Today you can still join a multiplayer game to hear the metallic pitter-patter of feet across steel grates, and see a xenomorph’s secondary mandible emerge like a murderous matryoshka doll, ready to impale the skull of an unsuspecting marine. Yet, 10 years after the heart of AvP2’s multiplayer was ripped out, acidic green lifeblood still trickles through the game. "People genuinely thought it would be the end.” “People made tribute videos and 'last hurrah' sort of matches," says Dallas Smith, an electromechanical engineer and long-time player. The master server browser going down was almost an apocalyptic event for the players. By the end of the year, Sierra itself was shuttered.
Aliens Versus Predator 2 was one of them. Within a few months Sierra announced it would be shutting down the servers for 21 of its games. Then in early 2008, Vivendi Games, parent company to the shooter’s publisher Sierra Entertainment, merged with Activision. No dark corner offered sanctuary, cloaked predators disemboweled marines, and marines surrounded themselves with thickets of spider mines, and, all the while, alien players crawled through the vents. For seven years, the multiplayer servers pulsed with life. It was an asymmetrical first-person shooter that stood out when it was released in 2001. Aliens Versus Predator 2 pitted colonial marines against predators against aliens.
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