Alternate Reality was a very ambitious game concept for its time. Originally designed by a programmer named Philip Price, it was intended to be a series of interlocking games, with the ability to transfer from one game to another as you desired. Originally planned as six games (The City, The Arena, The Palace, The Wilderness, Revelations, and Destiny), only one of these games actually got completed - and it was split into two games.
Alternate Reality: The City came first. Originally, it was planned for The Dungeon (The Sewers, as originally designed) to be part of the City, but the concept was too ambitious, and Datasoft (the publisher) rushed The City out the door incomplete.
It is lacking many of the core game concepts that were intended to be added in later installments. Alternate Reality: The Dungeon fulfilled many of the original design ideas. However, the original designer, Philip Price, was removed from the project. The official word is that he had time constraints that prevented him from working on it further. Rumor at the time had it that Datasoft got fed up with Price's primadonna antics, and showed him the door.
The connectivity of the two games is obviously less than originally intended - you can transfer characters from The City to The Dungeon (with a loss of all equipment, if I remember correctly), but you could not transfer characters from The Dungeon to The City
at all. Many of the other game concepts - Guilds, Alignment, and so on - were evident in The City, but not functional. In The Dungeon, they became not only a functional part of the game, but an ESSENTIAL part.
The game is played from a 3D perspective. Like most 3D games of its time, the layout of the dungeon was designed in a square grid. However, unlike other games of its time, you didn't move from one grid square to the next with each step. Depending on the Speed of your character, it could take several steps to get from one grid square to another.
This brings us to another feature of the Alternate Reality game series. The game functioned in realtime - that is, time progressed with or without player input, and if you stand still long enough, something WILL happen - usually, a monster attack. There were many types of random encounters, but just as many static encounters that happened at specific places and times.
One of the most creative systems built into the game was a beast called The Devourer. The game's inventory management was fairly limited, but instead of having a hard cap on how much you could carry, it allowed you to carry as much as you could manage... but if you were carrying more items than a certain limit, you had a steadily-increasing chance of running into a beast called The Devourer. This monster, mostly found in the sewer that runs around the outside edge of the map, had an unusual method of attack. Instead of simply hitting the player, it would suck up items out of the player's inventory at random - which could be very annoying or frustrating, if it happened to suck up a critical weapon or piece of armor.
The game's statistic-tracking was leagues ahead of its time, and featured details that even games today don't usually bother with. In addition to the usual stats that the player gets to see - Strength, Intelligence, Speed, and so on - it had many hidden and semi-hidden stats. There were Hunger, Fatigue, Light, Drunkenness, Warmth, and others. It was possible to be poisoned or diseased - and there were many different kinds of disease, including the dreaded Crystal Doom, which would eventually kill you by turning you into a crystal statue...
Ultimately, Alternate Reality: The Dungeon is one of the most overlooked and underrated Computer Role-Playing Games ever made. And since its parent company, Datasoft, went bankrupt not too long after it was released, it never achieved the fame that it truly deserved. If you want to try out both Alternate Reality games, feel free... but once you've played The Dungeon, you won't want to go back to The City.
