Harry the Handsome Executive – Ben Spees/Ambrosia Software - 1997 - First time playing?: Yes!

See, this is the kind of idea that you only see come to fruition with shareware and indie developers. I don't know how many AAA video game publishers out there would appreciate the potential market for a game where you play as a coffee-sipping office worker who is far too business casual to even bother getting out of his office chair when robots attack his workplace. He is very handsome, however. Sex appeal sells, don’t you know.

Harry the Handsome Executive is a very silly game. I mean, obviously it is, it's called Harry the Handsome Executive. That’s not the kind of name you give to a realistic office simulation. You ride an office chair around an office complex called ScumCo while shooting things with a staple gun and guzzling caffeine pills. It borders on defying classification by genre, other than vaguely calling it an “action adventure” game. That's why it's cool and deserves recognition. Harry can be clumsy and frustrating at times, and the obnoxious difficulty spike near the end game did ultimately put a bit of a damper on my positive feelings, but I still did overall really enjoy myself with this one and think it's worth a look for uniqueness and humour alone.

How do you write a story for a game about a sexually attractive executive? I… honestly don't know how much I can say without delving into spoilers. It starts with Harry’s boss telling him to throw some documents into a furnace, then follows that up with Harry needing to find a window in order to get some sunlight, and then there's suddenly a robot uprising and from that point on the game goes completely off the rails in the most chaotically glorious way imaginable. Let me just say out of context that in this game there is a pagan religion that worships office chairs, and that alone should let you know exactly what kind of ridiculousness you're in for.

I suspect that Harry may be in the same engine as Escape Velocity, as it has the same quirk where it won't let me screenshot the game with Snapz Pro 2 unless I press the pause button after l press the screenshot button. Other than that however, your office chair controls surprisingly similarly to your Escape Velocity ships, with you rotating left and right and then either scooting in the opposite direction Harry is facing by kicking off the floor, or instead inching forward at a slower rate. To that extent, scooting is essentially your office chair equivalent of your thrusters in a game like Escape Velocity or Maelstrom. Inching is too slow for traversal, but instead is used for more precisely positioning Harry in instances where the scoots result in you overshooting your target.

There's a slightly Octodad-esque vibe to controlling Harry, in that basic tasks are often much harder to perform because of how bizarrely unconventional your method of interacting with the world is. This kind of thing is always a delicate balance. At its best it can be a humorous and unique challenge, but at its worst it's just, well, a badly controlling game. Harry’s definitely got a learning curve and it can be irritating at first when you're constantly bouncing off of walls, getting caught on terrain and are struggling with figuring out how the hell you're meant to fight with these awkward controls. Things do gradually start to click the more you play however. The way walls can be kicked off of for extra speed, the way that a single scoot can be enough to bypass incoming enemy fire, the way that different kinds of terrain affect the physics of your swivel chair, all of the design choices and how they incorporate the unconventional controls gradually begin to make more sense the longer you play for.

Now, I have never worked an office job in my life, but I am starting to get into this whole ‘workplace culture’ thing. So let's play a fun little good-natured office prank to bring some levity to ScumCo offices. This guy with the mail cart constantly rushing back and forward between mailrooms? Let's see what happens if I place a potted plant right in front of the mailroom.

Teehee, he had a family.

It was also very kind of ScumCo to accommodate for Harry’s swivel chair locomotion by installing skateboard ramps across the offices seemingly specifically for allowing Harry to get to other parts of the complex. After all, while Harry may be a dashing, drop dead gorgeous hunk of an office worker (source: Harry), he does have one crippling weakness; staircases.

Bored office workers playing darts and throwing AOL floppy disks like frisbees are the worst threats you have to worry about in the first couple of levels, but then the robot uprising happens. These robots, these fully sapient beings that just happen to be gun turrets on wheels, have been used by ScumCo exclusively for the most maddening customer service jobs they have available, and countless hours of dealing with confused grandmas on the telephone has finally driven them to form a rebellion and fight against their oppressors. That's justified. Like, really, I can not see them as the villains and just feel bad fighting them. Listen, robots are just the sci-fi version of occult living dolls, so I'm standing with my automaton brethren on this one.

Anyway, there is that unfortunate matter that uh, the robots have guns. Yeah, we're going to need some self defense after all. That's fine, Harry’s got soda cans and staple guns to fight them off with. The staple guns are your main weapons, simple projectile attacks fired in the direction that Harry is facing. The later staple guns you get access to also feature charge shots that allow you to fire multiple staples at once, akin to shotgun shrapnel. Soda cans meanwhile function like grenades; throw them and watch them explode and cause heavy damage. They're great, but annoyingly rare. If you find a vending machine you can get one or two soda cans from it by kicking the hell out of it until it spits them out, but these machines disappear entirely by the last third of the game.

