Gears Of War Designer Almost Made An Aliens FPS, And Here's What It Would Have Been

Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski nearly made a new Aliens first-person shooter featuring a new version Ripley and set in a Black Mesa-style facility. You would play as a grown-up version of Rebecca “Newt” Jorden, who was among the only survivors of a Xenomorph infestation during the Aliens timeline.

The developer revealed this on Twitter, saying his studio, Boss Key, was in talks with Aliens rights-owners Fox to make a new Aliens game, but it fell apart after Disney acquired Fox.

“Ripley would be alive and be your ‘Cortana/Anya,'” Bleszinski said, referencing the two support characters from Halo and Gears of War, respectively. “You’d play as grown Newt. On Earth. Weyland-Yutani are weaponizing the aliens in a Black Mesa-style facility, and, of course, all hell breaks loose,” Bleszinski added.

The game was also going to feature a new robot-friend named Casey after Newt’s doll in Aliens. Bleszinski added that he was never personally interested on working on someone else’s IP … unless that IP was Aliens or Transformers. (The code-name for LawBreakers was Bluestreak, which is a reference to the Transformers franchise)

In response to Bleszinski’s tweet about making a new Aliens FPS, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford replied, “Careful” with a winky-face emoji. This could be in reference to any number of things. Gearbox developed the maligned Alien game Aliens: Colonial Marines, but whether or not the studio makes any more Aliens game is unknown.

What is known is that Cold Iron Studios is currently working on a new Aliens FPS, made by some of the people who also developed BioShock, Borderlands, and Star Trek Online.

After Disney bought Fox, it acquired the company’s games label, FoxNext, which was going to publish this new Aliens game. However, Disney sold FoxNext to Scopely. The saga doesn’t end there, however, as Scopely said it plans to sell Cold Iron to another company in the future.

Going back to Bleszinski, he left Epic Games in 2012 (before Fortnite) and later started his own studio, Boss Key. The company would release two titles–LawBreakers and Radical Heights–but they both failed to find and audience and the studio closed down. Bleszinski recently said that part of the reason why LawBreakers failed was because he pushed his own “woke” politics.

Cliff Bleszinski Comments On Aliens Game