A years-old, one-letter typo led to Aliens: Colonial Marines‘ weird AI

Enlarge / Want Aliens: Colonial Marines to better resemble this ‘shopped image? Just remove one letter! (credit: Gearbox / Sega)

History may never be kind to Aliens: Colonial Marines, but the present tense isn’t looking so good for the lawsuit– and complaint-ridden Gearbox game, either. This week brought to our attention one of the weirdest coding typos we’ve ever seen in a game—which has apparently been hidden inside of A:CM‘s PC version since its 2013 launch.

The first-person shooter returned to gaming’s zeitgeist this week thanks to a 90-percent discount at gaming site Fanatical, which brings its asking price down to $ 3. (Buying the PC version outright from Steam currently costs the full $ 30 price.) This sale led one fan to plead with members of the popular gaming forum ResetERA to consider the game as a decent cheap-fun option, especially due to a 712MB fan-made patch at moddb.com that addresses many of the game’s graphical and gameplay glitches.

Tether vs. teather

Upon researching this patch, ResetERA readers noticed something in the moddb.com notes that somehow escaped the gaming community at large in October 2017: the discovery of a one-letter typo in A:CM‘s INI files. As moddb.com user jamesdickinson963 pointed out last year, the game’s “PecanEngine.ini” file references a “tether” system in assigning AI commands to the series’ infamous monsters (which I’ll call “xenomorphs” for brevity’s sake, even though that term isn’t necessarily the right one). However, one of its two mentions of the term “tether” is misspelled as “teather.”