The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Alter Ego
Want to experience a character’s entire life from birth until death? Here’s your chance!
RELEASE DATE: 1986
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Activision
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
BEST VERSIONS: All (including modern versions)
Have you ever wanted to see what it’s like to live someone else’s life? While many video games have provided the option to live vicariously through a custom-built player character or to watch simulated citizens live out their own lives, few have offered players the chance to live an entire virtual life from birth through senility. And while simulating someone’s entire life might seem like a massive computational problem that only modern hardware can handle, psychologist Dr. Peter J. Favaro pulled it off in 1986 with the unique role-playing adventure game Alter Ego, a simulator where the player can progress through seven stages of life and experience a story that’s somewhat different every time.
The game accomplishes this by first giving you a 26-question personality test (which rolls the character’s basic stats) and then offers a series of icons which represent key moments in your life from which choices can be made. In the earlier stages of life, many of the decisions you have to make are simple and result in developing basic skills like smiling or giving a parent a kiss. As the game shifts into the childhood and adolescence stages of life, social dynamics come into play and you begin to experience scenarios like noticing members of the opposite gender, responding to a friend who is shoplifting or developing empathy for an old woman who lives alone and needs a friend. Alter Ego includes a wide range of vignettes like these and some can even be frightening, like encountering a kidnapper posing as a police officer. Others can be embarrassing, like becoming aroused as a developing boy as a pretty older lady rubs sunscreen on your back. There are also scenes which are tastefully but unapologetically sexual in nature (which is surprising, given the controversy around sexual content in other mainstream 1980s PC games!) as well as scenes which are truly shocking, like witnessing your parents fighting and watching helplessly as your father physically assaults your mother.
As your character ages, additional options begin to open up for experiences like relationships, education, work and adventures. One of the most difficult sections to navigate is dating members of the opposite gender (and because this game is from the 1980s, only heterosexual relationships are included). The choice of whom to date and whether or not a relationship is worth keeping is rarely straightforward, and the game likes to throw curveballs to keep the player on his or her toes about whether or not a chosen partner is the right choice for settling down. This is, unfortunately, also a place where the game shows its age a bit, reflecting relationship attitudes that were standard in the 1980s but which may seem old-fashioned today. In keeping with the role-playing theme, my suggestion to any player is to think of the game as being a period piece set during the 20th century, not the 21st. (One positive note for Alter Ego is that it’s considerably more modern in its sexual attitudes than the stodgy Commodore 64 game, Dr. Ruth’s Computer Game of Good Sex, which is even more of a libido-killer than it sounds.)
The first few times through, Alter Ego is great fun. The entire experience of playing through a simulated life takes an hour or two, but because the game limits how many scenarios the player can witness and adjusts choices based on the character’s personality traits, the game is able to have some nice surprises and feel genuinely different each time through. It’s definitely worth playing through at least one time as each gender and also potentially role-playing some different archetypes (such as a scoundrel, a rebel or an outright sociopath) to see what the game really has to offer. Unfortunately, like many games with fixed choices, there’s not much to see after exploring the boundaries.
Fortunately, the game does not take much effort to track down and play today. While the game was released on the Commodore 64, Apple II, Macintosh and MS-DOS PC back in the day and has considerable charm on those platforms, it can today be played in a free web browser edition (https://www.playalterego.com/) or on Steam or mobile platforms for a few bucks. I highly recommend it if you enjoy the choice and character aspects of role-playing games but get tired of all the fighting, looting and gear grinding.
Note: There are at least two other games called Alter Ego which have no relation to this one – a 2010 murder mystery and a 2019 mobile adventure game.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about 3D games, arcade action games, wargames, grand strategy games, RPGs, sports games, gameroom games, puzzle games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
This series will continue to cover games written by unique personalities like Chris Crawford, Roberta Williams and Danielle Bunten Berry, by great writers like Steve Meretzky, Michael Bywater, Robert Pinsky and Brian Moriarty, and based on the work of famous authors like Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Gibson and Douglas Adams.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!