Alternate Reality: The City

Alternate Reality: The City offered an unusually ambitious open-world RPG on the Atari 800, in which the player, as an abducted Earthling, finds themselves in a fantasy metropolis and must survive without being consumed by a downward spiral of hunger, fatigue, illness, and enemies lurking in the streets and dark corners. The game emphasized simulating the character's everyday life – you had to eat, sleep, earn money through work or theft, get treated by healers, and build relationships with the city's inhabitants, who reacted to the player character's behavior and reputation, an unusually open approach to RPG design in the mid-1980s, built on freedom of decision rather than linear story progression.

On the Atari 8-bit, the game used smooth, colorful first-person rendering of the streets and a fairly rich range of locations from taverns through temples and arenas to underground sewers, together creating the impression of a living, if non-linear, city with its own day-night cycle. The absence of a fixed main quest was unusual at the time – the game offered freedom of discovery rather than a guided storyline, requiring players to bring their own initiative, experimentation, and willingness to risk encountering danger without a clear goal or a predetermined order of tasks.

Alternate Reality is still cited today as one of the early examples of open-world design in RPGs, foreshadowing the genre's later simulation ambitions, although the planned sequels describing the world beyond the city itself were ultimately never completed to the full extent originally suggested by the series' first entries. On the Atari 800, the game remains interesting precisely for its unconventionality and the atmosphere of a truly living city, though navigation and survival without a walkthrough are noticeably difficult today, and players must rely mainly on their own notes and systematic exploration of the individual districts.

Why play it: For fans of early open-world design who will appreciate the atmosphere of a truly living city – navigating without a walkthrough is noticeably difficult today, but the game's unconventionality is worth the effort.