
However, due to that promising start, fans still have much love for the world begun by Alien - indeed, social media has declared today to be "Alien Day 426" - named for today's date, and the planet LV-426 where the Aliens were first discovered.
To mark this most special and arbitrary of occasions, here's a brief history of the key moments in Alien gaming.
Except... the crew all have their own personalities and emotional states - and will choose to follow or ignore your orders based upon how freaked out they are at the idea of eating a bad egg.
Playing it now, with its chunky, lo-fi, graphics, it's hard to imagine anybody being scared of it. But then, it's hard to imagine anybody ever giving Little And Large their own Saturday night TV series - and they were still going strong in 1986. "Rock on, Little!"
Also, if you ignore that Pac-Man thing, it was the first game where you played as Ripley... Believe it or not.
Curiously, there were dramatic differences between the various versions - the Super NES and Mega Drive games followed the same side-on shoot 'em up style, but were basically different games. The Super NES came out on top, duh.
When studying the bright, colourful graphics, it's worth remembering the lengths filmmakers went to in order to keep the Alien hidden in the shadows, so as to preserve its grisly awe. Well done, video game-makers of the era for utterly missing the point of the Alien's appeal.
Lots of people seem to like this, judging from how developer Rebellion ran the idea into the ground. However, we were always annoyed by it, as we felt it demystified the Aliens and the Predators too much. But then, we're so iconoclastic it hurts. No, really. We have to get cream from the chemist.
The story expanded on the Space Jockey race - seen in Alien - which would later be canonised to such disappointing effect in Prometheus, Ridley Scott's weird return to the series he gave birth to.
Interestingly, it was one of the few games to utilise the godawful PlayStation mouse - which added an extra layer of challenge and swearing.
Unfortunately, for our money, it was a little too difficult, the invincible Alien a little too smart and dangerous; seeing it typically meant instant death. Though certainly a step in the right direction - once again returning the Alien to the role of antagonist, and not a Predator in sight - the relatively low sales suggests that years of over-exposure had damaged the Alien brand, and people were reluctant to spend hours hiding beneath desks.