Revisiting: Alternate Reality: The City (1985)

The screen that actually has the title is boring, so here's a shot of an alien spaceship capturing people in a tractor beam.

  

Alternate Reality: The City
United States

Paradise Programming (developer); Datasoft (Publisher)

Released 1985 for Atari 8-bit; 1986 for Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari ST; 1988 for Amiga and DOS

Date Started: 12 March 2010
Date Ended: 26 February 2016

Total Hours: 18

Reload Count: 17

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 113/209 (54%)

Ranking at Game #452: 273/452 (60%)

If you had to give any 1980s RPG series the designation of "cult status," it would have to be to Philip Price's grandiosely-planned, unfinished Alternate Reality. Originally intended to cover six games, the series never got further than two. But their technological achievements coupled with a uniquely weird setting make The City and The Dungeon (1987) live longer in memory than the typical titles of the era.

According to a Wikipedia article so poorly written and cited it's being considered for deletion, Price had recently left a U.S. Navy enlistment when, "living in a shack with no running water and...using a Jeep for power," he began writing his first commercial games, starting with The Tail of Beta Lyrae (1983) and progressing to Alternate Reality, which he published through California-based Datasoft. According to another poorly-sourced site, he hardly made any money from the games because his contract allowed Datasoft to deduct 100% of the conversion costs from his profits; and they ported the game from the original Atari 8-bit to the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Macintosh, and DOS. Discouraged, Price left the gaming industry for a variety of programming jobs at military contractors. He made a failed effort to turn Alternate Reality into an MMORPG in the late 1990s.

Alternate Reality uses a first-person interface in which the player navigates a large map and encounters monsters, NPCs, and shops. In its basic approach, it superficially resembles The Bard's Tale from the same year and thus draws on a Wizardry tradition. Although the setting is high fantasy, the opening screen shots make it clear that the character is in that setting because he's been abducted by aliens. The specific nature of the world is left a mystery: Has the character been transported there in body or just mind? Is it a real place or a simulation?

The nature of the plot, and the ultimate plans for unfolding it, make up half of the games' appeal. The other half is due to a series of memorably innovative technologies and elements. These include:

• Continuous incremental movement between tiles.

• Weather effects, including continuous rain.

• Visible sunrises and sunsets, including changing the colors of the terrain to represent the lightening and darkening days.

• Multiple methods of dealing with enemies, including tricking them and charming them.

• The ability to work regular jobs in some establishments to make money and pass time (in some versions).

• A complex set of hidden character statistics, including hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, cold, disease, poison, and encumbrance.

• An alignment system that responds based on player actions.

• The ability to invest money in banks and earn interest, at various rates of risk and return.

• In-game drunkenness manifesting itself in difficulty manipulating the game interface.

• Artfully-composed music and lyrics specific to the various settings of the game.

   

When you're drunk, your character staggers around independent of your keyboard inputs. It's raining in this screenshot, too.

   
These innovative elements are coupled with a heavy difficulty curve. Characters start with a handful of copper pieces and some basic clothing and have to immediately contend with hostile enemies wandering The City. Stores don't necessarily sell low-level adventuring equipment, so even if the player scrapes together enough money for a dagger or short sword, he might not be able to find a shop that will sell one. Surviving even a couple of days and assembling a basic set of equipment is a major victory. And death is generally permanent unless the player backs up the character disk.
   

From the C64 version. It's going to be a while before I can afford anything here.

   
The original goals for Alternate Reality were lofty. The City was going to serve as the central hub for the game, and from there, the player would be able to move in and out of The Arena, The Palace, and The Wilderness, each with its own selection of sub-quests and winning conditions. For instance, the player would be able to retire after becoming champion of The Arena or take over the city after negotiating The Palace. The idea was that players would be able to transition seamlessly between these areas even though the actual disks might be released years after The City--much like characters in Skyrim can move back and forth between Skyrim and Solstheim.
  

The Atari 8-bit version calls for a disk that never existed.

   
I'm not sure how the two final planned games--Revelation and Destiny--would fit into this "transition" model, but together they would resolve the plot of the series. I'll talk more about that later.

