Speaking in a recent interview with Kotaku, Gearbox Software head Randy Pitchford describes the enormous lengths the studio is taking to craft their upcoming first-person shooter, Aliens: Colonial Marines, as a true sequel to the 1986 James Cameron film Aliens, boasting of how they're working with information from the filmmakers that wasn't explicitly detailed in the movies may actually improve players' perception of the oft-maligned Alien 3 film.

Pitchford explains how they want to tell their own story, but how it will also plug some gaps that film-fans -- like the developers themselves -- have been missing for years

We will board the Sulaco; we will be joined by a synthetic who was the same model as Bishop and will therefore look like and be voiced by Bishop actor Lance Henriksen; we will head down to LV426; we will check out the ruins of Hadley's Hope, the human colony set up by the Weyland-Yutani corporation after the first Alien.

..."At the end of Aliens, Ripley, Hicks, Newt and Bishop go to sleep and are presumably going home. At the beginning of Alien 3 something happened. We never knew what or why. But something caused them to be ejected from the Sulaco and they ended up on this prison planet.

..."One of the things we're really proud about is that there were some things that fans like us always believed were inconsistencies between Alien 3 and Aliens," Pitchford said, "But as we dig into it, as we work with filmmakers and kind of understand it all and think about it from a logic problem point of view, there is actually a truth there that makes more sense. When we are able to use it to stitch it together, Alien 3 is actually a better movie."

From our past preview sessions with the game, we're still not sold on the gameplay, but if it truly does provide a better bridge between the two films, it may just be worth playing it for that alone.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is due in Spring 2012 (US Fall) for PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and a Wii-U version to follow. Watch the most recent trailer here on AusGamers.