This was one of the last commercially released games for the Apple IIgs. The port was written by Bill Heineman, who also was responsible for the SNES version (both the IIgs and the SNES share the same main processor). If the screen size was reduced, the game ran extremely smoothly on a stock unaccelerated IIgs.
The game took Eric Chahi two years to develop and create, hence the tag-line: "It took 6 days to create the Earth. Another World took 2 years".
With the exception of the music and sound effects, Eric Chahi created every aspect of the game himself, even to the extent of painting the cover artwork for the box.
The game 'Flashback' (1993) is frequently mistaken for a sequel to 'Another World' due to it's similar rotoscoped style. In fact, the sequel is 'Heart of the Alien' (1994), and was available exclusively for the Sega Mega CD platform (and is therefore relatively unknown). The sequel starts from the end of the first game, and follows the alien character instead of Lester. Having very little to do with it's development, Eric Chahi was unhappy with the sequel, and has since disowned it.
Creator Eric Chahi was inspired by the Amiga conversion of 'Dragon's Lair' which managed to fit large amounts of animation on to six floppy disks. He realized that if a polygon rotoscoping technique were used, the storage requirements would be much smaller. This is why the lengthy cinematic animations in 'Another World' are contained on just one floppy disk.