WHY HORACE IS THE WORST GAMES CHARACTER OF ALL TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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