Alternate Reality: The City came out in 1985 from the mind of Philip Price for Datasoft, and set up an uncommon premise for the time: a pilot is abducted by a flying saucer and wakes up a prisoner inside an alternate reality, in the city of Xebec's Demise. There's no dungeon or immediate goal: the game is the city itself, an enormous first-person board that must be walked and mapped street by street, entering taverns, temples and guilds while leveling up by fighting in real time against whatever shows up on each corner.
Critics of the time praised the scale and detail of that city -for many, the most ambitious seen until then on a home computer- but also noted that once the map was complete, there was little left to do besides fighting aimlessly while waiting for the sequel. Price had planned a series of six installments; only this one and The Dungeon were ever completed, which turned The City into the truncated start of one of the most ambitious RPG visions on 8-bit.
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