Gearbox’s Aliens Flopped: Tiny Tina and Horizon Star Ashly Burch Was Thrilled to Join, Now Wonders If Anyone Even Remembers

Alien games swing wildly between brilliant and busted. Alien: Isolation is the gold standard. Aliens: Colonial Marines... was not. But for Ashly Burch, who was just breaking in at the time, that infamous 2013 shooter ended up being a stepping stone she remembers fondly.

How Tiny Tina led Burch to Colonial Marines

In a new chat with Fall Damage, Burch says her Borderlands stint on Pandora opened the door to Gearbox's Alien game. She was already the chaotic heart of Borderlands as Tiny Tina, and that momentum carried straight into LV-426.

"The reason that I got Alien: Colonial Marines is because it's a Gearbox title. I had done well enough with Tiny Tina that they were like, 'Oh, let's bring her into this thing.'"

Back then, Burch was still climbing. Now she is also the voice of Aloy in the Horizon series, which makes the throwback connection a little surprising: the notorious Aliens FPS helped build a career that very much did not stall out.

Who she played, and where it fits in the Aliens timeline

• Character: Lieutenant Lisa Reid, a marine Burch voices throughout the campaign
• Setup: A squad is sent to check out the USS Sulaco after the events of Aliens
• Where it goes: They end up back at Hadley's Hope on LV-426
• Fate: Reid is a side character who actually survives the whole story

On being part of a game everyone drags

Burch is realistic about how Colonial Marines is remembered. She points out that when a game flops, people mostly talk gameplay and story, not voice work. So she figured her role might just vanish into the noise.

"I kind of felt like, 'Are people even going to remember that I was in this?' Now they do."

And to be fair, voice performances were never the issue with Colonial Marines. The problems were... plentiful elsewhere.

Could Lisa Reid ever return?

Never say never. If somebody spins up an Isolation follow-up or another Alien project that dips back into that corner of the universe, Reid is right there. Whether Burch has time to squeeze it in is another story now that her schedule looks nothing like it did in 2013.

Meanwhile, on the Isolation side

Separate but related: an Alien: Isolation writer recently admitted the game is too scary for a lot of people and they probably could have sold more if they had watered it down. Speaking as a proud scaredy cat: I am very glad they did not.