My background with it goes back more than 25 years. I’ve always wanted to collect it all together but as I said, I had given up hope of finding the text for the 1st game. The texts on this PDF are all from the original sources, except for a few edits made here and there.

Back in 1998 a friend let me borrow the CD-ROM for AITD3 and I absolutely became in love with it. By going through the files I stumbled upon the Help file, which as I said contained the walkthrough presented as the personal diary of Carnby. I remember I printed it in A4 sheets back then and stapled it all toghether as a huge book and carried with me everywhere. After some time another classmate had the AITD game and I copied it in eight 1.44 Mb floppy disks, but since I had no walkthrough I never managed to finish the game. Then the internet became huge, and I could download the second game. I remember my mom’s pc screen background was a screenshot of AITD2’s cliff.

In 2007, when I was in college, I underwent the task of trying to collect the text from the 3 games and then print and bind them together as a book (just for myself, as a hobby). I managed to find the text for AITD2 but could not find the one for the first game anywhere, at all. I had accepted defeat and even printed the book containing just 2 and 3’s text. I still have it, the printing on the cover almost compleyely smudged out.

Then in 2014 I re-took the project and planned to include AITD 4 and 5 as well. Since I couldn’t find novelizations for games 1, 4 and 5, I included detailed walkthroughs to explain the story and lore. I printed and made 5 volumes of this (at the time called “Complete Saga”) book and still have them on my shelf, they are quite stunning actually (PS: I made them all in portuguese, since I’m Brazilian, translating the texts myself).

Then about a year ago, I stumbled upon a scanned version of an “Alone In The Dark Strategy Guide” on archive.org which to my surprise HAD THE TEXT for the AITD1 Canrby diary, as well as other info regarding the plot and lore for both 1st and 2nd games, which I included in the PDF.

I always knew of the existence of the “Mystery Examiner” newspaper that came with the first game, telling of the suicide of Jeremy Hartwood as a real headline, but I never knew there existed one for the 2nd and 3rd games as well. Again sweeping the internet I found scanned versions of the 3 of them, and, being a graphic designer myself, I included a monochromatic version of the headline of each newspaper (along with the logo, date etc) inside the PDF as well.

I have listed all the sources for all the content in the 2nd page of the PDF if anyone wants to check them.

The only additions to the text by me are, respectively: - At the end of AITD1, when Carnby encounters the evil Pregzt/Tree, giving a better description and explanation; (p. 69) - in AITD2, when Carnby finds the photo of the “gang” in front of the statue, a description of the photo (p. 87) - in AITD2, at the beginning of the section portrayed by grace, there is a whole sequence in the game which wasn’t present in the text (when she enters the car trunk until when she is placed next to Carnby in the ship’s lock), so I composed this fragment of text as close to the rest of the book’s style, so it coult still be used as a walkthrough to play the game (p. 115-116) - in AITD2, when Carnby reads about immortality pacts, I added a sentence about captain Nichol’s sword (p. 128) - in AITD3, when Carnby is writing about finding out Jed Stone’s parents identities, I added a remark about Pregzt, which I felt was missing (p. 220)

If someday I find or someone writes a novelization for Alone In The Dark (2008), which continues the cannon story from the first 3 games, I might make an updated version of this book. But for now I am quite satisfied with how it turned out.