Your question for John Passfield

[Tijn]

#10734

John Passfield not only worked on Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage (1993), but also created the original Halloween Harry (1985, not for DOS). Right now he’s working on a brand new upcoming Halloween Harry game (also not DOS lol): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040430/Halloween_Harry/

So this being our game of the month seemed like a good time to reach out to John and see if he’s up for an interview. And it turns out he is!

Besides Halloween Harry, John Passfield is also the creator of Flight of the Amazon Queen, which is a great point & click adventure game that we should definitely look at in a future month.

John’s been active in the Australian game industry for many years, so I’m sure he’s got plenty of stories for us to hear.

https://www.mobygames.com/person/1859/john-passfield/

If you have a question for John, please post it here and we’ll make sure it’s put before him 🙂

[dr_st]

#10737

Nice!

Was he also involved in the sequel ‘Zombie Wars’? If so – it would be nice if he could share something about how the development for that one went.

If this is too broad – then specifically – what pushed the team to release what is essentially a same-technology sequel so late after the first game.

Thanks!

[Tijn]

#10738

Ah yes, good one!

[TigerQuoll]

#10743

I’d be interested to know what the general game industry looked like in Australia in the 80s and 90s. Was it possible to make any money in the Australian market? Or was the only viable option to attach oneself to an overseas publisher like Apogee?
Was there anybody else doing interesting things in video games in Australia at the time? If so, did they communicate or work together in any way, or was every Australian developer basically forging their own path?

[jefklak]

#10751

I’d like to know what got them into making another platformer for DOS in 1993 and how they thought it be different enough from the others already published by Apogee (especially since ’93 is the year of Duke II). Is the jetpack/movement “the” unique thing here?

[dr_st]

#10865

Oh, I just thought of another one – in connection to jefklak’s question: the game is often compared to Duke Nukem II for various reasons, and indeed there are quite a few similarities – the way certain weapons act, the alien theme, the basic 4-episode structure.

Since the games were released almost at the same time (end of 1993), I assume their development cycles have been largely parallel. Was there any communication and sharing of ideas between the development teams (perhaps via Apogee’s role as a publisher), or are similarities purely coincidental?

[Tijn]

#10881

We just concluded a call of about an hour talking to both John Passfield and his friend & collaborator Peter Mullins.

They were both happy to share stories and I think I managed to get everyone’s questions in. Thanks for sharing them and look out for the extra episode soon!

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[Evil Taco]

#10883

Super cool!

[TigerQuoll]

#10901

Nice! I look forward to hearing it!

[Eulisker]

#11226

Great interview. Zombie Wars runs great in DosBox with Win 3.1 or in DosBox-X with Windows 95. I think the biggest problem to get this out there would be that you need to distribute a version of Windows 3.1 or 95 with the game to get it to run. I am not sure Microsoft would like that very much.

[Tijn]

#11227

Ah yeah, you’re completely right, Eulisker. I hope John can find a way around that somehow.