In any event, the series never even got to the second of the planned games. The City was split into two games: the one bearing that title, and The Dungeon, which was originally just The City's sewers. The Dungeon has a winning condition, but exploration in The City is both open-ended and goalless, with the exception of creating a good character for The Dungeon.
   

From the DOS version. This doesn't seem very champion-like.

   

For the last six years, since I briefly covered The City in a short posting during the first month of my blog, I've been feeling bad about how I treated the game. Since The City didn't have a winning condition, I didn't feel like putting up with its difficulty, and I eagerly moved on to the next title. You understand, this was before I started to take my project seriously. I was only in the game to have fun, not to properly document the historical development of RPGs, and I wasn't even bothering to look up basic things like developers' names.

This time, I was determined to explore The City long enough to create a viable character for The Dungeon in 1987. This meant that I would need to play one of the versions for which The Dungeon was released: Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and Apple II. As you may have gathered from the comments in my recent "1984/1985" posting, I had some trouble with this. I downloaded multiple versions of the games for each of the platforms but encountered a variety of crashes, bugs, and obstacles caused by the game's sensitive copy protection system, which diseases and slowly kills the character. The C64 version is notably bad, sending a seizure-inducing series of flashing colors at you every time you encounter a monster or NPC or enter a shop.

Amid this, multiple readers wrote opining that the Atari 8-bit version is "the original, therefore the best" and a couple of them finally sent me working copies, so that was the one I ultimately stuck with, even though it brought its own challenges. My first character, for instance, was unable to enter any of the smithies--after a bunch of disk swapping, he was immediately kicked out. Also, the version lacks any obvious mechanism for exiting a bank once you enter. Ultimately, in my modern emulator-based experience, instabilities, bugs, unexplained deaths, and inconsistent requirements for disk-swapping marred every version of the game that I tried to play.
   

With no "exit" option for the bank, you have to use the joystick controls to get out.

    

The opening graphics show an alien space craft hovering over a modern city, firing tractor beams or something that scoop up random citizens, including (presumably) the player's character. The title graphics come in over a field of stars. The game thus establishes the theme of the series: although the world of The City may resemble some medieval fantasy, it's really taking place in a simulated reality on a spaceship after the character has been abducted by extraterrestrials.

The original Atari version does something that I didn't see in the others. As the star field whizzes by and music plays, lyrics appear on the screen to accompany the music, with individual words highlighted as their accompanying notes play in the background:

The early morning

Turns into early day

A sunset comes they

Take the colors

Away

Where you are

Alternate Reality

A bit like home yet

Unmistakably new

A morning rain then

Evening stars come

And view

What is your

Alternate Reality

You walk around each

Corner hoping to see

A way to get back

Home a way to

Break free

And to leave

Alternate Reality

This is your

Alternate Reality

  

I think I could just turn off the computer.

     
I can't say much for the meter or rhyme scheme, and there are some obvious errors (e.g., "and view" instead of "in view"), but it's definitely a "first" in the RPG world. There are other little songs throughout the game. For instance, after you wander into a tavern, this little ditty scrolls by on the screeen: "Walking in / sitting down / naturally you / glance around. / On the floor / about to dance / with smallish legs / in smallish pants / a character / with features drawn / from ages past / and yet to dawn. / You down an ale / and few a forth / you watch the dance / you watch the dwarf."

    

Attributes scroll by as you contemplate entering the city.

    

Character creation begins with a name, after which you find yourself in front of a portal with continually-scrolling values (between roughly 3 and 20) for your stamina, charisma, strength, intelligence, wisdom, skill, hit points, and copper. They scroll too fast to watch more than one or two, so you have to prioritize when to accept the values. Stepping forward through the portal freezes the values and lands you in the City of Xebec's Demise, with no idea where to go or what to do--but then again, you wouldn't have any idea in a real scenario, either.
   

Arriving in Xebec's Demise.

