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WHY HORACE IS THE WORST GAMES CHARACTER OF ALL TIME

4/11/2019

19 Comments

 
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Horace: he's the name on the tip of every retro gamer's tongue these days! But who - or what - was Horace?

Created in 1982 by one William Tang, employee of Aussie software house Beam - the creative arm of publisher Melbourne House - Hungry Horace was something of a short-lived sensation.

Tang's game spawned two sequels, before Horace slithered almost completely off the radar for almost 40 years. Buried beneath layers of sediment, formed by the decaying flesh and bones of better ZX Spectrum characters, Horace is remembered merely as something of a joke - a fundamentally terrible character.

Indeed... possibly the worst games character of all time.

And here is why. 
ALL HIS GAMES RIPPED OFF OTHER GAMES
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Back in the home computer era of the 1980s, it was common for developers to blatantly rip-off popular arcade games. Thus it was with the Horace series: Hungry Horace was essentially Pac-Man, Horace Goes Skiing was Frogger (with some skiing bits), while Horace And The Spiders wrongly mixed Pitfall with Space Panic. 

It baffles me why so few game creators got sued - if any even did - and why so many of them became household names, despite thinking that it was enough to put a funny wig on a stolen Faberge egg and try to pass it off as something new.

"No, no - it's definitely NOT a Faberge egg... It's a completely original concept, that I call Fuzzy Wuzzy The Funny Egg-O-Tronic!"

The only reason Horace ever became a sort of unofficial mascot of the ZX Spectrum - for a couple of years or so anyway - was because ZX Spectrum owners were desperate enough for games that they would shovel any old feculence into their spotty, bumfluff-accented, mouths, no matter how derivative or bad.
THEY WEREN'T EVEN VERY GOOD GAMES
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Notably, all of the Horace games have aged terribly. Even within a couple of years of their release they had become the butt of jokes, in computer magazine letters pages, for looking like they were relics from the Dark Ages. Two years after the release of Hungry Horace, Ultimate released Knight Lore, rightly making those Horace games look like a series of failed prototypical abortions.

Play them today, and they're even worse than that.

I mean... Hungry Horace didn't even understand the fundamental flow of Pac-Man, including dead-ends in its mazes, while Horace And The Spiders - the first game I ever played on my ZX Spectrum, kids! - is virtually unplayable, challenging players with an opening rope-swinging screen that flickers like it's daring you to suffer a seizure. 
THERE'S NO CONSISTENCY BETWEEN THE GAMES
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Horace's first game saw him "forever being chased around the park by guards", for the crime of "eating pathway flowers" and "ringing the alarm".

By the time of his second game, Horace had gotten his act together enough to go skiing. However, the casette inlay blurb rather overstates the quality of the game, declaring that it "Pioneers the idea of inter-active cartoons". 

Does it now? Does it really?!?


The third game had him fighting spiders. Inexplicably, within the space of three games he'd gone from being some sort of demented, anti-social, ADD-afflicted, flower-eating, menace, to going on mountaintop adventures to defeat giant spiders. 

Explain. EXPLAIN.
HE WAS A WEIRD, DISH-EYED, MR MEN FREAK
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Horace is an abberration, clearly the byproduct of a design borne from necessity. He looks like he took all of 30 seconds to come up with, boasting the hallmarks of a that'll-do ethic that was typical of the era. Neither detailed nor simple enough to be iconic, his pupil-less eyes, club feet, and malformed tentacles offer only the barest smear of concept.

Frankly, he looks like a Mr Men character who was recently run over by a bus, and has discharged himself prematurely from the hospital. 

Clearly he owes a huge debt to Q*Bert, but while one was a genuine innovation, a foul-mouthed, nozzle celeb with true star quality and his own unique song to sing... the other comes across like a sweaty, inebriated, pub entertainer.
THE FOURTH HORACE GAME NEARLY KILLED ITS CREATOR, AND NEVER GOT RELEASED
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Astonishingly, despite the vast leaps in graphical fidelity elsewhere on the ZX Spectrum scene, there were ill-conceived plans for William Tang to create a fourth Horace game.

Horace to the Rescue was announced for release in 1984, but never materialised, after Tang suffered - of all things - a collapsed lung.

However, with sales of Horace and the Spiders proving disappointing - players lured away by games that were more than just crude, IP-infringing, travesties - Beam Software saw a silver lining. The company decided against giving the project to another programmer, and invested instead in more potentially lucrative, less awful, titles, rather than another of Tang's Faberge dog's eggs.
THERE WAS A FOURTH HORACE GAME THAT DID GET RELEASED AND IT WAS ALSO TERRIBLE, AND A RIP-OFF
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A fourth game in the series did eventually get released, albeit without any involvment from William Tang, whose final game credit was Asterix And The Collapsed Lung (Magic Cauldron).

