(sorry if this is a duplicate email for you, but it seems, the list
has become rather chosy about from where I write my emails from, according
to the archive, my last email didn't reach the list) ...


Hi all,

I'm 38 years old now and played AR - the city - from 1986 on until
- well, if I ever get my old Atarix 800 XL hooked up again - now ;)

Before I played AR, I never thought of a game concept like the AR one and
I think many of my friends at that time were also as astounded as I
was, that you could do some kind of roleplaying in another world on
the computer.

Of course, I liked other role-playing games, too (at least what you called
RPG at that time) , like bard's tale
on the amiga, dungeon master on the Atari ST and Amiga... But though
it's hard to understand today, the best about AR was the athmosphere,
that you really had the impression to be there. Even today I could
walk straight at the most places in the city by heart. Ok, for the
star wizard's guild, I'd have to take a look at my map ;) But the sound
of the wind, the rain, night and day, the changing of the colors throughout
the daytime. The kind of monsters you met in sideways,
compared to main roads, how monsters/peoples behaviour changed
towards you, depending on what kind of monsters you killed.

I think, the dungeon was never released in germany, though I always
were waiting eagerly for it to be released. It was only due to this
list that I later found out, it DOES exist for the Atari 8-bit.
I even almost bought a C64 at that time just to play the dungeon, what would
have been a great sin for every Atari user .. ;)
(Well at the age of 20 you still try to divide the world in black
and white..., good monsters, bad monsters, good 8-bit system, bad
8-bit system, today: good OS, bad OS... ;)

Nowadays I sometimes tried to play the dungeon on the emulator, or, using my
pc and a SIO2PC-Cable as disk-drive even on the original
hardware. But somehow it wasn't the same anymore, while I sometimes
still like to play the city again. Just gives me this feeling of being
back in 1986 again, what the dungeon naturally can't do, as I never
played it at that time.

Oh, btw., just for the statistics, 1986 I was about 20 when I played
AR. And I'm from Kaiserslautern in Germany -that's very close to
Ramstein, the biggest US Air Base in Europe, though people in Germany know
Kaiserslautern better than Ramstein, while people in the US maybe have heard
about Ramstein, but maybe even don't know
in which part of the world Germany lies ;)

The only games I even nowadays play on the old Atari HW are:
Alternate Reality, MULE and 7 Cities of Gold, so it seems AR-Gamers
somehow share the same taste for computer games.

Bye,
Peter
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Email: ereborn--ereborn.de URL: http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ereborn/