Kataban Blog
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 Is Coming — And the Japanese Alien Games That Came Before It
Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 ships on August 25, 2026 — three days from now. Four-player co-op, a new Specialist class, and cross-platform voice chat so a squad split across three ecosystems can actually talk to each other. If you want the trailer, it is a search away.
What is harder to find, in the three days you have left to fill, is the series' back catalogue in Japan. This article is not about officially licensed Aliens games you can buy today — it is about the ancestors, the games that got to the same idea earlier, and Japan's record of them is thinner and considerably stranger than you would expect. Checked against the Agency for Cultural Affairs Media Arts Database, the licensed titles are mostly missing, and the one game that most deserves the credit was never sold for a home console at all.
Alien 3 — the licensed one Japan actually got
Japan received エイリアン3 on three platforms, and the database has all three:
| Platform | Japanese title | Year | Product code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Super Famicom | エイリアン3 | 1993 | — |
| Game Boy | エイリアン3 | 1993 | — |
| Game Gear | エイリアン3 | 1994 | — |
Two things stand out. The first is that there is no Mega Drive entry. The Mega Drive version of Alien 3 is one of the better-regarded 16-bit movie tie-ins in the West, and Japan simply did not get a catalogued release of it — the database has a Sega handheld port and a Nintendo home port, and nothing on Sega's own home console.
The second is that none of the three carries a product code. The 型番 field is empty on all of them, which is the situation this site exists to deal with. Acclaim Japan is credited on the Game Boy record; the Super Famicom record leaves the publisher field blank entirely. When there is no code to search by, the Japanese title is the search key, which is why searching "Alien 3" returns the three Japanese releases rather than the Western ones you already know about.
Super Contra — the alien shooter that isn't Aliens
Konami's スーパー魂斗羅 reached the Famicom in 1990, and its full Japanese title is スーパー魂斗羅 エイリアンの逆襲 — "Super Contra: The Aliens Strike Back."
It is not an Aliens game. It has no licence, no Weyland-Yutani, and no legal relationship to the films whatsoever. It is also, unmistakably, two soldiers with rifles walking into a nest of biomechanical horrors that a certain 1986 film had put into every designer's head four years earlier. If you want the thing Fireteam Elite is doing, on Japanese hardware, in the era when the idea was new, this is it.
A wrinkle worth knowing before you search: the database's Famicom record is filed as plain スーパー魂斗羅 with the subtitle dropped and the English title left blank. The subtitle survives only on the 2012 Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console entry, where it sits in the alternate-title field. The practical consequence is that searching "Super Contra" in English finds the 3DS re-release and nothing else — you have to search スーパー魂斗羅 to turn up the 1990 Famicom cartridge and the 2008 Wii version alongside it.
The series kept the theme. 魂斗羅スピリッツ (Super Famicom, 1992) went out in English as Contra III: The Alien Wars, and unlike almost everything else in this article it has a real product code: SHVC-CS.
Konami's Aliens (1990) — the real ancestor that never came home
Here is the one that should have been the centrepiece of this article, and can't be.
In 1990 Konami released an arcade game called エイリアンズ — properly licensed, based on the 1986 film, two players side by side, run-and-gun, xenomorphs by the dozen. It is the closest thing the 20th century produced to what Fireteam Elite would do three decades later, and it came out of the same studio that made Contra.
It has no entry in the database at all. Searching the full record set for エイリアンズ or "Aliens" returns exactly one row, and it is a Super Famicom game called ALIENS VS. PREDATOR published by IGS in 1993 — a different game entirely, and not the Capcom arcade beat-'em-up that people usually mean by that name. The Capcom Alien vs. Predator has no entry either.
The reason is mundane and worth understanding, because it applies to a lot of searches on this site: the database catalogues packaged home releases. Konami's Aliens never received one. There is no cartridge, no disc, no Virtual Console listing — nothing to buy, in Japan or anywhere else. An arcade board is the only way to own it.
Product code reference
| Title | Platform | Year | Product Code | Kataban |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| エイリアン3 (Alien 3) | Super Famicom | 1993 | — none recorded | Search for this on Kataban → |
| エイリアン3 (Alien 3) | Game Boy | 1993 | — none recorded | Search for this on Kataban → |
| エイリアン3 (Alien 3) | Game Gear | 1994 | — none recorded | Search for this on Kataban → |
| スーパー魂斗羅 (Super Contra) | Famicom | 1990 | — none recorded | Search for this on Kataban → |
| 魂斗羅スピリッツ (Contra III: The Alien Wars) | Super Famicom | 1992 | SHVC-CS |
Search for this on Kataban → |
Where to buy
Only one of these has a product code on record, so four of the five have to be searched by Japanese title. Adding the Japanese platform name is what separates the three エイリアン3 releases from each other — the title alone is identical across all three.
エイリアン3 (Alien 3) · Super Famicom · 1993 · no product code on record
Where to buy:
Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) ·
Buyee ·
eBay
Search for this on Kataban →
エイリアン3 (Alien 3) · Game Boy · 1993 · no product code on record
Where to buy:
Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) ·
Buyee ·
eBay
Search for this on Kataban →
エイリアン3 (Alien 3) · Game Gear · 1994 · no product code on record
Where to buy:
Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) ·
Buyee ·
eBay
Search for this on Kataban →
スーパー魂斗羅 (Super Contra) · Famicom · 1990 · no product code on record
Where to buy:
Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) ·
Buyee ·
eBay
Search for this on Kataban →
魂斗羅スピリッツ (Contra III: The Alien Wars) · Super Famicom · 1992 · product code SHVC-CS
Where to buy:
Suruga-ya.jp (by product code) ·
Buyee ·
eBay
Search for this on Kataban →
Four of these five have no 型番 on record, which is unusual for this site — most of what we index does. Licensed film tie-ins from the early 90s are one of the weaker corners of the dataset. For those, search the Japanese title and match the box on sight.
Bottom line
The genuinely licensed Aliens game that a Fireteam Elite player would recognise as an ancestor is Konami's 1990 arcade cabinet, and you cannot buy it — it never came home. The licensed game Japan did get on a cartridge is Alien 3, and the database can't even tell you its product code or, on the Super Famicom, who published it.
What is left, and what is actually sitting in the used bins in Akihabara for a few hundred yen, is スーパー魂斗羅 エイリアンの逆襲 — a game with no licence, no film rights, and no legal claim to the word Aliens, which is nonetheless the one you can put in a Famicom tonight and recognise immediately. Thirty-six years on, the knock-off is the version that survived in a form you can own.
One last confession, purely so nobody accuses us of favoritism: after digging through everything the license has touched, the site owner's personal favorite is still Sega's 1987 arcade classic, Alien Syndrome.