Halloween Harry, the tough as nails marine from Alien Carnage, is 22 years old this year. He 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!
I want to say a big thank you to the DOSBox Development Team and Joe Siegler for putting this all together. Nice work guys!
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