Creative Assembly Working On Alien Title [UPDATE] News

It's not often that a Cabinet Minster announces a new video game but that's exactly what's happened today, even if the Minster in question revealed the game unintentionally.

Ed Vaizey, the UK government's Minster for Communications, Culture and the Creative Industries, Tweeted today: "Great visit to Creative Assembly one of UK's best developers. Now hiring for new blockbuster based on Alien."

Oh dear. SEGA can't be too happy about this. The project is unannounced and should presumably be under some kind of non-disclosure agreement, although that sort of thing probably doesn't matter much to an MP.

Of course, there's always the possibility that SEGA could be forking over some of the development of Gearbox Software's long overdue Aliens: Colonial Marines to The Creative Assembly. Having originally being pegged for a late 2008 release, the title has since fallen into development limbo despite continued assertions that the project has not been canned.

Gearbox has also been busy on Duke Nukem Forever over the last year, so it's not entirely out of the realms of possibility that SEGA has spread out some of the workload onto its Creative Assembly studio in the hope of getting Colonial Marines out a bit quicker.

Having purchased the rights to make Alien video games from 20th Century Fox in 2006, SEGA has since announced three separate projects under the license. An Alien RPG from Obsidian that was cancelled, Rebellion's Aliens Vs. Predator which was released last year, and Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Whether or not this Creative Assembly project can indeed add a fourth full project to the pile remains to be seen. We'll keep you updated as more news comes in...

Update: A Eurogamer report has now revealed that The Creative Assembly is working on a new, unannounced Alien project that's described by Studio Director, Tim Heaton as a "console core game".

However, it appears unlikely that it's in any way linked to Ridley Scott's currently-in-production 'Prometheus' film - a project that once started off as an Alien prequel but has since (xeno)morphed into an "original story" with "strands of Alien's DNA", according to Scott.

Heaton was quick to dismiss links between Creative Assembly's project and 'Prometheus', saying, "What we can say is that we understand that games that are time-constrained to be day-and-date with the movie are often flawed so it's probably something that we wouldn't really want to be tied to."