-out apartment videophone. Give us an MMO that feels like it belongs in a world where the concept of the internet is science fiction.
