Ripley's bleak prison adventure is one of the series' least popular films. But it could make a killer game.

Alien 3 has always been a bit of a black sheep in the long-running franchise. Though directors Ridley Scott and James Cameron did some of their most acclaimed and popular work in the H.R. Giger-designed playground, the same can't be said for Alien 3 director David Fincher.

"I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing," Fincher told The Guardian's Mark Salisbury in a wide-ranging interview, during Fincher’s 2009 Oscar campaign for the much better received The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. "No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me."

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So, Alien 3 has the dubious distinction of being disliked by critics and its own director, the product of a long and tumultuous shoot, and a box office disappointment (though not an outright bomb). As a result, while Scott's Alien and, especially, Cameron's Aliens have cast long shadows over video games, Alien 3 received a buckshot of tie-in games at the time of its release but hasn't been revisited since. Those games were, predictably for the time, not especially faithful to the conceit of the movie. As with most tie-in games from the '90s, the Amiga, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Mega Drive/Genesis, and Master System versions of Alien 3 were run-and-gun 2D platformers set in an industrial setting that vaguely resembled the Fiorina "Fury" 161 and shooting at a menagerie of enemies, some of which look like the Alien from the film. There's a Game Boy version, too, but its monochromatic top-down shooting isn't an improvement. Neither approach comes close to capturing the themes, narrative, or aesthetic of Alien 3.

The franchise began with a sci-fi horror movie, the action escalated under Cameron, and then Fincher made… a prison movie. It was a left turn for the series conceptually, and in execution, that's even more the case. Alien 3 kills off Ripley's found family in its opening credits and *spoiler alert* kills Ripley off before closing credits. Its ending, in which Ripley throws herself into the facility's smelting furnace as the Alien growing inside her bursts forth from her stomach, can be read as hopeful, bleakly nihilistic, or some bittersweet mixture of the two. Those qualities may make it sound like Alien 3 would be a strange fit for a video game and, yeah, that's true. Thematically, Alien 3 denies viewers the visceral pleasures we might associate with a good game. But, much of its concept would be a perfect fit for a modern sci-fi horror game and/or a choice-based RPG. You just need to look past the bleak surface.

Fury is a setting defined by its factions: the militaristic warden and the guards under his command, and the cult of monkish prisoners who make up the bulk of its inhabitants. An Alien 3 game could include faction mechanics, with Ripley attempting to ally with certain segments of the population to accomplish her own goals. Ripley's status as the lone woman in the prison complicates her relationship with the all-male prisoners who, in one of the film's most upsetting sequences, attempt to sexually assault her. Though Ripley has no means of self-defense in the film because there are no weapons in the prison, a game could easily get around this with some throwaway dialogue ("Oh, wow, there's a well-stocked armory we never noticed before!") and ameliorate the threat of violence posed by the prisoners as a result.

Though the film is set in a prison, the plot never focuses on any of the prisoners trying to escape. Obviously, escaping a prison on a planet whose only function appears to be facilitating that prison presents logistical difficulties that escaping a prison on Earth would not. Prisoners would need to steal a ship and make sure that that ship had the supplies necessary to make it to the nearest planet. But, even still, you would expect some of the prisoners to have the drive to escape. An Alien 3 game could play into that, presenting it as a choice for Ripley. Do you help them escape or help squash their attempt? The following mission could play out as a result of your choices.

Thankfully, nothing in Fincher's handling of the setting lays the groundwork for a Prison Simulator-like gamification of the mechanics of incarceration. Instead, Fury is an oppressive, industrial setting where, yes, the shadows may hide an extraterrestrial killing machine, but, even prior to Ripley's arrival, Fury's architecture is designed for destruction. Destruction of the individual on a spiritual level, as suggested by the sameness of the planet's imprisoned inhabitants. But, also, literal, physical violence, as when the deceased crew of Ripley's ship are sent off with a swan dive into the smelting furnace's molten center, or when a prisoner falls down an incline and through an industrial fan that reduces him to gibs. As a result, Alien 3's setting would be plenty forbidding as the setting for an Alien: Isolation-style horror game. Additional horror could be mined from the ticking time bomb inside Ripley, which could give the game a Majora's Mask-like structure.

It's a shame, then, that the film isn't especially beloved among Alien fans. Though Alien 3's austere setting would be a perfect fit for various kinds of games, it's unlikely any developer (or the Alien license holders) would take up the task of adapting one of the franchise's least popular entries. Fincher may hate the movie most, but he isn't alone.

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Andrew King is a Features Editor at TheGamer. He has been working as a journalist since 2016 and is a museum caretaker in his spare time. He loves immersive sims, RPGS, and David Lynch movies.