In 1995, Psion released Horace In The Mystic Woods for the Psion 3-Series of palmtops. This time, the Horace franchise had the gall to rip off not a popular arcade game, but one of his Spectrum contemporaries: specifically, Manic Miner - 12 years after it was released - for some utterly inexplicable reason. 

And that is why Horace is the worst games character of all time.
OFFICIAL BEANUS MERCH NOW AVAILABLE! 
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19 Comments
Larry Bundy Jr link
4/11/2019 11:42:38 am

I've got Horace In The Mystic Woods on the Psion 3, It's actually not too bad, not exactly brilliant, but in terms of playability, it's probably the best in the series.

There's also a fan remake on the Spectrum.

Reply
@DancesWithYaks
4/11/2019 12:03:12 pm

Yes, surely the whole humour value of Octav1us using him as a sidekick was that he was entirely rubbish and rightly consigned to the dustbin of computer game history for decades.

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LeeM
4/11/2019 01:45:37 pm

I mean, yeah, that's the point. But unfortunately horrible people miss that don't they? When money is involved I mean.

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CdrJameson
4/11/2019 12:11:50 pm

Played Horace Goes Skiing again recently, and I'd forgotten (somehow) how even the intro screen manages to simultaneously hurt your eyes, ears and spleen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b79r4eBDWs

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FrankhMorpork
4/11/2019 01:50:09 pm

But Horace is such a SEXY BEAST!

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no
4/11/2019 02:29:37 pm

Or maybe we should all just collectively forget Horace even exists.

Continuing to talk about the character only increases the value of the IP.

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Not Horace
5/11/2019 06:49:24 pm

Eff off, mate

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Keir
4/11/2019 02:58:14 pm

Horace DOES look valuable and original when you look at some of the other IP the same person specifically boasts about owning, such as Caterpilla, Ocean's Centipede clone from when they were still called The Quarrymen.

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Sedric-and-Charlie
4/11/2019 04:53:54 pm

What IS that green blob on the cover of Hungry Horace? It looks like Horace has either vomited or hocked out one hell of a ball of snot onto a window just a moment previous

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Keir
4/11/2019 05:36:49 pm

We're not allowed to say what it actually is, because we'd be accused of sexualising him.

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Charlie-and-Sedric
4/11/2019 06:05:04 pm

Sounds like Horace Visits The STI Clinic better be the next title up (it's a clone of Dr. Mario)

Jon Clay
4/11/2019 11:33:05 pm

It's a bit of Cannabis and he's got the munchies obviously from the game title...!!!

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S Hawke
4/11/2019 06:15:00 pm

"Inexplicably, within the space of three games he'd gone from being some sort of demented, anti-social, ADD-afflicted, flower-eating, menace, to going on mountaintop adventures to defeat giant spiders.

Explain. EXPLAIN."

Easy - Horace went on a quest for redemption, a bit like Rocky if Ivan Drago was a giant spider

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Robobob
4/11/2019 07:45:26 pm

I'd watch that Rocky film.

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Matty
4/11/2019 08:00:51 pm

I'm all for a new installment called Horace Gets Sexualised for what it's worth.

Also, Mystic Woods is good, not bad. And even if you hate Horace, it's the game where you get to hear him scream.

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above-average-sized kennington
4/11/2019 08:22:06 pm

All this is true, but I still like the idea of Horace carrying on doing the same derivative thing but inexplicably surviving into today, leaving a string of disconnected games ripping off whatever was popular at the time. Imagine it:

Land of Horace (2004), an MMORPG
Horace joins the Navy Seals (2007), a military shooter
Horace gets Crafty(2011) an open world survival game
Horace the Night Watchman (2014), a camera-based jumpscare simulator...

I don't want to think about what the inevitable Horace: Battle Royale would like look like.

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Matty
4/11/2019 08:24:17 pm

They say there's slash of everything, but I've just found myself wondering if anyone's written about Horace and his Amstrad CPC equivalent, Roland, fucking each other senseless.

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Dan link
4/11/2019 10:14:23 pm

Roland for life! Power to the CPC etc.

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Jon Clay
4/11/2019 11:31:11 pm

IMHO I think you'll find Seymour, that blob thing, from Codemasters was far worse, certainly in the irritability stakes.

Reply



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