Alpha Waves was an abstract game with a moody, artistic presentation, named for its supposed ability to stimulate the different emotional centers of the brain with its use of color and music.

[2] It was developed initially for the Atari ST by Christophe de Dinechin, and later ported to the Amiga and DOS.

The DOS port was done by Frédérick Raynal, a notable game designer who would go on to develop Alone in the Dark and Little Big Adventure.

In November 2012, Christophe de Dinechin released the complete assembly language and GFA BASIC development tools source code for the Atari ST version.

In emotion mode, players guide one of six crafts (which are little more than geometric shapes in many cases) onto trampoline-like platforms.

There is not a particular end to the game; the goal is simply to last as long and to discover as much as possible before time runs out.

A promotional version of the program was distributed by a French magazine on single-sided floppy disks, crashing any machine with more than 512K of memory.

Additionally some of the mobiles have been changed, level layouts tweaked, and the camera tilting toned down for easier viewing.

Another key to performance was a highly optimized polygon-filling routine, which used a number of tricks, including an assembly version of Duff's device to achieve a high fill rate, besting the in-house self-modifying routine Infogrames was using at the time.

[22] The One gave the DOS version of Alpha Waves an overall score of 80%, calling it the "most abstract and original" game of Infogrames' Crystal Collection, and begins their review by noting that "Alpha Waves' effect is so dependent on colour and sound that you really do need a fast VGA machine with an AdLib sound card to get the most out of it.

The One furthermore expresses that "It's quite an entertaining way to spend a few hours, but the problem is that as nice as the idea is there simply isn't enough variety to sustain interest.

In regards to Alpha Waves proposed psychological aspect, The One states that "Whether the light and sound frequencies actually do have some effect is difficult to tell - certainly no-one here noticed any difference."