Fascinating talk with Alistair Hope, creative director for the game Alien: Isolation. Set between events in Alien (79, Ridley Scott) and Aliens (86, James Cameron) it follows Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen, as she searches for her missing mother and ends up trapped on a space station with a Xenomorph and a handful of survivors. It’s an unbearably tense experience, beautifully designed, and oddly affecting at times as Ripley gets closer to the truth about her mother. 20th Century Fox were hugely supportive of the project and gave Hope and his team access to production material from the original movie even going so far as allowing them access to their archives. The resulting game looks pleasingly like Ridley Scott’s roughnecks-in-space vision of the future. Hope also mentioned being influenced by the work of Terrence Malick and what Hope described as “the space between the action” in The Thin Red Line. Alien: Isolation fits so well into the universe established by the film franchise it’s hard not to consider it canon.