25 years ago today was Oct 10, 1993.  On that day, we released "Halloween Harry". Created by SubZero Software and released by Apogee Software, it was one of the more interesting scroller games out there.  When your game has a final boss of Zombie Elvis Presley, you know it has a sense of humor.

The game was originally released on Oct 10, 1993 as we said.  It was later discontinued  on April 21, 2000 (for various technical reasons at the time).  We then re-released the full game as freeware on May 24, 2007.  

One of the original game's creators, John Passfield, sent us a few thoughts today looking back on the 25th anniversary of the game..

"It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Halloween Harry first blasted onto PC as shareware. The game was built by a scrappy young team of game developers from down under including myself, Steve Stamatiadis, Robert Crane, Tony Ball, and Darren Baker. It felt like the Wild West back then as we learnt new things and pushed the limits of the computers we were working on. I’m proud of the legacy of the game and excited to see it remembered fondly by the amazing Apogee fanbase. Here’s to another 25 years! 

John Passfield (Brisbane, Australia)"

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In honor of this game's birthday, we are bringing you one of the pre-release betas of the game.  This particular beta was dated August 23, 1993.  It contains just the first episode of the four, as we were testing just that at the time.  The game play is mostly there, but some of the individual things inside the levels are different than the public/final version of the game.

Here are a couple of links for you to download:

1) The 2018 Beta release:
ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/hh_beta_082393.zip

2) The freeware release from 11 years ago:
ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/acfreew.zip

A note about both the beta release and the freeware release.  We offer no support in helping to getting this running.  YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN HERE, although you will need DOSBox to get it going (unless of course you have a pure MS-DOS computer, in which case never mind).  

One quick note.  You will need to run the config.exe file first before trying to run the game (with start.exe).

If you still ask us after reading this, your request will be brutally ignored.  ;)

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We also have a few words that John Passfield and Scott Miller (Apogee founder) had to say about Halloween Harry...

John Passfield:

Halloween Harry, the tough as nails marine from Alien Carnage was the star of a game I wrote on the Australian Microbee computer system and released commercially in 1985.  I was still in high school at the time and was super excited to have sold my second computer game (the first was called "Chilly Willy", a clone of the classic arcade game, Pengo).

I left school, studied computer science at university, and then got a "real job" as a programmer at a telecommunications company. That lasted just over two years before the computer game bug bit again.  Now I was developing for the Amiga computer and had started work on a re-make of the Halloween Harry game I made as a kid - the game that would eventually become Alien Carnage!

With the help of a local comic artist we cooked up a demo that had great graphics and the core of a cool game.  Through sheer luck I then hooked up with two other programmers who were making PC games.  They were "coding demon" Robert Crane, and "graphics wizard" Tony Ball.  We joined forces and Robert took over as lead programmer while I took the reigns on design.  In no time we had a very addictive game on our hands.

Then, through sheer luck, we hooked up with Scott Miller and George Broussard from Apogee and before we knew it, the hottest shareware publisher on Earth was publishing us.  Back in 1993 when Alien Carnage was first released, we had the honor of being one of the best selling shareware games of the year - an honor that we held on to until a little old game called "Doom" was released a few months later!

Well, I hope you enjoy taking a trip down memory lane with Alien Carnage.

Cheers,
John Passfield

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Scott Miller:

Halloween Harry was a project I particularly liked because games with both flame throwers and zombies were few and far between back in the early 90's! This was also our first project working with a team in Australia, the country where I grew up during my high school years, so this project re-established my connection to my favorite country outside the States. (We would later work with two more teams in Australia, riding the roiling wave of their fast cresting development community.) 

The people we worked with on this project were creative, professional and collaborative, and many (maybe all) still work in the game industry today. †It cannot be underestimated how important it is to work with collaborate creative types, where the best ideas win. †And that was definitely the case with the Halloween Harry team.

We later changed the game's name to the unfortunately generic Alien Carnage because sales for Halloween Harry were below expectations, and we feared that people thought this was a seasonal Halloween game. Looking back, probably the real killer was Doom, which clearly set a new standard for shareware games, a standard that took a few years for everyone else to catch up to. Still, this was a well polished, fun game that deserved a wider audience, and even today is worth a try.

Scott Miller, founder & owner
Apogee Software, Ltd.

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Thanks to all of our fans who have been around since these games were new, or newer ones we've picked up lately.  We wouldn't exist without y'all playing our games, so thanks!

Enjoy this early beta of the game and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Joe Siegler
Apogee Software / 3D Realms
October 10, 2018

P.S. One little bit of legal stuff. 

Halloween Harry is ©2018 Red Sprite Studios
www.redspritestudios.com