Alter Ego (1986 video game)

Lore & Background

Alter Ego was created by Peter J. Favaro, a clinical psychologist who studied the effects of video games on players. He interviewed hundreds of men and women about their most memorable life experiences, then selected common experiences for the game. The game's development caught the attention of Jim Levy of Activision, who was seeking ambitious projects after the video game crash of 1983. Activision emphasized Favaro's PhD status in all packaging and advertising.

Reader's Guide

Alter Ego is significant as an early example of a psychological life-simulation game, grounded in academic research on human behavior. Its tree-diagram gameplay, tracking statistics like Physical, Confidence, and Intellectual, influenced later narrative-driven and choice-based games. The game received positive reviews for its thought-provoking and entertaining approach to decision-making. Its legacy includes fan-made ports and commercial re-releases by Choice of Games LLC, extending its reach to modern platforms. The game remains notable for its unique blend of psychology and interactive fiction.

Did You Know?

• The game was released in both male and female versions, each with a different set of experiences.
• Favaro wrote his master's thesis on the effects of video game play on mood, physiological arousal, and psychomotor performance.
• The game's designer interviewed hundreds of men and women about their most memorable life experiences to select common experiences.
• Activision always referred to Favaro as 'Peter J. Favaro, PhD' in packaging, manual, and advertisements.

Classification and Genre Identity

Alter Ego occupies a specific niche within the broader social simulation genre, distinguished by its designation as a "personality video game." This descriptor sets it apart from the other recognized subtypes: farming simulations where players tend crops while interacting with townspeople, city-building simulations focused on managing urban evolution over time, and life simulations centered on creating avatars and exploring social behaviors within a pre-built world. Social simulation games, as a category, are defined by their exploration of how artificial lives interact with one another. The genre itself traces its roots to educational contexts, where physical city-building exercises in classrooms laid groundwork that eventually migrated into digital entertainment. By 1986, when Alter Ego arrived, the trajectory from classroom exercises to consumer video games was already well underway, and the "personality" framing suggests a focus on character identity and social dynamics rather than resource management or architectural design.

The Activision Connection

Alter Ego was published by Activision, a connection that places it in direct proximity to another landmark title from the same publisher: Little Computer People, developed by David Crane and released in 1985. That one-year gap suggests a period of active experimentation within Activision's catalog, where the company was exploring the boundaries of what interactive software could do with simulated characters and social scenarios. The broader context of the mid-1980s was one of rapid evolution in the social simulation space. Before video games even existed, the genre's roots lay in physical, classroom-based city building created by educators like Doreen Gehry Nelson, whose in-class exercises allowed students to imagine, construct, and rebuild cities while incorporating real-world learning. The Nelson siblings later contributed the roleplaying game Purium at a 1971 Smithsonian Institution workshop, which went on to inform the baseline of future social simulation titles. Alter Ego arrived in this lineage of educational-to-entertainment evolution, carrying the Activision brand into a space that was still being defined.

A Bridge in the Timeline

Released in 1986, Alter Ego sits in a critical transitional window in the history of social simulation games. It came one year after Little Computer People (1985) and two years before The Money Game (1988), a Famicom life simulation about balancing romance with high finance. The titles that followed in the late 1980s and beyond—SimCity in 1989, Jones in the Fast Lane in 1990, and eventually The Sims in 2000—would define the genre more firmly. Will Wright, creator of The Sims, explicitly acknowledged the influence of Little Computer People on his work, describing The Sims as having a richer gameplay experience while sharing fundamental DNA. The Sims was initially called nearly the sole title in its category upon release, yet the examples list stretching back to 1985 reveals a much deeper wellspring. Alter Ego, positioned between these milestones, represents a moment when the "personality video game" concept was still novel, before the genre coalesced into the recognizable categories that video game journalists would later formalize in the early 2000s.

Among the Examples

In the broader catalog of social simulation games, Alter Ego shares a listing with titles spanning four decades and multiple platforms. It appears alongside Tenshitachi no Gogo (1985), one of the earliest dating sims released for the 16-bit NEC PC-9801, and Little Computer People (1985), and just before The Money Game series (1988–1989), which included the Famicom title Wall Street Kid as its sequel. The full roster extends through SimCity's various iterations, the Princess Maker series by Gainax running from 1991 to 2025, the Tokimeki Memorial series, and more recent entries like Stardew Valley (2016) and Harvestella (2022). The genre's DNA also draws from dating sims dating back to the early 1980s, with titles like Girl's Garden (1984) and Tenshitachi no gogo (1985). What unites all these entries, from a 1986 personality game to a 2025 early-access release, is the core premise of exploring social interactions between artificial lives—a thread that Alter Ego helped weave into the fabric of the genre before the term "social simulation" became a standard journalistic category.

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