Creative Assembly’s Alien Isolation is, in many gamers’ minds, the perfect sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien. Set between the first two movies, the game follows film protagonist Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda Ripley aboard the Sevastopol space station.

Amanda Ripley, first introduced as a deceased old woman in 1986’s Aliens, is the perfect protagonist for a sequel, but they weren’t the first choice for Creative Assembly’s now-iconic horror game. Speaking on an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more, Alien Isolation writer Dion Lay reveals that the character was initially pitched by one of the game’s coders.

“Now it seems like a no-brainer,” Lay explained. “And it was so funny because I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea. What happened was, one of my mates, the guy I was living with, Chris Gascoyne, he’s a coder and he came up to me in the kitchen, and he was like, ’Hey, what about [Amanda Ripley]?’”

“I always felt like she had been trapped in almost stasis where she can’t really do anything with her life until she kind of solves that [mystery].”

Alien Isolation writer Dion Lay on the inclusion of Amanda Ripley

In the earlier iterations of Alien Isolation, Creative Assembly has essentially created their own Ellen Ripley, another strong, stoic female protagonist that would grow in the same way that Sigourney Weaver’s character did across the first two films. Lay was right, now simply slotting in the unexplored character of Amanda Ripley seems like a “no-brainer”, but at the time the writers were worried it would seem too cliched.

“He was like, ‘Why don’t we make her Amanda Ripley?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a bit Son of Frankenstein, you know?’ It’s a bit convenient as well. And I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know’ and then he talked to [creative lead] Al [Hope] about it.”

Over time, the team softened on the idea with creative lead Alistair Hope and writer Dan Abnett jumping on the idea of Amanda Ripley being the face of Alien Isolation. Yes, it was convenient, and it was somewhat cliché to have the horror of the Xenomorph haunt through the family just like slashers Halloween, Scream and more. However, with Ellen Ripley still missing, the idea was tied around the existence of the Nostromo flight recorder that could help Amanda move on from the disappearance of her mother.

“Dan Abnett, he kind of came around to it as well,” Lay said. “And then Dan Abnett, he had the idea of like how it could not feel convenient, which is the reason she’s going to find the Alien is because she’s going to follow her mother, literally. So she’s going to follow, you know, black box and the reason they found it is because they’ve been on the Alien planet, you know, where there’s an Alien. So that made it make sense, and it was so funny because suddenly every has so much more weight and heart in it.”

Lay explains that the character of Amanda Ripley was “trapped” prior to the events of Alien Isolation, knowing that something happened to her mother but unable to find out what.

“I always felt like she had been trapped in almost stasis where she can’t really do anything with her life until she kind of solves that [mystery],” they explained. “So I always kind of thought Alien Isolation, even though it puts her in terrible danger, kind of frees her because she’s like, ‘right, now I know’… now you can start living and you can do what you want to do.”

In the end, Creative Assembly’s use of Amanda Ripley ended up making the tragedy of the original series even sadder. Ellen Ripley’s survival of the Xenomorph unwillingly sends her daughter into the exact same horrors she faced years prior. While a sequel is in the works – which may or may not feature Amanda Ripley again – we don’t know where the character ends up. Will she actually be free? Can anyone be free from Weyland-Yutani’s endless quest for the Xemomorph?

For more from our chat with Dion Lay, read about the creation of The Banished in Creative Assembly’s Halo Wars 2 and how 343 Industries already planned a soft-reset of the universe before the release of Halo 5.