Alien vs Predator

How it was made

What the press said at the time

The contemporary press could not agree on this one: comparable scores run from 40% to 96% across 16 publications. Scores are printed in their original scales.

Cartridge & preservation record

Cartridge ROM capacity 32 megabit (4 MB), measured from the preserved cartridge image.

Catalogue part number J9008E

Cartridge data from the No-Intro preservation database (metadata only — names, sizes and checksums, no game data).

Worth knowing

• The Lynx version got far enough to survive as a dated prototype. The Jaguar game began life as a Lynx title, and the ROM preservation record shows how far that version actually got: a playable Alien vs Predator prototype for the Lynx survives, dated 17 December 1993 — a month after the Jaguar launched and ten months before the Jaguar game shipped. It is the only artefact of the handheld version, and it is not in the Lynx's commercial library because it was never released.
• It started as an Atari Lynx game. Atari sub-licensed the Super Nintendo Alien vs. Predator through Activision and commissioned a Lynx port from Images Software. Producer James 'Purple' Hampton felt a straight port did not do the licences justice, so Images redesigned the handheld version into a first-person shooter — then production stopped when Atari moved its attention to the Jaguar. Rebellion built the Jaguar game from those Lynx design documents. The platform's best game began as a handheld conversion of somebody else's port.
• A rights problem is what let it become its own game. The contract with Activision specified a port of the SNES title. Hampton found that the Lynx build also used characters and settings drawn from the Dark Horse comics — rights Atari did not hold. That discovery handed him a legal justification to abandon the port and let Rebellion design something original instead. The Jaguar's signature exclusive exists because of a licensing defect.
• In Japan it was the pack-in, not Cybermorph. Mumin Corporation bundled Alien vs. Predator with the Jaguar at the Japanese launch on 8 December 1994, and only sold it separately from 17 February 1995. Japanese buyers got the platform's best game in the box; North American buyers got Cybermorph.
• Nine people, working to a deadline, in Oxford. GameFan visited Rebellion in May 1994 and described a nine-man team "knee-deep in the AVP deadline", calling the Oxford studio the UK's leading 64-bit game designers. The magazine reported the game as almost finished and due on sale at the middle or end of April. Atari later built its advertising entirely out of review quotes for it — "Jaguar game of the year" from both Game Informer and Game Players, "best sound and best shooter — all platforms" from Game Informer, and VideoGames' line that it "scared the hell out of me".
• Atari told the press Sega would never get to make it. When Atari and Sega settled their patent dispute in 1994 with a cross-licensing agreement, the deal covered software licences only and gave Sega no access to Lynx or Jaguar hardware. Atari spokeswoman Sandy LaBrec put the practical limit plainly to Electronic Games: "I don't expect they'll ever be making Alien vs. Predator, nor that we would ever make a Sonic game." Any cross-licensed title would have been negotiated one game at a time; none ever was.