   

Xebec's Demise (no explanation is given for the name of the city) is a huge city--64 by 64 squares. I started out trying to map it, but the incremental movement made it hard to figure out how many "squares" I was passing through. Ultimately, I gave up and just bumbled around. The city is full of banks, inns, taverns, smithies, other shops, healers, guilds, and random encounters in between. Notable is the ability to take a job at some of the shops and earn a little extra coin (in some versions, at least; I don't think I encountered these options in the Atari 8-bit version).
   

Visiting the bar in the Atari 8-bit version. I've ordered a meal.

   

Everything in the game takes place in real-time, and if you don't make liberal use of the (P)ause key, you'll get approached and attacked while standing still. During combat, when the options change, you only have a couple of seconds to choose your selection or the game assumes you take no action and the enemy gets a free hit. This is not a game in which you want to crank up the emulator speed.

Outside combat, you have options to view your stats, drop items, ready items, pause, drink potions, and save the game. In the Atari 8-bit and C64 versions, movement is accomplished with the IJKL cluster.

Creatures approach at random intervals, including enemies like orcs, muggers, and giant rats and friendly NPCs like couriers, knights, and merchants. Nighttime and rain cause more dangerous monsters to appear. I can understand nighttime, but I have no idea why so many monsters come out in the rain.
  

From the C64 version, I contemplate my attack options as the rains fall.

  

Once you encounter an enemy or NPC, your options change to charm, ignore, sneak, trick, engage, use, ready, cast, and leave. Tricking and charming, if successful, immediately kill the creature but are considered "evil" acts if done against non-evil creatures. If you "engage" him or he attacks you, your options then change to lunge, attack, parry, disengage, use items, ready items, cast spells, or "give up," the latter of which immediately kills you. (You wouldn't think this would make sense in a game, but in a real-life scenario, if I suddenly found myself kidnapped by aliens, thrust into a medieval alternate reality, and attacked by a goblin, it might very well be my default choice.) As I struggled to find a shop that would sell me my first weapon, I managed to get past a few enemies with "trick" and "charm."
   

Having enough money to buy a weapon and finding a shop that will sell one for that price is a major event in this game.

   
There are lots of elements hidden from the player at the outset, revealed as the player enters various guilds. These statistics include a physical movement speed, "noticeability" (i.e., how often you get encounters), stealth, likelihood of finding treasure, and an alignment score. The latter apparently goes down when you attack friendly creatures; I'm not sure how it goes up. The game is also ahead of its time in the way it awards experience points--some for damage, some for each kill, and some for finding treasure--and the way that attributes can increase as you successfully use associated skills.

For this post, I invested about 12 hours into the game, 6 with characters and versions that ultimately went nowhere, and 6 with a semi-successful character named Chester, aided by some save-scumming. He started strong, with attributes all in the teens. Like all characters, he began outside the entry gate, near a couple of shops, a smith, a bank, and several inns and taverns. This "city square" area is a relatively safe part of town, and I learned to hang out there until I was strong enough to explore other areas.

Trying to survive the early stages is an exercise in masochism. You don't have enough money to buy anything the shops are selling, and there's no easy way to make more. You have to trick, charm, or kill a monster with your bare hands or slave for a couple of weeks in a bar--at which point you can perhaps afford a dagger--if you're lucky enough to find a shop that will sell you one. Meanwhile, you're worrying about depleting food, water, and stamina--but of course staples and sleep also cost money.

The difficulty does create a couple of good aspects. First, there's a real incentive to be evil and prey on innocent, defenseless townsfolk. It's rare to find an RPG in which you (realistically) turn to evil out of desperation. Second, I admit that the difficulty does make things all the more satisfying when they start to get incrementally better.

In the case of Chester, the turning point was tricking a gremlin to death and finding a couple of potions on his body. The game has an interesting potion-identification dynamic, not unlike NetHack, in which you have to take cues from the color and what happens if you sip it. For instance, a red potion that tastes "bitter" is a Potion of Strength and a white potion that tastes "alkaline" is poison. There are several dozen combinations. A player would have to learn these combinations through extensive testing and record-keeping and more than one character death. Anyway, the two potions the gremlin carried were Strength and Treasure Finding. The latter increases the associated hidden statistic, and after I drank it, I started finding more money with subsequent kills.
  

