While the two X-men Chronicles issues cover events that take place in the past, X-men: Alpha was the real introduction to the Age of Apocalypse, being released before all the other issues. This was the first thing that the current readers saw at the time to introduce them to this world.
This issue was actually published toward the end of the Age of Apocalypse event, and seems to be designed to help answer some of the questions people may have had while reading the various series. The main one apparently being “How did Magneto and Rogue end up together?”
While the primary Age of Apocalypse issues were set in the “present day” part of the timeline, they did think to provide us with a prequel to those stories in the X-men Chronicles series. This title replaced X-men Unlimited, which was basically just a series where Marvel was squeezing even more money out of us X-men fans by providing outside-of-the-main-storyline character pieces in double sized issues. In all fairness, a lot of these stories were really high quality in large part due to that longer length.
Like many of my generation, watching the X-men cartoon that premiered in 1992 led me to picking up the comics and becoming a full fledged, dedicated reader, visiting my local comic book shop every month to get the latest issues. Being judged by my peers as an outsider and a weirdo, the X-men and their “hated because they are different” themes appealed to me in many ways. Having very few friends of my own, I thought of them as my friends; characters I went on adventures with by reading their comics and watching the cartoon.
As such, I’ll never forget the day I walked into my comic shop in early 1995. The store was run by an elderly couple – he was the sports card expert, and she knew the comics. She also knew who of her customers read what, even without them having a pull list. So when I walked in that day to buy my comics, she pulled me over to the counter to show me a press release. She did not look particularly happy about it. I’ve scoured the internet to try to find a copy of that press release, but apparently no one has uploaded it to the internet, so I’ll do my best to paraphrase: