I know that feeling. Everyone was running IBM 386's and I was still rocking a Color Computer II with a dot matrix printer and tape recorder for saving. I was a writer early on - self published short stories and poetry "books" I sold at local gas stations for a buck or two (lots of money in the mid to late 80s).

I mostly played games on my brothers Commodore 64 which is where I played Alternate Reality the Dungeon. I still have my character disk - paid a guy $5 to copy it over to a file I can use for emulators so effectively I have been playing the same character for 30 years or so.

When you die and revive from your character disk the game would punish you by randomly lowering one stat by a random amount. By now my character is probably a dunce walking around on one leg blind and mute. Lol.

This was pseudo 3D, it was not "real" so the computer was not being pushed at all, other than the 30+ stats (you can only physically see 5 to 7 represented by numbers on the screen). Rather deep game for the time. If you were mean to a pauper for instance, he would remember and it effected your Good/Evil rating (long before Knights of the Old Republic came along).

It was released on many platforms including the Atari 8-Bit computers, C64, IBM, Apple II, etc. There are fans working on remakes of it but there is so much behind the scenes we have to guess at that it may never happen.

There were seven scenarios planned. #1 was The City and #2 was The Dungeon. They were all going to be interlocking and connected as well (there are large swaths in the first floor of the dungeon that you cannot access because they were to be part of a future expansion.

Some have claim that story behind Alternate Reality was stolen to become The Matrix movies. I cannot say much more without ruining the game though. It is interesting.