Alien 3 is a depressing film about bald British character actors being chased around a dilapidated industrial prison by a single dog-shaped alien. In comparison to the balls-out action of Aliens this setup doesn’t scream video game adaptation, though pretty much every platform under the sun in the early 90s got some kind of licensed game based on it.
Most of these were side-scrolling action platformers (though a special mention should be given to the top-down adventure Game Boy version). Then, a year on from Alien 3, Sega unleashed Alien 3: The Gun into arcades and, after clocking it, we kinda wish they’d let Sega tackle the movie itself.
The System 32 cabinet was a staple of the early 90s arcades and even after thirty years it still turns heads. Front and centre are a pair of immaculately modelled Aliens Pulse Rifles. They’re a dream to play with and (at least on the cabinet I played at Croydon’s Heart of Gaming) are hard-wearing enough to still be in good shape.
The game itself is a bare-bones but intense scaler shooter. Like Jurassic Park the cabinet throws a ridiculous number of sprites to blast away in a haze of acid blood, with familiar Weyland-Yutani corridors, weatherbeaten alien planets, and dowdy-sci-fi cafeterias full of objects to blow to smithereens as you pick off the hordes of xenomorphs (and later robots to mix things up a bit).
The aliens get blown apart into pre-rendered chunks, often rising up from the floor to continue their pursuit of you without arms or legs, requiring a further blast to put them in the ground for good. There’s a smattering of credit-munching fake-outs in which an alien will suddenly appear in front of you to do damage but, so long as you’ve got quick reflexes, it feels a damn sight fairer than a lot of other 90s coin-ops
There aren’t a lot of tactics here, though you can’t simply jam the trigger down. Sustained fire causes the Pulse Rifle to overheat, meaning optimal gameplay is to fire in short, sharp bursts. This forces you to mimic the way the marines fight in Aliens and gives you the illusion that you’re a crack soldier rather than simply spraying and praying your way through the game.
Sega also – somewhat surprisingly – manage to capture the cyberpunk cynicism that’s been baked into the franchise since 1979’s Alien. After battling your way through five levels of hell you defeat the main alien by knocking it into molten metal then freezing and shattering it. Then, as per the movie, the company man shows up to take you out.
Defeat him and you’re faced with a wave of soldiers, you rush them and get blasted to bits as the screen fades to white. I don’t think there are many 90s arcade games that go full Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but it feels perfectly in line with everything else in the Alien franchise.
Alien 3 is an interesting movie, though we suspect this game delivers what audiences were really craving after James Cameron’s Aliens. As with most licensed Sega games of the era this has never gotten so much of a sniff of a port, though I don’t know how fun it’d be without the plastic Pulse Rifle to play with.
The game got a spiritual sequel in 2007 with Global VR’s Aliens Extermination, which also featured mounted pulse rifles. However, despite the graphics making the jump to 3D the game just can’t compete with Sega at the height of their early 90s arcade pomp.
This is a hard-wearing cabinet that can take a beating so there are still a lot of these out there in the wild. If you see it feed it a handful of coins for old times’ sake, because this cabinet has still got it where it counts.
Pixel Hunted 