Aliens Online

~ the eulogy ~

In April 1998 I had a 33.6k modem in Turkey and no multiplayer shooter in my life at all. That came four years later, in an internet cafe, with everyone on the same switch in the same room playing Counter-Strike against each other. Aliens Online was an American subscription game running on American servers, and the round trip from Ankara would have decided the match before anybody aimed at anything.

The game came out on 16 April 1998, developed by Mythic Entertainment together with Kesmai and published by Fox Interactive under the actual Aliens license. It ran on GameStorm, Kesmai's subscription service, for $9.95 a month with no box price attached to the thing you were paying for. Underneath it was a modified version of the engine Mythic had already built for Rolemaster: Magestorm, which is how a small studio shipped a licensed shooter with dozens of people in it two years before that was ordinary.

What made it worth writing about is that both sides were people. Plenty of games have let you shoot aliens. This one staffed the hive with subscribers, gave them a lifecycle to climb, and put a single queen at the top of it who was somebody who had earned her way there that evening. GameSpot gave it 7.2 and it picked up a D.I.C.E. nomination for online game of the year, which it lost to Ultima Online, and then it went quiet in the way games on somebody else's service tend to.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it played ~

Marines picked from a set of roles running from medic up to heavy weapons, and they carried motion trackers that showed movement without showing what was moving. Aliens got the whole map on radar and no guns at all. The lopsided part was deliberate: one side had information and the other had firepower, and neither had both.

The alien side ran as a lifecycle rather than a class list. You came in low, as a facehugger or a drone, and worked upward, and each map had exactly one queen with an empress above her. That single slot did more for the atmosphere than any amount of lighting would have. Being hunted by a script is a level design problem. Being hunted by a person who wants to win is a different feeling entirely, and in 1998 very few games could produce it.

~ the actual end ~

Electronic Arts bought GameStorm in 1999 and inherited a catalog it had not built. Somebody went through the list and decided which titles were worth the servers, which is a completely reasonable thing for a buyer to do and a fatal thing to be on the wrong side of. Aliens Online did not make the cut. The servers went off on 29 May 2000, twenty five months after launch.

Subscribers got a parting gift in the mail: a free copy of Ultima Online and a month of subscription time, from the same company, to move them onto a game EA did want to keep running. Losing the D.I.C.E. award to Ultima Online and then being mailed a copy of it as a severance package is the sort of ending nobody plans. The license went back to Fox and the engine stayed with Mythic. The hive left nothing behind to preserve, because everything that made it work was other people being logged in at the same time.

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