So a couple months ago, YouTube started recommending a bunch of videos about Alien: Isolation.

After I watched a couple of them, the algo being what it is, they started popping up in my recommendations more often, but their initial appearance probably had something to do with its sequel being announced¹ and its reported influence on this year’s Alien: Romulus.

But then I noticed an undercurrent of recent comments geousing about IGN’s review score of 5.9, which is atypical of IGN, ancestral home of the 7-10 scale.

(…which they’ve gotten defensive about lately – see, for instance, their insistence that they only give scores below 7 to already infamous duds because they’re chasing search-engine traffic and they assume going in that well-funded media is at least OK and a couple other reasons they threw out in the hopes that something would make an impression.)

This all culminated in someone making a nearly hour-long video in October of this year calling IGN’s review and initial defense thereof an “insult to journalism.”

This was a less obvious fit in my recommendations, because I’ve avoided subscribing to IGN’s torrent of slop – at the time of writing, they’ve posted over 200 videos in the past two weeks – and the last time I’d paid any attention to them was when they gave The Day Bwfore, which they’d hyped for a while beforehand, a vindictive 1/10.

 

I wondered, as I sometimes do, why outrage about a 10-year-old IGN review is hitting the Net now.

The best answer I can come up with at the moment is that they did it to themselves, revisiting Alien: Isolation this October in a more nuanced and broadly positive piece that referenced the controversy, which at the time was mostly confined to a few archived forum posts.

The motive? Well, they’ve already said they’re motivated to chase the algo-dragon, and they’re touchy about the whole 7-10 thing. So when they noticed a wave of media chatter about a decade-old video game, they tried to catch it. If they were lucky, they could get clicks and buff their reputation as critics.

They were seemingly not lucky – their reputation is a meme at this point – but they did get at least a few people talking about them with intensity again, if not in a good way.

 

But that isn’t the whole answer.

There have been (as I’ve recently seen) a steady drip of Alien: Isolation videos and clips in the years since its release, but there was nothing about IGN when they praised the game’s level design last year. And there wasn’t a similar noise in 2021 when Gameapot had “a look back” at its own 6/10 review.

The most obvious difference between them and now is that wave of buzz. The algorithm wasn’t pushing Alien: Isolation content in 2022 or 2023, and it is now.

Looking at the “insult to journalism” video’s creator shows currently less than 3,000 subscribers. Most of his videos get hundreds or a few thousand views each; that video, which came out about a week and a half after IGN brought up the subject, is his most popular by a lot.

That’s the world we live in, in which media algorithms move like the sea, and catching a wave or tide can make the difference between notice and obscurity.

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1. I guess Alien: Blackout doesn’t count, either because it isn’t available any more or because it didn’t have nearly as much of an impact. Or maybe because it was only on mobile, ptui.