Alternate Reality (series)
| Alternate Reality: The City | |
|---|---|
Commodore 64 cover art
|
|
| Developer(s) | Paradise Programming |
| Publisher(s) | Datasoft |
| Designer(s) | Philip Price |
| Composer(s) | Gary Gilbertson |
| Platform(s) | Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, Apple II, Mac OS, Atari ST, Amiga, MS-DOS, iOS (Spectrum Collection) |
| Release | 1985 |
| Genre(s) | Role-playing |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Alternate Reality: The Dungeon | |
|---|---|
Commodore 64 cover art
|
|
| Developer(s) | Paradise Programming |
| Publisher(s) | Datasoft |
| Designer(s) | Philip Price, Ken Jordan and Dan Pinal |
| Composer(s) | Gary Gilbertson |
| Platform(s) | Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64 / 128, Apple II |
| Release | 1987 |
| Genre(s) | Role-playing |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
Alternate Reality (AR) is an unfinished role-playing video game series that has achieved cult status among many fans of RPGs. It was created by Philip Price, who formed a development company called Paradise Programming. Published by Datasoft, AR: The City was released in 1985 and AR: The Dungeon was released in 1987. Price was unable to complete the second game in the series, and The Dungeon was finished by Ken Jordan and Dan Pinal. Gary Gilbertson created the music for both games.
Aliens have captured the player from Earth, and suddenly the player finds themself 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 the player into a new person, putting them into an "alternate reality", hence the name.
In 1988 Datasoft denied that the series would end after The Dungeon. 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, the series was never completed.
During the late 90s, Price intended to produce an MMORPG version of the game called Alternate Reality Online or ARO, and teamed with Monolith. The deal ended due to lack of funds to start serious development on the project. Monolith originally had funds, but needed the funds for existing games in the pipeline. Monolith tried to find an external publisher to fund the game, but the number of technical innovations, coupled with an unknown market for MMORPGs, made it difficult to find publishers willing to risk funding. The publication deal ended and the rights to the game were returned due to no funds. Monolith went on years later to create The Matrix Online.
The original outline for the game series included plans for 6 games:
The first break from this outline was when Datasoft forced the release of The City early, and The Dungeon which would have been included, became its own release. 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. Since the final coding of the sequels was done by Datasoft, the matching code was not put into any of the sequels, including the Atari 8 bit dungeon.
...
Wikipedia