It’s a step from Lifespan towards Princess Maker. It’s a “role-playing game” where the point is legitimately to play a role. Alter Ego is instead built on stats it uses to judge the player as a human being, which actually ends up making it even gamier a video game, since the stats are basically just more points.
Also, its predecessors were built on an arcadey points-scoring model leveraged as commentary on your performance as a player and thus a human being. Most palpably, it’s far more grounded in the quotidian and the specific, where its predecessors had run wild with the archetypical and abstract. It differs from the likes of Lifespan and Deus Ex Machina in a couple important respects, though. Īlter Ego is yet another birth-to-death story, by now clearly one of the most well-precedented genres of the Art Game.
#ALTER EGO GAME PETER J FAVARO MOVIE#
Scattered in amongst movie tie-ins, sports games, arcade-style games, adventure games, and early LucasArts titles that actually were not adventure games were Web Dimension, Little Computer People, Hacker and Hacker 2, Portal, and today’s subject, Alter Ego.
It made a lot of sense at the time for them to acquire fellow traveler Infocom, although by the beginning of 1987 Activision would be under new management by a serious businessman who not-so-secretly hated Infocom to the point of spitefully bringing legal action against their own subsidiary for not being profitable enough. By 1986, Activision had evolved from making sure Atari console game designers got paid and credited (as we saw with Pitfall ) into probably the leading commercial purveyor of Art Games for computers.