Mortal Harvey

I don't know why I remember this game at all. Mortal Harvey from 1995 is one of those computer oddities that hovers on the edge between almost something and almost nothing. That's probably why it stuck with me — I desperately wanted it all to click into place, but it never did.

It's a side-scrolling action game modeled on the classic beat 'em ups like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, just transplanted into a 2D world with a grotesquely big-headed fighter named Harvey. You scroll left across the screen, brawl with enemies, run down stairs. The setting is so vague that I'm not even sure if this is actually a Mortal Kombat fan game or if it just happens to look like every other DOS brawler by accident.

The controls are straightforward — jumps, punches, maybe some special moves. This simplicity would be fine if there was at least some cohesion. The animations are stiff, hit detection is random, and when you push forward, you discover the game doesn't really know what it wants to be. Sometimes it feels like a horror game, sometimes like a cheap fighting attempt, sometimes just like an emulator glitch.

From a 1995 perspective, it's not bad at all — the DOS underground scene believed there was freeware for everything. Mortal Harvey is exactly the type of amateur effort that became a nostalgia commodity afterward. The game brought nothing new, its contribution is forgotten, I don't even know if there's a sequel. It's just a few hours someone spent on something that vanished right after.

Today you can play it in DOSBox and it'll take you maybe fifteen minutes to figure out why you forgot about it. It's more of a curiosity for collectors of DOS oddities — something you show other people to illustrate how much more chaotic and raw everything was back then. Not a must-play, just a brief bit of trivia.