Halloween Harry

Halloween Harry
Also known as: Alien Carnage Developers: SubZero Software, Interactive Binary Illusions Publisher: Apogee Software Platform: DOS Released internationally: October 10, 1993 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has revisional differences.

Halloween Harry (later renamed to Alien Carnage) is a game where aliens have taken over the world and turned people into zombie slaves. You must fight your way through the zombies and rescue people who haven't yet been harmed.

The game received a sequel, Zombie Wars, in 1996.

Unused Developer Text

In the archive file order.bnk, there are two files called build.bat and make.bat. Both these DOS batch files do the same thing - they create the order.bnk file from files found in the current directory. From the content of these files, it can be seen that there are two utilities the game developers used to create these archive files. One that created the .bnk files is called kit, and one that possibly created the corresponding .fat file for each .bnk is called dizfile, although this isn't 100% certain.

This is what build.bat looks like:

del order.bnk order.fat
kit a order.bnk *.*
kit d order.bnk *.bak
dizfile order.bnk order.fat
copy order.bnk order.fat ..\

And make.bat:

del order.bnk
kit a order.bnk *.*
dizfile order.bnk order.fat
copy order.bnk order.fat ..

At 18C4 in carnage.exe (freeware version):

Portions Copyright (c) 1983,92 Borland

Revisional Differences

Title Screens

To do: Are there other title screens from other re-releases?.

When the title was changed to Alien Carnage, the title screen was updated with more than just the name change. The 10th Anniversary Edition received an entirely new title screen.

Halloween Harry (original)	Alien Carnage	Halloween Harry 10th Anniversary Edition

Level Order

In addition to an updated title screen, levels one and three were switched when the game was re-released as Alien Carnage. Apogee's Joe Sielger noted that only one level was in neither shareware version, so if one had the shareware versions of both Halloween Harry and Alien Carnage, they effectively already had three quarters of the full game!

(Source: Blog post)

(Source: Wikipedia)

Undocumented Run Parameters

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page.

These pieces of text appear alongside documented parameters such as SLOWPAL in carnage.exe and have the same type of separators.

Parameter	Effect
NOLEV	?
DEMOONLY	Locks the game into demo mode.
SHWR	Enable only the shareware episode
SKIP	Skips the title screens and goes straight to the main menu.