Alone in the Dark 3
Alone in the Dark 3 is the third installment of the Alone in the Dark survival horror video game series created by Infogrames. The video game was released for MS-DOS in 1994. It was ported to the PC-98 in 1995. Versions for Windows and Mac OS were also released in 1996 under the name of Alone in the Dark: Ghosts in Town.[1]
| Alone in the Dark 3 | |
|---|---|
 MS-DOS version box art | |
| Developer(s) |
|
| Publisher(s) | |
| Director(s) | Christiane Sgorlon |
| Producer(s) | Bruno Bonnell |
| Writer(s) | Hubert Chardot Christian Nabais |
| Composer(s) | Frédéric Mentzen |
| Series | Alone in the Dark |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS, PC-98, Windows, Mac OS |
| Release | |
| Genre(s) | Survival horror |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
Plot
It's 1925 and after Edward Carnby's success in his previous two investigations, a journalist has nicknamed him the 'Supernatural Private Eye'. This time, he is called to investigate the disappearance of a film crew at a two-bit ghost town known by the name of Slaughter Gulch located in the Mojave Desert in California. Among the disappeared crew is Emily Hartwood, Jeremy Hartwood's niece from the original. Edward soon discovers that a curse has gripped the town, and an evil cowboy from the Badlands named Jed Stone is the villain who is responsible for the crew's disappearance. Lurking around town are many trigger-happy sharpshooters, deranged prospectors, and bloodthirsty lost souls whom Edward must ward off with both his strength and his wit.
Gameplay
The main theme of this game is the Wild West, as Carnby is pitted against a town filled with "zombie cowboy outlaws" who attack him with revolvers and lever-action rifles. More traditionally mindless, shambling zombies begin to appear about midway through the game. Towards the end of the game, the concept of radioactive mutation plays a significant role in the story, and the player ends up fighting monstrous creatures created from the radiation.
Release
This was the first game in the series not to be released on floppy disks. Rather, it was released as a CD-ROM game since the initial release, with full Red Book audio soundtrack and dialogue speech (in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, depending on the country the game was released) like the CD-ROM re-releases of the previous two games. It was also the first game in the series to be exclusively released for several computer formats and therefore it didn't receive any official console release unlike the previous two games.
Outside of Europe, the game was distributed in North America by Interplay Entertainment. In Japan, a PC-98 version of the game was developed and released in 1995 by AMT Savan Corps,[2] a merge of the company previously known as Arrow Micro-Techs Corp which published the previous games for Japanese computers. There was no FM-Towns version developed this time. In 1996, the Windows and Mac OS versions were also released in Japan by Electronic Arts Victor as Alone in the Dark 3: Ghosts in Town.[3][4]
The official guide to the game (Alone in the Dark 3: The Official Strategy Guide, Prima Publishing, 1995; re-released by the author, 2019) was written by Steve Schwartz in cooperation with Infogrames.
A 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version of Alone in the Dark 3 was announced but never released.[5][6]
See also
- Undead Nightmare, another horror Western video game
References
- Alone in the Dark: Ghosts in Town
- アローンインザダーク3を普通にプレイ（PC98 CD Ver）
- エレクトロニック・アーツ・ビクターの最新海外ゲーム6月分
- アローンインザダーク3をサクサク進める予定の実況プレイ Part01
- "Preview – Coming Soon". 3DO Magazine. No. 10. Paragon Publishing. May 1996. pp. 33–34.
- "Preview – Coming Soon". 3DO Magazine. No. 12. Paragon Publishing. July 1996. pp. 33–34.
