Alternate Reality (series)

[1] Price was unable to complete the second game in the series, and The Dungeon was finished by Ken Jordan and Dan Pinal.

During the late 90s, Price intended to produce an MMORPG version of the game called Alternate Reality Online or ARO, and teamed with Monolith.

Nonetheless, the design planned to allow the player to move between these games, so that, for example, when one attempted to leave the confines of The City, one was prompted to "Insert disk #1 of Alternate Reality: The Wilderness".

The planned seamless migration never worked out, in large part because the Datasoft developers did not implement the idea, so only the Atari 8-Bit city had the ability to boot sequels.

A brief summary of these outlines follows: The player is thrust into a new environment (the city of Xebec's Demise) and must learn to survive.

While The City is mostly an open area planned to serve as the hub for the game series, The Dungeon was made up of four concentric levels, each one smaller than the one above.

The plan also included provisions for players to enter the arena in other ways, e.g., as a spectator or a free man.

Planned to feature courtly intrigue and the ability to purchase land in the city, with the capability to alter the map and building layouts if one built new sections or tore down walls.

Players could climb the ladder of power and responsibility, and eventually choose to rule the city as its new king.

With the illusion broken, the player would find his or her way onto the alien ship and out of the holo-world upon which he or she was previously trapped.

One could continue to live on as the image body, a nearly immortal life, but knowing that these aliens have done this and can watch, feel, and experience whatever is done.

One could escape in a smaller ship (as compared to the massive Alternate Reality entertainment world) and go back to Earth.

Most other 3D first-person games used static graphics to represent the walls, meaning the player could only move one tile at a time.

On the Apple II and Macintosh versions, repeated "random" encounters would occur in quick succession when wandering the town, and escaping the combat was disabled.

The Dungeon, if loaded with an unauthorized copy, featured two "FBI agents" as encounters during the beginning of the game, who attacked with "the long arm of the law".

In effect, it was impossible to actually transfer a character over from the city to the dungeon without mailing in the disks to be exchanged for a fixed version.

Only in the second installment were any elements of a traditional RPG plot added in, but the player could (and probably did) spend days playing before realizing the importance of any of their actions.

The bottom of the screen alternated depending on user choice and situation between consumables like food, water, money, and torches, equipment, combat options, spells, and other things.

[3] In 1993, Scorpia called The City "a fascinating premise that turned out rather poorly ... a game for those with great persistence and patience", and The Dungeon "better than the first, but not by much".