Atari’s “Alone in the Dark” arrives on Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Wii and PC next month.

It won’t arrive on PlayStation 3 until later, which means it could include support for the PS3’s virtual world Home service and the system’s Achievements-like system called trophies.

Home was one of Phil Harrison’s babies at Sony, where he served as head of worldwide studios until a couple of months ago. He always seemed very proud of what Sony could accomplish with Home. But it didn’t happen while he was there.

I figured that now that he’s president of Atari’s parent company, Infogrames, he might have some insight on whether “Alone in the Dark” could support Home and incorporate trophies later this year.

“If the libraries are available, then yeah, I would hope that the PS3 version can take advantage of that,” he told me last week.

No Home guarantees yet, readers. Not even from Phil Harrison.

The Xbox 360 version of “Grand Theft Auto IV” has 50 official Achievements. But no list of Achievements can tabulate all of interesting things you can do in a “GTA.”

Here are several things I achieved in my first seven hours in the game that you can strive for too, if you get the M-rated game once it launches Tuesday..

100% Unofficial Extra “Grand Theft Auto IV” Achievements

• Caught A Visual Joke Reference To Master Chief
• Saw Reflection Of The Elevated Train In The Hood Of My Car While Driving In First-Person View
• Walked Into a Six-Star Wanted Rating
• Watched a Pantomime Cowboy — Really!
• Heard a Character Say The Words ‘Hot Coffee’
• Used A Car to Knock A Cup Of Coffee From Someone’s Hand — Without Knocking The Person Off Their Feet
• Lost Niko’s Hat

Most of these things wouldn’t have been possible in previous “GTA” games. A lot of them are physics-dependent. Not all of them, though. Not the Master Chief thing.

So why stop at 50? If ever there was a game so rich with possibilities in its world that gamers could make up their own list of Achievements, “GTA IV” is it.

There are Achievements, Entitlements, eventually trophies, and now there are Honors, courtesy of Disney’s upcoming DGamer social network for the Nintendo DS.

DGamer comes first attached to “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.” As the first title coming out of Disney’s newly formed Fall Line Studios, a group focused exclusively on Wii and DS development, there’s quite a bit riding on the reaction to this initial outing.

Disney’s hopes are pinned to the younger crowd flocking towards DGamer, Disney’s gaming take on the Facebook/Xbox Live/MySpace phenomenon, an extension of what the company has already been toying with on Disney.com.

I decided to give it a whirl yesterday. Unfortunately, Disney rejected my screen name!

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Demos may be the best way to find out if you like a game, but releasing one might not be in a publisher’s best financial interest, according to a study discussed at last week’s MI6 video game marketing conference.

This is the same study, presented by Gregory Short and Geoffery Zatkin, heads of the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research Group (EEDAR), which recommended marketing teams should work with developers to come up with an Xbox 360 game’s Achievements.

While demos may be effective at producing word-of-mouth, the EEDAR found that the highest selling games on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 produced buzz via Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network with trailers alone.

There are some other interesting bits extrapolate, so let’s look at how the sales break down…

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It’s not likely Microsoft knew how much of an influence Achievements would have on the industry.

Today, most would argue they’re impossible to ignore.

At the MI6 Conference in San Francisco, a two-day event filled with presentations targeted squarely at marketers, the results of an Electronic Entertainment Design and Research study were clear: marketers need to care about their game’s Achievements.

Achievements are influencing sales and Achievements are becoming effective viral marketing that puts the power of driving sales in the hands of gamers.

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[UPDATED with comments from D3 Publisher.]

We all know what Xbox 360 Achievements are.

They’ve produced countless Achievement whores (including our own Jason Cipriano), and many see Achievements as a way to measure a gamer’s success.

Today, D3 Publisher of America not only announced the Xbox 360 Achievements for “Dark Sector,” but also PS3 “Entitlements” for the game. Remember “Entitlements”?

Back in July 2006, an EGM podcast revealed that Sony aspired to mimic Microsoft’s addictive Achievement system, calling the various accomplishments in the game “Entitlements.” But no further information was provided. We’ve seen Achievement-type rewards in Sony’s first-party games (such as “medals” in “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune,” “Resistance: Fall of Man,” “Warhawk” and “glyphs” in “Heavenly Sword“) but they haven’t appeared in every PS3 game thus far… Though it seems that a few third-party titles are moving ahead, like “Devil May Cry 4,” which has identical Achievements for the Xbox 360 and PS3 (they’re called “accomplishments” on the PS3).

And would there be a numbered tally that adds up all these “Entitlements” across games for an overall “Entitlement score”? (”Entitlement whore” just doesn’t have the same ring to it…)

We’ve put in a request to D3 and Sony to try to find out more, and we’ll let you know as soon as we hear back.

To see “Dark Sector”’s Achievements and Entitlements, read on.

[UPDATE From D3 - March 5, 8:14pm]

Josh Austin, a producer at D3 Publisher answered some of our questions regarding the “Dark Sector” entitlements:

Multiplayer: Why did you decide to include Entitlements now? Was it a mandate by Sony, or just forward-thinking on the developers’ part? Please explain.

Austin: Including medals or “entitlements” as we call them in “Dark Sector” was definitely forward-thinking by the developer, Digital Extremes. From the start of development, we planned that gamers would have a compelling gameplay experience regardless of platform.

Multiplayer: Did you get any specific instructions from Sony regarding “entitlements”? If they were not called “entitlements” would they have been included in the PS3 version anyway?

