Trivia / Alien: Isolation

• Acclaimed Flop: Despite good reviews and positive fan reception, often being described as the quintessential Alien game, sales were described as "weak" by Sega, most of the development staff left the company, and a proper sequel never materialised.
• Development Gag: The setting of the game, an understaffed space station with a giant space mall and a subway-style transit system, was the original setting of William Gibson's draft of Alien 3.
• Ink-Suit Actor:
  • Most of the major characters including Samuels, Taylor, Waits and Marlow resemble their respective voice actors. This is averted with Amanda, who is physically modeled after actress Kezia Burrows and Sigourney Weaver's own mother but voiced by Andrea Deck.
  • Many of the faces for random NPCs in the game were modelled off of Creative Assembly staff members. A streamer who used to work there had the surreal experience of having to crawl through the game among the mutilated corpses of his former coworkers.
• In Memoriam: The game is dedicated to Simon Franco, a programmer for the game who died during the development of the game.
• Money, Dear Boy: Yaphet Kotto admitted that this was his reason for reprising his role as Dennis Parker in the Crew Expendable DLC.
• The Other Darrin: Dave B. Mitchell replaces Ian Holm as Ash.
• Playing Against Type: Creative Assembly, a studio known for their Real-Time Strategy games like Total War, took a stab at first-person survival horror based on a film franchise.
• Referenced by...: The infamous Alien stageplay by North Bergen High School uses footage of the vents from Alien: Isolation for the scene where Dallas is caught in the vents by the Alien.
• Role Reprise: Barring Ian Holm, all of cast members from the first Alien movie reprise their roles in DLC which events started after Kane's death.
• Shrug of God: Whether Amanda had a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong or not while she was All Webbed Up near the end of the game is kind of ambiguous. Gary Napper at Creative Assembly said that the ambiguity was intentional, and they do not have a fixed idea of how that situation exactly shook out.
  • Although it should be noted that Napper also stated he personally does not believe Amanda was infected, citing the fact that when she awakens the closest egg is still closed.
  • And, you know, she dies 30 or so years later of natural causes, as stated in Aliens.
  • The first film itself gives the answer that it's not possible for her to have been infected. The facehugger attached itself to Kane for hours before coming off, in which that time he was given the facehugger, and had been in a temporary coma a couple of more hours after that. If Amanda had been infected, she would have been dead and the Torrens would have been destroyed along with the station. If anything, it even backs up what was established in Aliens, as the xenomorphs didn't kill Newt or any of the other colonists on LV-426, but took them back to the hive to be cocooned and waiting to be infected (in the case of the game, they took her to the newly constructed hive wall and had her ready to be infected. If you pay attention, when she wakes up, there's an unhatched egg next to her).
  • The fact that Facehuggers are still hostile after this point and eggs will even hatch when you approach them seems to suggest she wasn't impregnated. Facehuggers are stated to have the ability to sense when someone is infected and avoid them so as to not waste themselves trying to infect someone already infected.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The fact that there are multiple Xenomorphs originally was not going to be a surprise. Ripley would've spotted one during the cut prologue on the Solace, and Kuhlman's unspecified "illness" was going to be a chestburster.
  • According to Word of God, Ricardo was originally going get a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong while Amanda was in the Radio Silence of the signal-shielded APOLLO Core. Ricardo would only dimly recall what happened, and try to hide it from Amanda out of both self-denial and a desire not to worry her, only to die by Chest Burster at a critical moment late in the story. This was written out due to the writers realizing this would be a bit too brief a gestation cycle compared to what had been established in the films. They did keep the part where Ricardo gets the Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong, but moved it to the story beat where he would have originally had the Chest Burster emerge, keeping his Character Death effectively dramatic even if he did not technically "die" at that point.
  • In the initial draft, Amanda would have agreed with Marlow's plan to blow up the station and would have only asked for more time to evacuate survivors.
  • There were a lot of cut or expanded levels in early drafts. Notably including a garbage room, a ship with a broken warp drive and broken cryo tubes, and a spaceship docking port.
  • Amanda would have given an ending speech identical to her mother's in the first movie only with Marlow, Waits, Ricardo, Samuels and Taylor replacing Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Dallas.
  • Samuels and Taylor were originally going to be typical W-Y bad guys, in the style of Ash and Burke.
  • The game was originally going to be in the third person.
  • There was apparently an entirely different intro planned, along with a considerable amount of cut dialogue, as seen here.
  • In early stages of the game, Ransome was going to play a more significant role, possibly even as a supporting character. His fate was also going to be more clear, namely dying while trying to escape on the Solace a ship which was also cut from the game.
  • A co-op/multiplayer mode, a PvP/competitive mode, an arcade mode, and a Dark Souls-esque multiplayer interaction (where players never saw each other but could leave items at designated points for other players to take) were considered, but scrapped due to criticism from Aliens: Colonial Marines and belief that the game would be better off as an independent experience than as a teamwork game.
    • The artbook shows concept art for the co-op mode with a man (likely an earlier draft version of Samuels, due to the resemblance) as the second player, who could wield an axe and a gun.
  • One version of the ending had Amanda fall unconscious while releasing the Torrens while Verlaine calls out to her.
• You Look Familiar: Marshall Waits is played by William Hope, who previously played Lieutenant Gorman in Aliens. Guess he always was an asshole.

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