With no Alien movie on the horizon, 20th Century Fox needed something to get fans excited for Alien Day 2018 – the annual celebration of the classic sci-fi franchise and its loyal fans. Something that would both hold their attention and be worthy of sharing with their fellow fans.

We created ALIEN: Offworld Colony Simulator– a first-of-its-kind stealth tactics game for Amazon Alexa. The game challenges fans to explore a Weyland-Yutani facility while avoiding death at the claws of a Xenomorph. The game innovated in the tabletop gaming space by replacing the typical ‘dungeon master’ with the A.I. of Alexa. We created a full campaign for ALIEN that included Key Art, social content, a contest, giveaways, an interactive browser experience, and a refresh of AlienUniverse.com.

While tracking the sudden spike in the adoption of tabletop gaming and considering the Alien franchise’s target demographic (middle-aged men) we realized there was a very obvious overlap in narrative: Our target demo was being introduced to Alien in 1979 just as the Dungeons and Dragons craze was sweeping the nation.

The Alien Offworld Colony Simulator launched on ‘Alien Day’, April 26th, 2018 across all Amazon Alexa enabled devices. To build anticipation and engagement in the weeks leading up to release we launched the web-hosted Career Placement Test to help fans determine which role in the game suits them best, as well as a multitude of content including a :60 Story Trailer, a 2:00 How-to-Play trailer, and over two dozen pieces of social content. Also leading up to Alien Day we refreshed the design of alienuniverse.com and developed all the Key Art for Alien Day 2018 itself. With the launch of the Alexa game on Alien Day we also launched the web-hosted interactive Survival Assessment simulator for fans without access to an Alexa device.

Alien Offworld Colony Simulator received coverage from entertainment podcasts, sci-fi publications, and tech sites like The Verge, calling it “The best Alexa skill yet.” The Verge went on to say our game ‘..demonstrates the storytelling potential of voice-based assistants’. The average time spent in the game by a player was nearly 7 minutes, more than tripling success metrics.