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In the world of Alien: Isolation, corporations dominate every day life, with foodstuffs, housing, technology, and more coming directly from their efforts.
Weyland-Yutani Corporation is the Company that all other corporations fear.
Summary[ | ]
Weyland-Yutani is a monolithic corporation, and is often referred to as simply "The Company" for this reason. They are the primary suppliers of global technology, and hold extensive assets in space exploration, mining, colonization, trade, etc., to the point of outright monopolization. Their branding appears on everything from starships to space heaters and children's toys.
The influence of Weyland-Yutani does not end within the corporation. It also has overt and covert control over several governmental bodies as well. In addition to the civic organizations of the Extrasolar Colonization Administration and the Interstellar Commerce Commission, they possess significant clout within the command structure the United States Colonial Marine Corps. and have several positions of power within the largest countries on Earth. They hold offices in Tokyo, Japan; San Francisco, United States of America; The Sea of Tranquility, Luna; and Capital City, Thedus.
Morality[ | ]
- CREW EXPENDABLE
- Weyland-Yutani special order 937
The Company's actions surrounding the Alien are good case studies for the Company's morality, especially when one considers how little the Company may even know about the species.
What is certain is that, by 2122, the Company became aware of the possible presence of an alien organism on the planetoid orbiting Zeta II Reticuli. Though the extent and particulars of that information remain unclear, subsequent to obtaining it, the Company issued orders to the USCSS Nostromo's "MOTHER" artificial intelligence to re-rout the ship to the planetoid without its crew's knowledge and awaken them on the pretext that it had intercepted the beacon signal coming from the planetoid. The Company also replaced the ship's science officer with a synthetic (under cover as a normal human being) under the pretext of a crew transfer and programmed both the synthetic and the MOTHER A.I. to ensure the safe return of a specimen for analysis, even at the expense of the human crew.
In 2137, upon receiving word of an alien organism aboard the Sevastopol subsequent to the arrival of the Nostromo's flight recorder, the Company again acted with ruthless secrecy, buying the whole space station from Seegson Corporation without publicising the sale and instructing the APOLLO Central A.I. to preserve a specimen and enforce a communication blackout.
In both cases, it would appear that the Company considers that any potential resource is to be exploited exclusively by the Company for its own benefit, regardless of any other potential gains or costs - including, but not limited to:
- Human lives, from six employees to a whole space station full of people.
- The price of a high-grade synthetic, a space freighter and its cargo, or an entire space station.
- An optimal first contact between humanity and a new extraterrestrial species.
The thought that the Company may not even know the particulars of the Alien (given the events chronicled thus far, there is no clear indication that the Company possesses any information on the Alien beyond the potential existence of an uncategorised xenomorph species; after all, both the Nostromo and Sevastopol were destroyed before the Company could collect the specimen or any intelligence on it) makes this mindset even more frightening: That they didn't know of its specific danger and didn't care.
To sum up, it could be fair to say that Weyland-Yutani's principal drive is this: The Company must own the future.
Broader Lore[ | ]
Weyland-Yutani has a varied and somewhat unknown origin. Though video games, comic books, and movies have each defined their origin differently, it would seem that the Company prefers to keep its origins a mystery; even internal documentation is sparse and heavily redacted.
The most well known accounts focus on the history of the Weyland side of the company:
- The movie Prometheus establishes the Weyland Corporation, also known as Weyland Industries, as owned and operated by Sir Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce). A TED talk set in 2023 shows Sir Peter as a middle-aged British man of great ambition; as of the Prometheus mission in 2089 (chronicled in the film), Sir Peter appears as elder man seeking to cheat death. Weyland Corporation is portrayed as already being heavily invested in terraforming other planets.
- The movie Alien Vs. Predator, though, establishes the head of the Weyland Corporation in 2004 as Charles Bishop Weyland, an aging American industrialist played by Lance Henriksen (linking the character to the Bishop android, also played by Henriksen, in Aliens). Whether Sir Peter is a blood relative of Charles is not established, and given Prometheus' pedigree as a Ridley Scott film, this origin and others are considered largely redundant.
Despite obvious demands of profit and power, several within the organization have stated that Weyland-Yutani does evil, but for the right reason - to establish humanity under the Company as the foremost elite species in the universe. Karl Bishop Weyland, one of the key employees of the Company in the 2010 video game Aliens Versus Predator, states that this is the purpose behind the program to capture and use the Alien, with profit being only a secondary cause.