Austin: We were already in the process of implementing entitlements in-game when we heard the news that they would be integrated by Sony and have more of a presence.

Multiplayer: Will these entitlements bring up a screen when achieved?

Austin: Players will receive an in-game message that they have unlocked an entitlement.

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Game developers just want to have fun.

So when the folks at Propaganda Games were amused by recklessly killing their own teammates during the making of “Turok,” they thought it might be funny and different to include an Achievement for doing so.

They were wrong.

After a backlash from angry Xbox Live gamers late last year, the company recently decided to patch the game on release day to exclude the teammate-killing reward. With “Turok” out in stores this week, I got Associate Director Tim Lewinson on the phone yesterday to talk about the controversial Achievement. Here’s a taste:

Multiplayer: I’m assuming you guys play a lot of multiplayer games on Xbox Live. It never occurred to you that gamers might find that kind of Achievement irritating?

Lewinson: Well, here’s the thing. A lot of folks got uptight about it when the Achievement list was leaked. They were yelling on the forums about how we’re awarding anti-social behavior. Won’t somebody think of the children and all that nonsense so, you know, to our credit we listened to the fan-base, and we patched the Achievement to remove that team-killing portion, so everything’s well in the universe once again. Never let it be said that we won’t listen to the fan-base and if there’s something that they feel really strongly enough about, we’re always willing to go back and take a second look.

Read on to learn more of Lewinson’s thoughts on taking feedback from gamers, how Public Enemy sneaks into the game and what a romantic guy he really is…

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I like to collect things. Lots of things. Video games are at the top of that list, and Achievement points are a solid second. However, for the past 21 weeks or so, that list has been a bit flip-flopped - clouded by my anticipation for “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” (which, coincidently, has a ton of things to collect in it).

This past week I collected another 1,415 achievement points, which, put me past my secondary target goal of 20,000 points before February 11 - “Smash Bros.’” second pre-delay release date. I’ve now collected a total of 20,595 points since mid-September, and am well on pace to hit 25,000 points by March 9. I’ve been furiously obsessing over Xbox 360 titles for almost six months now, but, as some of you readers have pointed out, at what cost to my other game systems?

Great games on other systems have come and gone since I started, and I have barely touched them. I’ve been too busy playing games like “Open Season,” “Cars,” and this week’s 1,000 point-getter “NHL 2K6.” I haven’t stopped collecting games, filling in my back catalog of titles that I missed when they were first released. In an attempt to demonstrate just how much I am actually missing out on, I now present a list of games that I have added to my collection since I started this quest back in September.

Atari 2600
“Spider-Man”

Famicom
“Kirby’s Adventure”
“Pac-Man 2″

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Video games can bring friends together.

But it can also tear them apart.

We’ve seen what happens when a couple shares a game and one beats it without the other during the Thanksgiving holiday; it wasn’t pretty, but they didn’t break up, presumably because they share other common bonds besides games.

Recently, I was faced with a similar dilemma, and I had to make a confession this week to my co-worker and friend, Multiplayer’s Jason Mitchell: over the holiday break, I finished “Crackdown,” a co-op game we played together a few months back, without him.

Read our exchanges below…

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Earlier this week, Harmonix Senior Designer Dan Teasdale answered our burning questions about “Rock Band.”

But we also wanted to know how the team came up with the Achievements for the game. Continuing our series of finding out where Achievements come from, Teasdale answers our questions about “Rock Band”’s range of Achievements, including how they differ from “Guitar Hero II“’s Achievements and the possibility of Achievement-laden downloadable content.

But for Teasdale, personally, he said he’d like to see a new kind of Achievement:

“I’d love it if there was some form of additional Achievement-like system in the future that was more like a badge of honor or a way for people to see your play style… Imagine if you could view someone’s Gamercard and see that they’d beaten me in a “Meet the Developer” tournament, or chosen to team up with the Scryers in “World of Warcraft,” or even was an “Early Adopter” and played a certain game in the first week of release. You can’t do these with Achievements, since you could never get 100%, but with a badge of honor system as well as Achievements, things could be much more flexible.”

More material like that follows in what may well be our last “Rock Band” post of 2007!

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As a general rule, I tend to save all my vacation days until the end of the year.

Whether this is just out of fear or being out of the office during the rest of the year, or just general procrastination, it is paying off a bit in terms of my Achievements quest.

This past week I was able to rack up 1,555 points putting my overall score at 14,350.

This leaves me with 5,650 points to go before I reach my goal of 20,000 points before “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” is released in early February.

With the next few weeks freed up due to the holidays, vacation time, and not having to write this column again until after the new year, I’m fairly confident I can pull it off.

I played a mixed bag of games this week for my quest.

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Remember “Dead Rising“?

How could you not: Capcom’s zombie action-adventure title was one of 2006’s bestsellers, enamoring gamers with its classic storyline and everything-is-a-weapon, sandbox-style gameplay.

Another thing the Xbox 360 exclusive had were amusing and fun-to-get Achievements. How did they come up with them?

Game designer Goda Hidehiro gave us his answers via e-mail (which were translated from Japanese). Here’s an excerpt about the easiest Achievement in the game:

Hidehiro: It would be “Freefall” or falling 16 feet. I imagine that those Achievements are achieved without the player knowing about them. I’m glad that [one] serves as a good hook to draw people’s attention, so that the player might think, “This game has some weird Achievements.”

Read on to learn about Hidehiro’s favorite Achievements, why he thinks gamers are obsessed with Achievements and what he’d like to see in “Dead Rising 2.”

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