Alien: Isolation Cassette

In a world filled with quick cash-in licensed games, Alien: Isolation was a gasp of fresh air. Its release in 2014 marked a watershed moment for what inspired and faithful adaptations could look like in video games as a medium. 

With its retro-futuristic visuals, subtly haunting sound design, nail-bitingly tense gameplay, and brilliantly ahead-of-its-time AI, Creative Assembly’s masterwork presented a different sort of vent-crawling survival horror, one well-suited for the world of Weyland-Yutani. 

Now, a decade later, we at iam8bit are proud to celebrate Alien: Isolation’s 10th anniversary with an appropriately analog release. This is the Alien: Isolation Cassette Soundtrack. It’s the very best of The Flight and Christian Henson’s now-legendary score, spooled up and stored on glorious magnetic tape, just the way a corporate-faithful android would like it. 

Keeping in line with the game’s grimy, lo-fi art design, the music of Isolation is a journey through tense corporate steel, dripping with an unforgiving atmosphere that often transports the listener right into the cold, unending expanse of outer space. It’s not all doom and gloom, though — like Amanda Ripley herself, Isolation’s music buoys forward through sheer will and unexpected moments of warm hope. 

For the artwork, we tapped longtime iam8bit friend Nimit Malavia to craft a piece that captures the vast, unending terror of Alien’s world; not just terror in the wake of an unspeakable monstrosity, but terror in the realization that we are cosmically alone. 

Because, after all: In space, no one can hear you scream. 

© 20th Century Studios