Gravelpits

I guess the below post is what you were referring to, @eobet? Here is a post from @ARO2 (Gary Gilbertson) on @Jace Hall's "AR Music Recreated" thread, made during the COVID lockdown in April, 2020: As mentioned above, the videos are unlisted for searching, so don't lose these links!

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but @eobet reported in another thread that Gary Gilbertson passed away in December, 2021. 🙁 Here's a link to his post:

Dear AR community, I recently revisited this thread and was saddened to hear of Gary Gilbertson's passing. A few years ago I made the above post describing my effort to capture the music from the original Atari 8-bit version of AR. I am very glad to have done it and I have actually listened to the music quite a lot more than I would have guessed. I have always wanted to make the music files available to the wider community, but I was unsure how to go about doing it without violating copyright or appearing like an opportunist, especially when there still seemed to be the possibility of an AR reboot in the works. However, the sad news of Mr. Gilbertson's passing coupled with the developments reported by @eobet regarding Mr. Price's firm intention to move on from AR has made me rethink my position. At this point, I cannot see any reason not to publish the music. Indeed, it seems to me that the good coming from making the files available to the community would far outweigh any foreseeable harm. Therefore, I am attaching to this post three versions of the music from AR in FLAC, ALAC and AAC formats. I hope you all enjoy listening to them as much as I have. RIP Gary Gilbertson. Best wishes to you all. The waves at home are pounding on the shore the snow here's falling just outside my door and all i want's to be with you once more but i'm told that this is one thing that i best stop hoping for they tell me to go on i ask them for how long they tell me to be strong to what you can't be wrong i'm lost without your love i need you here with me in this reality. PS: All audio was captured using the Atari800 emulator in PAL mode, not NTSC. PAL is 50 Hz and NTSC is 60 Hz, so if the music sounds slower than you remember and you are from North America, that is probably why. I am uncertain if Mr. Gilbertson intended for the music to be played on an NTSC or PAL device, though he probably wrote them and played them back on an NTSC device. I broached the subject with him, along with some other points, in a DM a few years ago after sending him the files to review, but he made no mention of it in his reply. Maybe he forgot to address it in his response or maybe the difference was unimportant to him. Nevertheless, if you're an NTSC purist, you're going to need to speed these up by 20%. AR - The Music (fixed).zip

Behold, the dreaded (not Richard Ramirez) Nightstalker! *This is not a submission for the competition; this character was backed up numerous times. I just thought it would be fun to provide a screenshot of this rare beast to the forum members. 😛

I do not wish to hijack this thread, but I would like very much to share the playlist from AR that I put together with Mr. Gilbertson's approval. So as not to repeat myself, here's the cross post from the Philip Price thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/214790-atariage-welcomes-philip-price-creatorcoder-of-alternate-reality/page-12?do=findComment&comment=4208019

