‘From now on, life will begin to change rapidly. ‘Happy birthday and welcome to the world,’ continued the narration screen. If I chose to ‘come out’, the game offered another chance to reconsider if I kept opting to stay in, eventually my alter ego would be born by Caesarean section, and my mother might subconsciously resent me. It’s almost time to enter a different world now.’ There followed the invitation to ‘Select an action’: ‘Come out fighting’, ‘Come out peacefully’ or ‘Stay in a little longer’. ‘This has been your place since you became aware that you are alive. ‘You are in a warm, dark, comfortable place,’ said the narrator. Immediately, it became clear that Alter Ego posited life as a selection of choices above all else. There were no such restrictions in Britain, and in any case they would have been impossible to enforce by 1996, so with all this in mind, I clicked on the game’s first experience icon and threw myself into its alternative reality.
#ALTER EGO GAME PERSONALITY TEST MANUAL#
The manual also said that ‘Because of the authenticity of the life experiences explored in the program, Alter Ego contains explicit material which may not be suitable for computer users under the age of 16’, and in the US, the game was not to be sold to them.
#ALTER EGO GAME PERSONALITY TEST PASSWORD#
I tried to get into the mysterious world of Hacker, in which you had to break into a mainframe computer: it came without instructions and opened with a stark ‘Logon Please’, crashing if you failed to guess the password before letting you in via another route. I was intrigued by, but too young to understand space trading epic Elite or the surreal 3D world of The Sentinel, but engaged with some interesting ideas elsewhere.
The ones I preferred, besides shoot-’em-ups, football and platform games, were those with an unusual concept. (This would not have been wasteful.) I spent most of mine, as a deeply depressed boy in a small Surrey town, in my bedroom, watching football, writing lyrics for terrible punk bands, furtively cross-dressing whilst suppressing my wish that I’d been born female, and playing computer games, mainly on my Commodore 64.
Not drinking, smoking, doing drugs and having sex.
I knew at the time that I was wasting my teens.