It sounded like a big robot or something like that-real thuddy and mechanical almost. Its footsteps were a trickier proposition than Ripley’s. Getting the right noises for the xenomorph was all about manipulating digital samples, however. “It’s amazing how much stuff they can do,” says van Dyck, “and you’ve got to imagine all this expensive equipment in this room full of dirt and broken wood and sawdust and stuff.” They did this mainly by stamping on different surfaces, including soil covered in assorted squishy vegetables. For Alien: Isolation, Pinewood Studios were hired to create an archive of sounds that would suit Ripley’s trek across Sevastopol, from the sterile plastic of its medical bay to the muck of an alien nest. During the infamous shower scene in Psycho you’re hearing Alfred Hitchcock plunge a knife into a watermelon. Traditional movie foley is the art of physically creating sounds that feel right rather than necessarily being similar to what’s on the screen. We had some budget left over and we went for the proper foley.” “You can buy libraries of stuff like that,” explains van Dyck, “and we went through a bunch of the libraries because that’s obviously the easier way to go about it, but we couldn’t find anything that really matched and we thought, well, you know, triple-A title. Ripley has sneakers that squeak, a backpack full of tools and scrap that jangles when she turns, and jumpsuit pants that sometimes shwiff like George Costanza’s when she walks. There need to be ordinary noises as well, the ones that ground you, that give a believable physicality to the character you’re playing. Not every sound can be as evocative as the space whale. Sevastopol’s creaking and sparking and shuddering all recede when the alien’s near, making you even more aware of protagonist Amanda Ripley’s breathing and the clatter of items you bump or devices you turn on. The xenomorph in Alien: Isolation has a similar intensifying effect, but as well as making the music change-more of those quivering violin tremolos-its approach makes the ambient noises subside. When they got closer to you the music would amp up.” Not only were they fixed points in the world, but they would attach that emitter to monsters, specially significant ones. “In Dead Space they use these things called ‘fear emitters’ and they were basically just a point they would put in various parts of the level, and if you walked near that point the music would cross-fade into tension and if you moved away it would be less. Among the games that Alien: Isolation drew on for inspiration, van Dyck singles out Visceral’s sci-fi horror game Dead Space, which itself drew heavily from the Alien movies.

Aliens motion tracker sound