Horace Goes Skiing, Eating, Fighting Spiders, and Cloning

Posted by: Paul Smith

The ZX Spectrum is a great technological milestone. Not only was it pretty much the first popular home computer, it contained - as the rainbow device on the right hand side of the machine will verify - the first gay microprocessor.

To save memory space, most of the games written for it were rubbish. However, most of the eighteen thousand programs written for it were gaming titles, and it did come up with some classics, among which are what is known as the Horace series. Not a great deal is known about the author of the series - William Tang - except that he suffered a collapsed lung halfway through writing them.

The first Horace game was Hungry Horace, published in 1982. In truth, it could just as easily have been called Unoriginal William, as it was one of countless clones attempting to cash in on the success of Pac Man. Horace has to charge around a park, by which we mean maze, eating food, by which we mean power pills, and avoiding guards, by which we mean ghosts. Pac Man is in himself iconic, with his tennis-ball-sliced-by-a-lawnmower profile appearing on almost every consumer item known to humanity. Horace looks pretty much the same, but turned three-quarters on and with legs. The Commodore 64 version of the game featured a level editor, which allowed players to create unique games and save them to something called a cassette tape.

Tang was on something of a roll in 1982, and later that year he produced Horace Goes Skiing. This is not really a sequel in the sense that it follows on from the previous title in any narrative sense, but it does use the same theme - ie, looking quite similar to another, hugely popular game. This time it's Frogger under the spotlight as Horace negotiates his way across a busy highway in order to - improbably - hire some skis. Once hired, Horace must re cross the road and slalom down a mountain, with the Spectrum's formidable graphics engine making him look like a discarded pair of tights. Horace Goes Skiing had a rather amusing dynamic, in that Horace needed money to do anything, such as pay for ambulances after being hit by speeding cars. He was awarded $10 for every thousand points scored.

1983 saw Horace at it again, and this time Tang was in no way influenced by Pitfall, or possibly Lode Runner, as he produced Horace and the Spiders. This game is in three parts: in part one, Horace climbs up a sharp incline while jumping over spiders, which, in part two, he avoids by swinging from strands of spider web. Part three finds him making holes in the same spiders' webs from which he was previously dangling, and then jumping on the unsuspecting arachnids as they try to repair the damage.

Horace To The Rescue was slated to be the next in the series, due in late 1985, however it was at this point that Tang suffered health problems and the game was never written. It could possibly have been that there were no prominent high profile games which featured characters going to the rescue of other characters, and that therefore Tang's inspiration remained unkindled. Indeed, after his spider battles, Horace becomes somewhat enigmatic himself. In 1995, he resurfaced in the obscure platform game Horace In The Mystic Woods, which was written by Michael Ware, and rumours abound of a pirate called Horace Takes A Trip, about which nothing is known.

In common with his creation, William Tang has also vanished from the electronic pages of computer history. To his great credit, he managed to conjure up a highly playable, if not entirely original, series of games at a time when sequels, spin offs, franchises and so forth were entirely unheard of. And it's not like he was the only person cloning stuff in the first great free-for-all of video gaming. So well done Horace, and well done William Tang. Hope the lung sorted itself out.

  About the author

Paul Smith

When not writing stuff for us, Paul has his own blog here. It deals mainly with his war of attrition with the general public, a conflict in which neither side seems to want to back down.

You'd either have to be mad, or just have something better to do, to miss it.

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