XENOMORPH TIMELINE
Xenomorph Timeline sorts every story into three continuities: Canon, Alternate and Legacy. The main timeline shows the canon. The two other continuities have their own timelines, so older or stranger stories stay easy to find without mixing with the official chronology.
Each media page shows its continuity in the Overview block, with a link to the matching timeline.
For Alien, the site follows the canon tiers described by Andrew E. C. Gaska, one of the writers of the official Alien roleplaying game (Defining canon in an Alien world). His first three tiers count as canon here:
Predator follows the same logic: the films, their novelizations, the Titan novels, the Marvel Predator comics, the Dark Horse comics published from 2014 and the recent games.
Gaska places the stories where Xenomorphs and Predators meet in their own Alien vs. Predator universe. This site keeps them as canon on the Predator side: the two Alien vs. Predator films (both set in 2004), the Titan Rage War novels and the Dark Horse Fire and Stone and Life and Death comics.
They appear on the Predator timeline and on the combined Alien and Predator movies timeline, not on the Alien timelines.
Legacy holds the older expanded universe, released before the Disney era (before 2020): the Dark Horse comics published from 1988 and their crossovers, the Bantam and DH Press novels, the older video games, the toy tie-ins and the adaptations of unproduced scripts such as William Gibson's Alien 3. These were official releases, but later stories often contradict them.
See the legacy Alien timeline, the legacy Predator timeline and the Dark Horse Aliens comics.
Alternate holds the Marvel-era crossovers with other franchises, such as Aliens vs. Avengers and Predator vs. Wolverine, the What If stories, and a few works that tell another version of events, such as the game Aliens versus Predator 2. See the alternate Alien timeline and the alternate Predator timeline.
Each media is placed by the year its story takes place, not by its release date. When a year appears on screen or in the text, that year is used. When it does not, the year comes from official guides or from the stories it connects to, and the site shows it as approximate ("around 2180"). Media set in the same year are ordered by their events.
Some media pages add a short note on how their year is known.