While Aliens was only released on the MSX, that wasn’t originally the plan. “We were actually working on the MSX, Famicom Disk System, and a PC version, but we only completed the MSX version,” Tokita said. “What happened was that the MSX version was programmed in-house, but we used contracted programmers for the Famicom and PC versions, and they really weren’t up to the challenge.”

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A prototype disk of Aliens for the Famicom Disk System (a floppy disk add-on for the Japanese version of the NES) was found and dumped in 2011, and that version of Aliens turned out to be playable all the way through, although Tokita says Square wasn’t happy with the quality.

“I think the Famicom version reached a stage between alpha and beta version, however the quality was quite poor,” Tokita said. “The programmer just… Didn’t really have the skill to pull it off. He was holed up in the office, working at it night and day, but… Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out the way we had hoped.”

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Does the near-existence of a Famicom version mean that we almost had a Square-produced Aliens game released for the NES? Probably not. “I think they only got the license for use in Japan,” Tokita said. Indeed, the mention of Activision on the game’s manual probably means that Square sub-licensed the Japanese rights from the U.S. publisher, which released Aliens: The Computer Game in Western territories.

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Besides Tokita, two other key members of the team would go on to Final Fantasy fame. Aliens’ producer was Hiromichi Tanaka, who did game design on the first three Final Fantasy games and also went on to a long and storied career at Square. And the music for the game was composed by Final Fantasy maestro Nobuo Uematsu himself.

(As often happens in Japanese game credits, the three went by goofy pseudonyms in the Aliens instruction manual—Tokita was credited as “Dirty Tokita,” Tanaka as “Cellotape Tanaka,” and Nobuo Uematsu as “Kentaro Hayabusa.”)

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“It was a very famous film, and we had a lot of freedom to develop the title,” Tokita said in conclusion. “I was only 20 years old, so that was quite exciting for me.”