After 40 years, Aliens is still shaping the way video games are made

James Cameron’s high-octane film sequel is a blueprint for modern action space slashers • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here It is difficult to believe that James Cameron’s Aliens was released into cinemas 40 years ago.

The seminal space shooter took the original Alien – a tense slasher film with a tiny cast and one monster – and transformed it into an intergalactic war movie crammed with wry one-liners, massive guns and an actual boss battle finale.

As a 14-year-old, I stood in line at the Tatton Gatley cinema, unsure if I’d be allowed in – I came out three hours later a changed person, my head filled with esoteric military slang and a deep fear of beeping motion detectors.

For days afterwards, I slept with my duvet covering my mouth so that no facehuggers could get me. (I was a highly impressionable teenager.) It’s little wonder that the film has had such a profound effect on video game design.

Take the colonial marines, for example. Although the concept of the space soldier had been around in sci-fi novels since the 1930s, most notably in the works of EE “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein (the Starship Troopers), Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and co, were the

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  After 40 years, Aliens is still shaping the way video games are made