Long time lurker first time poster here and about five years late to the party. Okay, here goes: I grew up in a small and isolated community in the California desert, across the Colorado River from Arizona. We lived just outside town in a rural area surrounded by fields of cotton, alfalfa and lettuce. We did have neighbors, but their children were older than me and my brother. I was born in 1977 and my brother was four years my elder. The two boys next door were 6 and 8 years older than me, so there was quite a range between the four of us, especially for that age. Nevertheless, we all grew up together and became very close and despite all going our separate ways over the years, we have remained friends. They had moved from "The Big City" of Boston, Massachusetts, bringing with them various novelties of popular culture yet unknown to us and our small town, including RPGs, especially Dungeons & Dragons. We would spent countless hours over at their house and likewise they at ours playing these games together. Stranger Things pretty much nails the atmosphere, but without the supernatural phenomena, unless you count the 125 degree days we regularly experienced each summer. There was a certain amount of "Keeping up with the Joneses" that went on between our two families and this worked out great for us as each successive generation of computing/gaming console became available. Although I'm told we had Pong, the first console I remember was our Atari (2600). I don't know if everyone remembers that no one really called it an Atari 2600 at the time. It was just an "Atari" and everybody had one. During the "home computer" era, while our family opted for the Commodore 64, our neighbors chose an Atari 800. When Alternate Reality: The City was released in 1985, our neighbors bought a copy of it for their Atari. Even at that age, I was immediately entranced by the game and the concept. You could play a real, moving D&D-like RPG on a computer! You didn't need to get three or four people together and you could play for as long as you wanted. The game's internals took so many factors into consideration: time, disease, fatigue, moral alignment, attaching consequences to actions that may not immediately show up and on and on and on. And of course the MUSIC. Come on! What game in 1985 could have had a soundtrack, for crying out loud? I mean, The City was basically (as far as I know) the first open-world sandbox RPG ever. It was amazing. It predated Grand Theft Auto (developed for 32-bit machines) by 13 years, which if my calculations are correct is roughly 16 million years in gaming technology evolution. Needless to say, we bought a copy of The City for our C64. In retrospect, I wasn't too good at the game at that age, but I didn't know that and it was nevertheless the experience that was so amazing. Furthermore, all the unfinished questions posed in The City were setup to be revealed over time, so there was very much a cliffhanger effect leaving us ravenously awaiting the release of the various future installments teased in The City, which was yet another novelty in the gameplay. Look, I know I'm not saying anything here that hasn't already been said a thousand times before. But it's difficult to make people who are not familiar with this series of games understand how remarkably innovate and revolutionary they were in the context of their time. I'm sure members on this group have had that conversation before. The notion that the programming was done buy ONE GUY including not only all the subtleties in the gameplay, but also the 3D graphic effects (with Craig Skinner) and of course the music (with Gary Gilbertson) as well the various forms of copy protection, all in that amount of memory, is just mind-blowing to me now even more so than it was then, if anything. You can't explain that sort of thing to these kids today (rattles cane). It saddens me, as I guess it does many of the members of this community, that the original developers/content creators for this game didn't become stinking rich as a result of its success. I was only 8 years old when The City came out, but the memories I have playing that game and its companion (reluctant to say sequel) The Dungeon are profound. When Alternate Reality: The Dungeon was released around Christmastime two years later, it was the absolute number one item on my Christmas list. On Christmas morning, I was so excited to play the game once we got home from my grandparents' house for the holiday that I read the entire manual amid the noise and commotion of the busy family living room on Christmas morning. My then 10 year old mind was singularly focused on that game. Of course, our neighbors also got a copy for their Atari. Over the next several months, we spent countless hours mapping and exploring The Dungeon on our respective machines. To be honest, I was never great at the mapping, having as I did the patience and attention span of a 10 year old. On the other hand, my 10 year old memory was much more reliable then than it is today! After a few months, I was finally able to convince my parents to spring for the hint book for The Dungeon and shortly thereafter we reached the end of the game after successfully traversing all four levels of the subterranean dungeons of Xebec's Demise. This is the first computer game I can remember playing with a proper ending and sense of completion to it. Of course, there were still expected to be future installments of the series, but the sense of elation, satisfaction and reward I felt after completing The Dungeon was a first for me. On at least two occasions, I became so frustrated with my lack of progress that I actually got permission from my parents to call Datasoft and ask for help! In particular, the riddle given by the gargoyle on level three stumped us for a long time. The best answer we could come up with was "Xebec," which was quite close. Up to that point, we figured "Xebec" was a proper noun and thus the name of a person. So I got permission from my folks to make this "long-distance" call to Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley to ask for help. This was before Chatsworth was the epicenter of the adult film industry, needless to say. So I call up Datasoft. The phone rang a few times before a nice lady picked up on the other end. I'll just say this again: I called their main phone number and a female human being answered the phone directly. Once she figured out that I was a little boy and not a little girl (my voice had not yet matured) she proceeded to give me help and clues to figure out the answer to my questions. "So what is a xebec?" I remember her asking me. I don't have any idea who this person was or how many people Datasoft employed, but I still find it almost unbelievable that you could just call up and the lady who answers the phones at the front desk would help you out of a jam! It was a simpler time. Less than five years later, I'd be waiting for hours on the phone while navigating an automated touch-tone labyrinth to get help with Nintendo games. Things change. It seems that retro/geezer gaming has become fashionable in recent years and that's fine by me. PCs and their emulators and VMs have are so powerful now that it feels like you can play whatever you want on whichever platform you want. Also, I'm nothing if not a digital stamp-collector. I love my media collection. It is expansive. For many games I've even downloaded scores, themes and soundtracks to relive the experience of playing them, if only briefly. Such collections are much more common now that games include CD quality sound, but I thought it would be great if I could find the old AR tracks online and add them to my media library. Well, one thing led to another and the whole attempt became a project. I wasn't able to find all the tracks I wanted to include, so I went back to the emulators and into the games directly, where I captured the PCM (705 kbps) sound for each of the tracks. The conversion of Gilbertson's music to the C64 platform was disappointing, but I did include the main theme (wishing well intro), which showcases some of the differences between the two. All of this I put together in a track order that was pleasing to me, while adding the lyrics as metadata to each track for which lyrics were available. I threw together a "cover" using artwork from the gamebox and the AR logo. Finally, I converted them to 192kbps AAC in m4a containers. With the exception of some start/stop copy sounds at the beginning and end of some tracks, they all sound great. I would like to link to them here to make them available to the fan community, but I am concerned about violation copyright, especially the reproduction of Mr. Gilbertson's intellectual property. I'll make them available if and when I get the go ahead from one of them. Mr. Gilbertson, if you're listening: even before I went back and captured the the in-game audio and edited it, I knew the lyrics to most of the songs. They have haunted me all these years. I took a few liberties with the track names. I wasn't thinking I would have to explain that when I did it because I hadn't thought to share them yet. They were just for me. I hope it's not a problem. Here is the tracklist: Alternate Reality -- The Music 01 - Abduction - City 02 - At the Floating Gate 03 - Armor 04 - Guild 05 - The Legend of Thoreandan 06 - The Dwarf Dance (Instrumental) 07 - Let In the Lite 08 - Moments in My Life 09 - Waves 10 - Death 11 - Abduction - Dungeon (Wishing Well Intro) 12 - Rathskeller Rock 'n Roll 13 - The Devourer 14 - Der Rathskeller Tune 3 (Instrumental) 15 - The Troll King 16 - Evil Guild 17 - In The Hall of The Goblin King 18 - Good Guild 19 - The Chapel (Instrumental) 20 - Death 21 - Into the Fray Bonus - Abduction - Dungeon - Wishing Well Intro (C64) Mr. Price, if you're still out there: Alternate Reality is in my humble opinion the best game of all time. Thanks for listening. Best wishes to you all, John