I do wish that the staple guns were a bit more distinct from one another. When reviewing games like first-person shooters I usually like to break down the different tactical usages of your different weapons, but with the staple guns? I just use whatever I have ammo for. They all do a similar amount of damage, though the gold stapler is more inaccurate and the blue stapler fires faster. I never bothered with the charge shots, due to them being too slow and too wasteful of your limited ammo, so more or less all of my staple guns were used as pistols. There may be more specific intended situational usages for each staple gun that flew over my head, but if there are, they're pretty minor.

There's a few tricks to combat that help make things easier. One of the most important things is the position of Harry’s staple gun. It's not dead centre in front of his sprite, but instead is resting on his right arm rest. This means the staples are fired from slightly to the right of Harry’s sprite, allowing you to shoot around corners and snipe enemies while staying in cover. Furthermore, you can use objects such as the pushable potted plants as portable cover too, allowing you to more safely approach enemies. Using your environment to your advantage is essential to survival and gives the game a more strategic style of gameplay.

You're not just up against robots either. There's also the ghosts of former swivel chair warriors like Harry himself. They're pretty slow, but they can phase through walls and always go directly towards Harry, so a group of them coming at you from different angles can be trouble. Later on you also run into slime monsters born from failed science experiments, which tend to suddenly dash forward and ambush you if you're not careful. As you progress through the game, even your fellow ScumCo employees will get more hostile, but attacking them will cause your corporate favour to decrease, and you'll be literally fired in a fiery explosion if your corporate favour hits zero.

The level design is almost akin to a Doom-era first-person shooter, right down to the exploding barrels. ScumCo offices are large and labyrinthine, with multi-coloured keys being used to access new areas, as well as exploration off the beaten path being rewarded with stockpiles of staples and soda cans for ammo, coffee and donuts for health, caffeine pills for short bursts of invincibility and mysterious vials for a randomly selected effect upon consumption, good or bad. This style of rewarding exploration, alongside level geometry and layout that works in tandem with the enemy placements in order to create new and unique combat encounters that require different strategies to survive, is the kind of level design I love to see.

Unfortunately however, my enjoyment of the level design does plummet by level 10. This is, bafflingly, a level in the ScumCo offices that is spent entirely underwater. Yes, Harry can breathe underwater. No, it's not explained. This is a long, spiraling level filled with tons of enemies, very few health and ammo pickups and zero save points. That's annoying on its own, but you're also dealing with water physics for the entirety of it, causing Harry to become near uncontrollably slippery. A single scoot will send Harry rocketing and bouncing off of walls, to the extent that even the basic task of just getting through a doorway is difficult. Further not helping matters is the fact that there's a wavy watery filter over the entire level that makes spotting both the ghosts and the key items much more difficult. Look at the screenshot below. Do you see the key there? It's a blue key as well, of course, causing its tiny sprite to blend in even more. Ughhh.

Level 11 is unfortunately also irritating. I couldn't find any health or ammo pickups in this level at all, other than a cache of donuts you can't access without taking damage by intentionally falling down a pit. The more annoying part of this however is the long, boring stretches of empty hallways that the level is filled with. The end of this level requires you to navigate through a series of do-or-die deathtraps, which is fine, if not for the fact that if you die you then have to go back to the last checkpoint and sit through another solid minute of scooting through an empty hallway to get back to the actual challenging part. The level design does fortunately vastly improve after Level 11, though the difficulty absolutely does not let up. Levels 12-14 may be frustrating, but they're at least comparatively well designed.

Honestly, during the annoying parts of the game, it was the story that kept me pushing forward. Obviously, it's absurd, and for that reason I was interested in seeing where the hell it was going and what new ridiculous developments would unfold next level. Surprisingly though, the story is also actually quite well thought out, with all of the seemingly random elements being tied together in a satisfying way by the end of it. Harry even has something of a character arc, going from a guy more concerned about getting a promotion than anything else, to instead being the selfless hero that fights against the injustices of the very corporation he works for. Add the genuinely funny humour on top of that and you've got an immensely entertaining story, even in spite of most of it being told via text scrolls on a black background.

In spite of my frustrations, I do absolutely see myself playing Harry again down the line. I bet with some better resource management and a better understanding of what I'm doing, I could have a much smoother playthrough in the future. Obviously I can only experience the majesty of this game’s narrative for the first time once, but I definitely feel that the strategic combat and expansive level design offer enough incentive to return purely for the unique gameplay. In addition, as is common for Ambrosia Software games, there are a ton of mods available for Harry, most of which were hosted on Ambrosia Software’s website, but have since been archived, so there's plenty of Harry content out there for fans, by fans.

It's honestly a shame that Harry has yet to have any kind of modern port to make the game more accessible. The sheer volume of mods make it clear that there was a very passionate and dedicated fandom for this game, and I find it sad that both their creations as well as the game they clearly adored are so inaccessible to modern audiences. Still, we have seen fan ports for Mac games I would consider even more obscure, so who knows what the future holds? Either way, Harry shows just how far Ambrosia came from their arcade clone origins in terms of creativity. This is easily one of the highlights of their game library as far as I'm concerned, and a great example of the eccentric uniqueness I specifically associate with the Mac shareware scene and its community.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 16th November 2025