Trivia
Development
Philip Price, the designer originally planned to release 4 interwoven games that could only be solved if the player owned at least two of them. They were given the working titles
The City,
The Wilderness,
Revelation and
Destiny. However, while
The City was being developed for the Atari, publishers Datasoft got cold feet about being able to convert the game for other platforms in time for the Christmas sales, and asked to have
The City split up in two games, where the first part would then be converted and released in time for Christmas, and the second part
The Dungeon would be converted later. So it came to be that
Alternate Reality ended up as a quartet in five parts where only one part was ever released.
Macintosh version
This game was released on many platforms, including the then-very-new Macintosh. The Mac version was notable because it did not use the Mac GUI toolbox or in any way conform to the Mac UI. In the early days, even Apple didn't realize that such a product could not sell - some of the pain in programming the Mac in those days came from having to initialize all the GUI managers yourself because they didn't assume all programs would be GUI programs.
This is the only commercial program of any kind that I know of, which actually took that route. It's unclear if it would have succeeded if their choice of actual interface had been better, but combined with a generally hard-to-use unique interface and very slow speed, the game was just too hard to play.
Information also contributed by
weregamer
