Saturday 11 June 2016

Remembering… Horace

Remembering… Horace

We recall a strange blue character this week

There are numerous famous characters in gaming that are recognisable no matter where you travel in the world – with the exception of some of the more farflung destinations, of course.

Lara Croft, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Q-Bert and countless others have left their mark on society. For those of us of a certain age though, there’s also Horace. That strangelooking blue creature, with haunting large eyes, lack of facial features and hand-less arms that seemingly grow from the top of his/her/it’s head.


Although Horace only starred in a trio of games he soon became the icon for the Spectrum, mostly due to the fact that Sinclair Research was one of the publishers. Despite his perpetually gloomy visage, Horace managed to dip his pointed and oddly shaped toes in a number of cloned games.

Hungry Horace, the first of the series, was simply a Pac-Man clone. Horace Goes Skiing was a mixture of Frogger and Slalom. The third title, Horace and the Spiders, featured stages in the same vein as Pitfall and Space Panic.

Its History


Horace was developed by William Tang, a chap who also programmed Asterix and the Magic Cauldron, H.U.R.G., Way of the Exploding Fist and Mugsy’s Revenge.

The first Horace appeared in the 1982 and was released by Sinclair Research Ltd. At the time, it was fairly well received, although it didn’t quite have the quality of some of the Spectrum games that were released months later. It did offer something a little different to the average Pac-Man look-alike, with the C64 version even having a level editor for gamers to share.

The relative success of Hungry Horace, in that it didn’t cost much to create and it yielded a healthy return, led to the most popular of the titles, Horace Goes Skiing. Here Horace took a, for the time, quantum leap from being a mere Pac-Man clone to something else entirely.

Skiing was a fun game to play. The first section, where for some unknown reason the place to hire the skis lies on the other side of an extremely busy dual carriage way, was certainly challenging. It was less a game of Frogger timing and one where you hoped and prayed for a slight gap in the traffic before launching yourself at full pelt across the bitumen.

Any collision resulted in you losing £10 and being picked up in an ambulance. And should you run out of money, then you couldn’t hire the skis to the slalom section, and it was game over. Ironically, you were still charged £10 if you were hit by the ambulance.

Finally, we had Horace and the Spiders, a game of much running, swinging from spider webs and jumping on spiders while they fixed their webs in order to kill them. Why? Absolutely no idea.

William Tang was set to work on another Horace game, but the internet tells us that he suffered a collapsed lung and therefore retired from gaming. Not much else is known about Mr Tang these days, but wherever he is, we hope he’s in good health.

The Good


Fun games, quite challenging and an endearingly odd main character.

The Bad


Nearly £6 for each game, which was a fortune to a ten-year-old! They weren’t exactly ground-breaking titles.

Conclusion


Horace, whatever the heck you are, thanks for some odd, but rather pleasant memories.

Did You Know?


• There was a poke that removed all the traffic off the road in Horace Goes Skiing.
• Horace in the Mystic Woods was developed in 1995 for the Psion 3, but not by William Tang. 
• Horace made an appearance in the PS2 game Dog’s Life.
• William Tang also wrote Spectrum Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner – a ZX Spectrum user’s bible.