Aliens: Colonial Marines

Steam News · Oct 11, 2025

The bold and futile attempt to fix the disastrous Aliens: Colonial Marines

Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the most infamous misfires of gaming history, a disaster of a scale that's relatively rare in the upper echelons of game development. Virtually everyone who played it at the time acknowledged that it was a buggy, broken, unfinished mess, and there were rumblings that Gearbox outsourced large portions of the game's development while it focused on building Borderla...

Steam News · Apr 21, 2023

Alien Day Steam sale drops prices on some real highs and lows

Alien Isolation is an incredible example of how to perfectly capture the vibe of a beloved movie series and transform it into one of the best horror games in years. As Alien Day 2023 approaches, a celebratory Steam sale offers a big discount on Alien Isolation, along with similar deals on other hits, as well as some less-successful takes on the beloved space horror franchise. Read the rest of the ...

Steam News · Jan 24, 2019

Meet the modder who's spent years trying to fix the "unfixable" Aliens Colonial Marines

2013's Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the most memorable gaming disappointments we've ever seen. After witnessing a gorgeous, atmospheric engine showcase back in 2011, fans of the series were hungrily awaiting a true sequel to the iconic 1986 film. But then, in February 2013, Aliens Colonial Marines came out and the horror of its truth became reality. Gearbox's first-person shooter was an infe...

Steam News · Jan 12, 2019

Gearbox legal battle with former employee becomes messy publicly

Back in November, the Borderlands and Aliens: Colonial Marines studio Gearbox Software filed a suit against their former lawyer, Wade Callender, accusing him of exploit Gearbox s generosity and trust for his own personal gain. The suit was not particularly interesting, alleging that Callender did not fully pay back a loan he borrowed to secure his house, and that he used a business c...

Steam News · Jul 17, 2018

Gearbox is seeking a 'Programming Copy Editor' to frag future typos

Aliens: Colonial Marines suffered from a lot of issues, including wonky enemy AI that resulted in erratic and confused Xenomorph behavior. More than five years after it came out, someone discovered that the bad behavior could have been the result of a simple typo in the code—a theory that we put to the test and found to be at least partially correct. Launching without that typo probably wou...

Steam News · Jul 14, 2018

A single typo wrecked Aliens: Colonial Marines and people are handling it fine

In what feels like The Games Story Of The Year, during the Steam summer sale the much reviled Gearbox title Aliens: Colonial Marines was marked down to a stupidly low three dollars. A modder happened to notice that in the INI file for the game, there is a single typo that is get this responsible for many of the awful AI choices that the xenomorphs make in the game like runni...

Steam News · Jul 14, 2018

All this time, Aliens: Colonial Marines' stupid AI may have been caused by a single typo

Aliens: Colonial Marines released on February 11, 2013. It wasn't very good. As Chris Thursten noted in our review, the AI of the aliens was especially bad. At the time, he said, aliens pop out of vents and pop back in again, get stuck on the ceiling, fall off walls and run in circles. Well, it turns out the game's laughably stupid xenomorphs may have been caused by a typo&#x...

Steam News · Jun 8, 2018

The worst marketing misfires and PR moves in PC gaming (and a pair of console flubs, too)

Image source: The Elder Scrolls Wiki What happens when PR goes awry? Not slightly sideways, as we saw recently with the leak of Rage 2 (which is probably the best thing that could have happened to it anyway) but completely, irretrievably wrong, in a way that inspires conversation and funny stories for years to come? Game publishers do their level best to keep the hype machine running along smoothl...

Steam News · Dec 6, 2016

Have You Played Aliens: Colonial Marines?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. You probably haven t and you probably shouldn t. A year before the world finally got the Alien game it deserved with Alien: Isolation, the burning wheely bin known as Aliens: Colonial Marines was dragged into public view and stank out the industry with countless bugs, terrible writ...

Steam News · Sep 30, 2016

We talk to lawyers about the No Man's Sky false advertising investigation

To better understand the potential consequences of the UK's Advertising Standards Authority's investigation into No Man's Sky, we reached out to a number of legal experts proficient in the realm of video game law for their take on the situation. Stephen McArthur, a "Video Game Lawyer" of McArthur Law Firm , Ryan Morrison of Morrison Lee , Jas Purewal of Purewal and Partners LLP , and Tom Bu...