About this episode

The episode explores the creation and downfall of the Atari 8-bit game Alternate Reality: The City and its creator's journey.

In 1985, Datasoft released Alternate Reality: The City , an Atari 8-bit role playing game built almost entirely by one self-taught programmer working out of a shack in the Hawaiian backwoods. In this episode, we explore how Philip Price talked his way from a stolen tic tac toe login into a career reverse engineering hardware with no manuals to guide him. We trace how he envisioned an entire interconnected series exploring captivity and free will, and how a single publishing contract quietly dismantled that vision piece by piece. Our conversation also digs into the technical feats packed into 48 kilobytes of memory, and the public dispute over who really killed the series before it could finish. Join us as we step through the portal, survive the streets of Xebec's Demise, and reckon with the cost of building something too ambitious for the industry that published it, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane. Read transcript

People in this episode

Hosts: David Kassin, Robert Kassin

Topics covered

• video game history
• role playing games
• programming
• publishing contracts
• technical achievements
• free will
• captivity

Keywords

• Datasoft
• Philip Price
• Alternate Reality
• Atari 8-bit
• video games
• programming
• publishing
• memory
• game design
• history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Datasoft

Books & works: Alternate Reality: The City

Places: Hawaiian backwoods, Xebec's Demise

More episodes of A Trip Down Memory Card Lane

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• Ep.305 – Three Wishes: How the Game Genie Took on Nintendo and Won · July 2, 2026 · 57 min
• Ep.304 – When the Hammer Fell: Quake and the Creative Fracture That Changed id Software Forever · June 25, 2026 · 1h 2m
• Ep.303 – Sunny Days: How Sesame Street Brought Its Classroom to the Console · June 18, 2026 · 59 min

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