Alien (1982 video game)

Alien is a 1982 maze video game for the Atari 2600 published by Fox Video Games. The game has the player control a human moving through the hallways of a space ship avoiding the adult alien and destroying the small alien eggs.

Along with Mega Force and M*A*S*H, Alien was among the tie-in video games made for 20th Century Fox's video game division programmed by Doug Neubauer. Reviews from The Video Game Update and video game critic Brett Weiss found the game to be derivative of other games like Pac-Man.

Gameplay
The goal of the game is to move your human character through the hallways of the space ship and crush all the Alien eggs which have been placed there by interacting with them. The goal is crush all the eggs, and collect items for points. The player must avoid or destroy any adult Aliens who also move through the halls. The aliens can be halted briefly in their path by hitting them with a flame thrower, which can only be used once per life. Connecting with a pulsar on the map will make the aliens turn blue for a short time period and killable by interacting with them. If an alien interacts with the player, they lose a life. The game ends when the player runs out of lives.The game used the difficulty switches on the Atari 2600 which changes whether the pulsars make the aliens turn blue or not and changes the movement of the aliens from random to a fixed pattern.

Once all the Alien eggs are destroyed, the player enters a bonus round where the goal is to move to the top of the screen and grab the prize shown there within eight seconds. The player does not lose a life in this round.

Development
20th Century Fox formed Fox Video Games Inc. in 1982 to produce video games for the Atari Video Computer System (later known as the Atari 2600).

Doug Neubauer worked as an independent contractor making film tie-in games for 20th Century Fox's new game division making games such as Mega Force, M*A*S*H and Alien. Neubauer had hoped that making several video game adaptations would lead to making a film license like Star Wars, finding that "just because a company makes a movie doesn't mean they have the rights to make a video of the movie, Case in point, Star Wars. They didn't have the rights to it."

Release and reception
Alien was released for the Atari 2600 in November 1982.

From contemporary reviews, The Video Game Update did not recommend the game, stating it was a "one more rehash of the eat-the-dot maze" finding the graphics to be "only fair and game play is just too much like other games already available to create much interest."

From retrospective reviews, Brett Weiss in his book Classic Home Video Games 1972-1984 referred to the game as a Pac-Man clone, stating that it was "one of the best movie-based games ever released on the Atari 2600" and that it was derivative of Pac-Man and Freeway, but still "highly playable." Reviewing the game for the All Game Guide, Weiss added that the other drawback was the cartoonish depiction of the aliens, but that "given the graphical limitations of the system, this weakness is understandable." In his overview in video games based on Alien, Graeme Mason of Retro Gamer wrote that the game "there is a sincere element of panic and fear as the player is talked through the blue maze" but the game was "commendable, if bland".