alternate reality

This article is about the Alternate Reality game. For the speculative concept, see Parallel universe. Alternate Reality (AR) is an unfinished computer RPG series that has achieved cult status among many fans of the computer RPG. It was created by Philip Price, who formed a development company called "Paradise Programming." Published by Datasoft "AR: The City" and "AR: The Dungeon" were released in 1985 http://www.eobet.com/alternate-reality/alt-reality_FAQ.txt. Philip Price was unable to write the second edition, so The Dungeon was actually written by Ken Jordan and Dan Pinal. Gary Gilbertson created the music for both games.

Concept

The basic concept for the game was intriguing: Aliens capture you from Earth, and all of the sudden you are in front of a gate with a slot-machine like row of rotating numbers of statistics. Stepping through the gate freezes the numbers and turns you into a new person, putting you into an "Alternate Reality", hence the name. The end of the series was supposed to conclude with the player discovering everyone's true bodies on the ship cocooned and effectively frozen, and that the ship is really a "pleasure world" of some kind for the aliens, leading to the player's ultimate decision of what to do to the ship, to the aliens, or even whether to return to Earth. However, because Datasoft effectively swindled the developers out of their money, the series was never completed. During the late 90's, Philip Price intended to produce an MMORPG version of the game called "Alternate Reality Online" or ARO, and teamed with Monolith, but Philip was released from the project and the game was never released. Monolith went on to create the online Matrix game.

Technology

Among other things, AR contained some revolutionary technology and ideas for its time. It worked from a 3d first-person perspective, with a small window taking up about 1/9th of the screen at the center. You only controlled one character who had an absolute minimum of visual representation - the closest to a character image to be found was when one encountered a "doppleganger" monster. The 3d used was not like other 3d graphics in games of the time, either. Most other 3d first-person games at the time used static graphics to represent the walls, meaning you could only move one tile at a time. However, in this game your rate of travel depended on your character's speed, and you moved incrementally along the tile. Distant walls would slowly come in to focus rather than suddenly appear. Alternate Reality had a raycasting engine equalling that of Wolfenstein 3D, which came 7 years later! It is an interesting and perhaps lamentable design decision to retain the right-angle movement, since it would have certainly amazed the world in 1985 to see 360-degree movement in the first-person. Another upshot of the fact that the graphics were drawn rather than simple images is that while the sun was setting, the entire pallete of colors changed convincingly. Distant waterfalls moved, and the rain was realistically rendered.

Gameplay

At the top of the screen were character statistics, such as game-world time, Strength, Health, etc. Immediately this brings up some of the unique aspects of the game: The character is not omniscient with respect to himself, but has some attributes that stay hidden except in special cases - for example, you never know your alignment (good/evil/neutral), and poison, drunkenness and disease may trick your perceived stats, or temporarily or permanently change them! In fact, you never choose your alignment, but come to learn it through how other characters treat you in the game. Among these hidden stats were things to keep track of how hungry, tired, thirsty, hot or cold, or encumbered you were. 15 years before The Sims, you had to manage your character's well being by tracking more than just his or her hit points. In fact, this game shared many game play aspects with The Sims. The Sims uses several constantly diminishing stats - hunger, happiness, etc. and balances your ability to fulfill them with the length of time it takes to accomplish tasks. Alternate Reality, similarly, required you to balance all of these things. While food and water could be carried with you, your supplies were limited and you would have to find or purchase new packets. You could only sleep in an Inn, so if you were off adventuring and started to get hungry and tired, you may have to return to a safe area before you could fufill these needs. Another feature was the non-linear game play, and extremely large game world that could be explored at will, rather than according to how the game expected you to play. Due to budget constraints, the first game was released, essentially, without a plot. Only in the second installment were any elements of a traditional RPG plot added in, but you could (and probably did) spend days playing before realizing the importance of any of your actions. This was nearly two decades before Grand Theft Auto 3 would be called revolutionary for offering the same feature. 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. The sides held the compass at left (when the player had one) and directional arrows at right. The gameplay of both games is reminiscent of other computer RPGs but more sophisticated than its peers - while the player still wandered around gaining levels and equipment, there were things like a finite number of items in the world, and items stolen could be regained, while near overflows of memory from possessing too many items resulted in an encounter with the Devourer, who would literally remove some of your items from memory. Death was allowable and mostly uncheatable since the game cleverly marked you dead as soon as you started and only let you become "alive" once you saved, but it caused a loss in one of the character's stats.

Music

One final remarkable note about AR is its music. The game designer, as he did with the graphics, managed to trick the Atari into producing more sophisticated sounds than it was designed to do. AR used them to produce a pretty FM orchestra with several tunes, complete with karaoke-type lyrics that you can sing along to. Audio cues were also used in this game for simple things like indicating a street was crowded, or the sound of the blacksmith's hammer striking a sword.

Ports

The games in the Alternate Reality series were developped on the Atari 8-bit family of home computers, but were ported to other platforms as well. http://www.eobet.com/alternate-reality/alt-reality_FAQ.txt