The Guardian's games column marks 40 years since James Cameron's Aliens hit cinemas, arguing the film remains hugely influential on how modern action video games are designed. Where Ridley Scott's original Alien was a claustrophobic slasher with a tiny cast, Cameron's sequel turned it into a militarised space war movie, establishing templates for weapons, villainous corporations and pacing that games have borrowed from ever since.

The piece traces Aliens' fingerprints through the colonial marines archetype, echoed in Doom, Halo, Gears of War, Killzone and Marathon, and through Cameron's expansion of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as a model for evil video game mega-corps. It also credits the film with popularising scaled weapon progression and a rhythm of tense exploration followed by explosive combat. Despite this influence, direct game adaptations have struggled: Aliens: Colonial Marines was a notorious flop that triggered a false-advertising lawsuit, while Aliens: Fireteam Elite and Aliens: Infestation had more mixed but modest success; the writer singles out 1986's Aliens: The Computer Game as an early, underrated favourite.