My fortunes change for the better.

   
Soon after the gremlin, I managed to kill a mugger with my bare hands. His corpse delivered enough gold that I could afford a small weapon, and fortunately the nearby smith had one for sale. The difference that one small dagger makes is huge, and in the next couple of hours, I was able to kill more gremlins, thieves, and even a couple of zombies. Later, I killed a thief who had a battle hammer and took it as an upgrade, then killed a swordsman and got his shield. Slowly, I worked my way up to Level 4.

Fighting a zombie in front of a smithy.

I started exploring the city and found a variety of shops with different names but basically the same stuff. Eventually, I wandered into one of the guilds of the city. When you enter a guild for the first time, the wizards always increase the associated statistic. Some of them tell you your hidden scores, like alignment and treasure finding. Despite an option to do so, there's no way to "join" a guild. I suspect this was supposed to be how you would acquire spells, which otherwise never seem to appear despite a "cast" option. (I understand you can join the guilds in the Amiga version, though.)

visiting a guild.

  
As I discussed above, there were grandiose plans for The City as a hub for other, more meaty adventures. Characters would explore the plots of The Arena, The Palace, and The Wilderness, moving back and forth through The City and using its shops, taverns, and inns. Unfortunately, because the reality of the game fell so far short of the plans, The City is left curiously pointless--a hub without any spokes--as if it were a normal dungeon-crawler released with only the town level.

But even though the game lacks a specific goal, certainly we have the general goal of developing a character for The Dungeon, right? Well...maybe. While I was in the middle of playing the game, a fan named Allen wrote with a bunch of tips, including this one: "veteran City characters are worse off in the long run than newly generated Dungeon characters in terms of ability scores, equipment, and the hazard level of encounters." He went on to explain that new Dungeon characters start with attributes higher than all but the luckiest City characters and that The Dungeon has level-based encounter scaling that punishes City characters at an already high level.

This means that the answer to the question of how long you play The City is "as long as you're having fun." And for me, that was no time at all. I apologize to fans of the game--I hope you at least agree that I gave it a fair chance this time--but I have a worse impression of Alternate Reality now than I did at the end of my 2010 posting. I have no idea how it developed such a positive reputation. It seems to expect its intentions and technical developments to override slow, punishingly difficult, buggy, and ultimately pointless gameplay.

The technical innovations don't even make for a good experience. Take the scrolling movement. Once you get past the initial reaction ("Huh. Cool."), you realize how difficult it makes mapping when you can't tell the moment you cross into a new square. The rain...sure. I might have been impressed in 1985. It's hard to get excited about some straight blue lines today. As for all the attributes--heat, cold, hunger, thirst, fatigue--the need to scrimp for every penny at the beginning, and the ability to work menial jobs--let's just say that I'm looking for an RPG, not Oregon Trail.

Thus, when I hit Level 5 and had more than 10,000 copper pieces, I entered the bank and invested most of them in a medium risk account...
   

   
...retired to the bar, ordered the lobster, and bought a round for the house...
   

   
...saved my character for The Dungeon and ended the game. If kidnapped by aliens, Chester would prefer to spend his days in the bar instead of fighting gremlins on the street, trust me.

My previous attempt at a GIMLET, calculated a few weeks after I played the game, came to a 24. Without looking at the individual scores, I tried again:

• 3 points for the game world. The plot is original, and I like the way that Xebec's Demise is a "living city," but ultimately you can't do much with it. While I can look up the series' backstory on Wikipedia today, the game earns a low score judging from what its own documentation gives you.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation is all random, but development is somewhat satisfying, with multiple ways to increase experience and alignment consequences to your actions. But too much is random and too little is self-directed.

• 2 points for NPCs. NPCs are really the same thing as monsters--miscellaneous knights, merchants, townsfolk, and couriers that you encounter just like enemies. There's no way to productively interact with them, but interaction does affect your alignment. Shopkeepers are also quasi-NPCs, given how they react to your attempts to low-ball them. Neither, unfortunately, imparts any information about the game world.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The enemies are fantasy standards with the usual slate of special attacks and defenses. There are no special encounters or role-playing choices.

