Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry not dead yet

[ClassicDOSGames]

I'm a fan of Halloween Harry which, sadly, was discontinued several years ago. I contacted John Passfield to see if he would be interested in releasing the game as freeware. He initially told me that he was very interested in doing that. A month later he gave me a surprise answer, which I didn't feel I should leak without his permission. I asked him if he would be willing to give an interview, on the record, and he agreed. I won't give away what he said about Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry, but it's about half way through the interview. The interview is posted at http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews.html.

[ClassicDOSGames]

***SPOILER WARNING***

Yeah, it's a bit weird to have a spoiler warning on a forum post, but I wanted to give the whole story about the Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry liberation effort, which will spoil some of the surprise if you haven't read the John Passfield interview yet.

I emailed John Passfield a couple of months ago about the possibility of a freeware release of Alien Carnage. He told me that he was very interested in doing that, but was concerned about compatibility on modern computers. He has already released Flight of the Amazon Queen as freeware, but overcame the problem of compatibility with modern computers by giving the source code to ScummVM.

I told him that DOSBox played the game perfectly, and mentioned products like Virtual PC and VMWare that allow DOS to be run in a virtual environment. I later suggested a source code release so that the game could also be ported to other platforms.

When he responded, he told me he was in talks with someone to have the game remade for handheld computers, and the outcome of those talks would determine the fate of the PC version of Alien Carnage.

So that's the larger story, which is a lot more informative than the interview was. There's still lots of other interesting stuff in the interview to anyone who hasn't yet read it.