An online shooting set in the world of Alien is being developed by industry veterans recently purchased by 20th Century Fox’s games division.
FoxNext has just purchased San Jose-based Cold Iron Studios and tasked them with using their Alien IP and turning it into an online shooter game. FoxNext is the recently created games division of 20th Century Fox and will turn Fox’s intellectual property into games and amusement parks.
Founded in 2015, Cold Iron Studios is likewise very new to the games industry but is filled with veterans who’ve worked on such big-name games as Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, Metroid Prime 3, BioShock Infinite, City of Heroes, Bioshock Infinite, Doom, and Borderlands. That’s a lot of award-winning titles, so nobody should question their games-making chops.
The head honchos at Cold Iron all seem to be mostly Star Trek Online veterans, those being CEO Craig Zinkievich, chief technology officer Shannon Posniewski, and creative director Matt Highison.
Details of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the Cold Iron Studios website says they’re hiring, so they’ll likely be adding some people to their current roster of 25 employees to get this new Alien game off the ground.
The last time we saw a game tie-in from the Alien movie-turned-game franchise was Alien: Isolation, an intense horror game that did a better job of scaring the crap of you than most. There’s nothing more terrifying than sitting around with a woefully inadequate pea-shooter while the hallway in front of you fills with the foreboding beeps of an incoming wave of aliens.
However, Alien: Isolation came out in 2014, long before either Cold Iron or FoxNext were even born. While all the people working there certainly know games, without any previous work under their combined belt, there’s no way to tell how all the parts will fit together to create an astounding blockbuster set in the Alien cinematic universe.
But hey - it’s 2018, and having more players in a vibrant games market will at the very least keep the more established developers on their toes.
