Aliens: Colonial Marines

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a 2013 first-person shooter developed by Gearbox Software and published by Sega for PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360. Based on the Alien universe and set shortly after the events of James Cameron's 1986 film Aliens, the game follows a group of Colonial Marines, a fictional military unit, as they confront the Weyland-Yutani corporation in an effort to rescue survivors from the Sulaco spaceship. The game features a campaign mode that supports both single-player and cooperative gameplay, and a multiplayer mode in which players compete in different scenarios.

Colonial Marines was developed over six years and suffered from a tumultuous development cycle. Because Gearbox decided to focus on other projects like Duke Nukem Forever and Borderlands 2, they outsourced a significant part of the game to other studios. The game was heavily inspired by Cameron's film. Concept artist Syd Mead, who collaborated with Cameron to design the Sulaco, was hired to design locations. Four downloadable content packs were released, adding multiplayer maps, a new cooperative mode, and a new campaign mode that takes place before the campaign of the base game.

Colonial Marines sold more than one million copies in the United States and Europe, but received unfavorable reviews from critics, who criticized its technical problems, low-quality graphics, short length, and weak artificial intelligence of enemies. It is considered to be one of the worst video games ever made. The competitive multiplayer mode was highlighted as its strongest aspect. The game drew a significant controversy for featuring a lower graphical quality than that of the press demos. This led two players to file a lawsuit, claiming that Gearbox and Sega had falsely advertised the game, but it lost class-action status by 2015. In 2017, a modder improved the game's artificial intelligence by correcting an error in the game's code.