• 3 points for magic and combat. The numerous options don't amount to much since you can't always use all of them. There's theoretically an option to cast spells, but I never found any in the game.

   

Fighting a knight outside the palace.

  

• 4 points for equipment, a very important part of the game, to include weapons, armor, clothing, food, water, utility items, and the potion system.

• 6 points for economy. In a game that's half survival simulation, this category takes on a lot of importance. I liked the currency, banking, and gem system.

• 0 points for having nothing like a quest.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. You want me to give points for the graphics, but I find them ugly and crude no matter how innovative the color-changes and raindrops are. You want me to give points for the music, but I don't care about music, and the other sound effects are primitive. The keyboard input works okay.

• 4 points for gameplay. I admire it for being open-ended and large, and slightly "replayable" given how random the encounters and events are.

This gives us a final score of 30, a little below what I would consider "recommended," but a little better than I expected. Its improvement from my 2010 attempt reflects the fact that I understand the game better.
 

  
My thoughts are echoed in Scorpia's November 1986 review in Computer Gaming World. She praises the attention to detail but criticizes the game for monotonous mapping, lack of anything interesting in the huge city, and lack of a plot. I think her review would have been even less charitable if she had known then that the planned 5 games would never happen.

Regardless of how the liberal media treated Alternate Reality, the sheer oddness of the game ensured that it would develop some die-hard believers. I've received e-mails from a lot of them, and I'm sure this comments section is going to be filled with notes from people who insist I missed many of the game's nuances. (I welcome that; please help me better document this game from multiple perspectives.) There are several fan sites, with no shortage of people who call Alternate Reality the best game ever made for the Atari 8-bit, or indeed for any platform. In 2011, a British company named Elite Systems released an iPhone version (though it no longer seems to be available), and a commenter named acrin1 is currently working on a nice-looking Windows version that combines The City and The Dungeon (you can download the current version in progress).
   

From acrin1's remake.

   
If I ever get a chance to talk with Philip Price, I'm going to ask about his influences. I said earlier that it comes from a Wizardry tradition, but that's mostly in the first-person interface and a few of the encounter options. It's possible that Price never played Wizardry. Some of the elements, such as the guilds, call to mind some of the PLATO titles, but I can't find any evidence Price was ever near a PLATO campus. The weird sci-fi setting, the emphasis on simulation, and the banking system suggest a familiarity with the Empire and Space titles from Edu-Ware.

Around 1990 (I'm having trouble finding the original source), Philip Price revealed to a fan his entire original plan for the series. Revelation was going to end with the character finding a metallic door at the end of a cave, leading to "corridors gleaming with technology" and a room with an immense window looking out onto space. (Given what's revealed in the opening shots, I'm not sure that's much of a revelation.) In Destiny, the character would acquire a bunch of high-tech equipment, fight through a bunch of aliens, and find a chamber with humans stored in pods. It would turn out that the aliens were using humans' experiences in The City (and the other expansions) for their own entertainment, and that the character isn't even corporeal but one of the bodies in the pods. The series would end with a number of choices involving remaining incorporeal (and immortal) or returning to the body, fighting or aiding the aliens, and continuing on to alien worlds or returning to Earth.

Great ideas--anticipating elements of The Matrix and Lost, even--but ideas are a dime a dozen, and the reality is that this "cult classic" never got out of its own sewers. I'm not interested in joining the cult. I think this series has been coasting for too long on its own mystique. We'll see if I feel any differently after playing Alternate Reality: The Dungeon in 1987. For now, let's revisit another game that I didn't engage long enough back in 2010: Autoduel.

****

For further reading: Unsatisfied with my conclusions? You might be happy to know that I enjoyed Alternate Reality: The Dungeon (1987) quite a bit more. And check out my coverage of two games heavily inspired by Alternate Reality: Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991) and Legends of Valour (1992).