Where are all these people now? It's now close to three years since Headfirst closed its doors. And Call Of Cthulhu has been out for about just as long. I have to admit it: I still haven't bought it. I've been lurking around ever since the first snippets of information on the game came around in 1999. That's ten years! During this game's development cycle I finished school, did a couple of jobs, moved twice, went to college,.. it's epic. Plenty ups and downs. Headfirst had them. I had them. You likely had them too.By the time Call Of Cthulhu finally hit shops, I didn't bother all that much anymore as I did some years before. I will give it a shot though at some point though. Promise. And now Headfirst are gone. The Woodroffes who've been around since forever are no more in business. It's a shame, and it's sad. I still remember an interview with Mike published in a 1992 PC gaming mag. Pre-Adventuresoft, Horrorsoft era. I thought his vision was sound at that point. He sounded really dedicated to that Horror thing, and there was probably not a single company around that was specialized on giving you the chills. Heck is there any around today?! The Elvira games had already made their impact on friends and me, Waxworks was just about to be released, and he was already talking about the next game. Horror stuff, of course. Something about a haunted carnival or something. But as we all know now, it took him several more years to do venture into the Fright Zone again.Probably all of the staff from the Horrorsoft days were long gone when the development of CoC started. But it was still my memories of playing Elvira and Waxworks that sparked my first excitement about the game. Getting my entrails ripped by flesh-eating dead on a night in early 1993, that sort of thing. Finally Mike Woodroffe was back on track! And then there were talks about sequels even though the game wasn't even out yet. Joy!But maybe this all wasn't to be. All that's left is a legacy of games, luckily one I've yet to play. Memories. And funny http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axqRgDkWXA0Honestly, where are all these people now? I wish they'd do a reunion and pick up from where they left one day. Jezz Woodroffe and the haunting Amiga scores, entire discs dedicated to multitudes of death sequences alone, and parents upset about their children playing Whack-a-Zombie till well past midnight.

Mike Woodroffe, having had quite an ordeal with the death of Headfirst which he had sponsored out of his own pocket in a seperate attempt to keep it going while publishers was uhm-ing and ah-ing over deals for the sequel, had finally decided to leave the industry and trained as a property surveyor which he enjoys by all accounts. I am working with Simon Woodroffe who was the creative director at Headfirst again since this last year. He is creative director at Midway Newcastle at the moment, and the game we have been working on is just about to hit the shelves, http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-wheelman-hands-on, Jez is still doing his music AFAIK. Most of the rest of the Headfirst crew have ended up at either Eurocom in Derby (myself included for the two years prior), or the recently folded 'Free Radical', but others have worked at Gorilla on Killzone, or Chrytek, Bioware, Dice and Swordfish to name but a few of the studios, and for the most part I believe just about everyone is doing fairly well. Ironically I am working with people at the moment who used to work at Adventuresoft and horrorsoft back in the day. Thanks for asking.I hope you get to play DCOTE and still makes some kind of an impression inspite of those many years of anticipation. Let us know if you ever do. What was your name on the forum back in the day?

I think I've been visiting the Headfirst pages since the days of Simon 3D, but I wasn't a common contributor to the forums. If there were any. Today when I logged in to this board, I was greeted with a message telling me I last visited in September. 2003! Awesome stuff though! And good luck on that project, if recent rumors are true, http://kotaku.com/5152193/rumor-aliens-rpg-canceled-layoffs-hit I just took a look around at Mike and Simon's moby profiles - about two years ago there was a German developer who acquired the rights to do another Simon The Sorcerer game and apparently Simon was part of the development team in some way or other.As for the Horrosoft staff, at least according to MobyGames most are long since out of business. It's a pity, since the pixel art in particular was one of a kind. I suppose it was a couple (Paul and Maria Drummond) who did the bulk of this. Whether they contributed something more light-hearted for Simon The Sorcerer or more fiendish for the earlier Horrosoft games, visually this was real quality stuff. Even if there were no undeads or http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/original/1202768863-00.png, their http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/original/1202769365-00.png No idea how this was done back then, whether it was based on photographs or else. You could easily tell their art apart from everything else.As for the demise of Headfirst, I've always had this theory that Mike never found a way to fit in with the games industry as it is now. Back then teams were rather tiny, production costs low as were development cycles and small independent studios had a much easier time. As soon as all of that changed, things probably went over his head. Call Of Cthulhu was hardly his first project that had a rather troubled development history. But this doesn't really matter as long as he's fine with what he's doing now. Ditto Simon. I think Mike's wife was involved with it all too in some way. A real family business like there's hardly any other in this industry. The Collyer brothers of Sports Interactive come to mind - bless them, I'm bloody addicted to Football Manager.

You're absolutely right in most respects. Headfirst was of a dying breed of family games companies, and yes Thrisha Mike's wife was also involved, there are other very succesful ones still like the Darling brothers' Codemasters which does pretty well, but there has been huge changes in the industry in the last 8 years, and the sad truth is that very few small independant games companies can survive the huge production value demands of the modern industry, there is hardly any of the old-school garage developers left, and if there are any they are more than likely involved with web based or phone based games. I am not too familiar with the old Horrorsoft or adventuresoft team, but two people I've worked with at Newcastle is from what used to be the Newcastle branch of the company in those days, one Kevin Preston is still working with me. The work back then we still fondly refer to as 'pixel-popping' and was pretty primitive by todays standards, a bit like MS-paint compared to photoshop, photos had to be manually copied for the most part. There were no real good pixel based animation programs and most of the tweening was done very laboriously and manually. Headfirst deservedly had a reputation for very good graphics in that era, and personally I think the simon the sorceror games were beautiful and technologically advanced for the time, it was the first time I played a game with recorded voice-over work, and you can still recognize 'Craig Charles' from 'red dwarf' and indeed Mike and Simon, basically everybody and their uncle was roped in to do some voice-over, and at the time for me as a South African having never heard a Brommie accent before thought the voices we really intriguing.A german developer bought the right to Simon the sorceror (all the adventuresoft titles were very popular in Germany, including 'feeble files which were called the 'Floyds' or something there), at the very end to try and generate some operating capital. Simon was involved only as a 'consultant' really for the game and I believe it was pretty much their own work all the way, I haven't played 'Simon the sorceror 4' at all, and am keen to see if I can get my hands on an english version. When I first started at Headfirst they were just wrapping up 'Simon the sorceror 3D', and I wa roped in to playtest it, which was well uhm also a troubled project, most companies had trouble doing the transition to 3D, and that was as good or bad as many I can think of, at least the humour in it was still top-notch, and it dismays me to see how little humourous games are being made these days, pretty much ninety percent low-brow fantasy, sports and racing and fighting games it seems to me, where are the good old 'Space-quests' style humour these days. (sounding like an old-man eh)Nice to know there is still people who appreciate all the old-school adventure and horror titles, feels like I am part of the old-garde for still liking all that stuff, which I enjoy playing in emulattion form still on my DS.

Yeah some reviews even went as far as saying it turned into a regular first person shooter after that, but it still had some adventurey moments though, and better logic puzzles than the usual find an emerald key and a ruby key

Wait - Simon the Sorcerer FOUR?! I assumed the series was dead, after the reception of Simon 3D. Darn, now I've got to go and buy another game.... Yes, it's a great pity that the game industry has turned into a big money-making machine rather than a collection of creative artists driven by vision. Still, PC gaming is never totally dead in the water: with tools like AGS and Source, it's relatively easy for people to put new, original games together, even if the industry at large is often just spouting out repetitious stuff.