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, Japanese and Portuguese, depending on the country the game was released, and with the Mac version specifically featuring a different English dub) 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 did not 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, 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.
A 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version of 3 was announced but never released.