Discover Top Posts Tagged with #hungry horace

Name: Horace

Debut: Hungry Horace

Before Super Mario Bros... when Mario was not yet Super... there was Horace.

Do you know about Horace? Horace is a delight. I only learned about Horace a few months ago, but Horace is FASCINATING! And now, I am going to teach you exactly why.

We begin in 1982, with the release of Hungry Horace for the ZX Spectrum. You might be able to tell that this is pretty much a Pac-Man clone, and it is! But there’s just something about Horace that makes this irresistible to me. The only facial features we can see are his eyes, but make no mistake, he is hungry! And he’s gonna eat all the plants he can scrounge up in this public park, with the disembodied heads of park rangers hot on his trail!

According to the description on the game’s case, Horace is a mischievous little scamp, who “loves to play cat and mouse with the guards in the park”. It also says both that he’ll steal their lunch AND eat the flowers, suggesting that the park guards are not allowed to eat proper food on the job, and are forced to graze the park’s vegetation for sustenance.

As for the gameplay... it’s like Pac-Man! But harder. The mazes are designed differently, with sections that just kinda feel like traps, and the guards are faster than Horace... but there is some neat new stuff, too! Each stage is a different layout, custom mazes can be created, and you don’t actually need to eat everything on one screen to progress to the next!

Next we have my personal favorite, Horace Goes Skiing! Also released in 1982, this game is incredibly mundane, and it is FASCINATING. This game is far more realistic than it has any business being. You may have noticed that this screenshot shows not a ski slope, but a busy street. That’s because before you go skiing, you have to rent a pair of skis, you silly billy! And Horace is just like us, despite being clearly not human at all, in a world where humans appear to exist.

Horace must cross this busy street kinda like Frogger to rent some skis, then return to the top to go to the slopes. You may notice that there are no “lives” indicated here... because Horace only has one life! And if he gets hit by a car, he’ll have to pay the $10 ambulance fee. If he can’t, it’s game over. I told you this game is realistic!

The skiing is about what you’d expect, with the added novelty of crashing NOT necessarily ending your game, as long as the skis remain intact. I guess this is where it gets a bit less realistic, because when Horace crashes into a tree at high speed, he never gets injured! The only fee he ever has to pay for it is another ski rental fee.

The third game in the most iconic media trilogy is 1983′s Horace and the Spiders, which... I don’t know how I feel about! I love Horace, and I love spiders, but this game is just confusing. There are now not one, not two, but THREE different gameplay screens, and I can’t say I really understand a lick of ‘em! Sorry folks!

After this game, creator William Tang tragically suffered a collapsed lung, making him unable to ever finish the planned fourth game, Horace to the Rescue.

But hope is not lost! In 1995, ten years after the fourth game was planned to release, the world was treated to Horace in the Mystic Woods, playable on Psion-3 devices, and right off the bat we can see that this is a far more ambitious project than the previous entries in the series. Though Skiing is my favorite conceptually, Mystic Woods is definitely the most enjoyable to play, being a platform game where we have full control of Horace as he travels through a LOT of levels, avoiding bizarre enemies! Mystic Woods was made by a different developer, so I’m not COMPLETELY sure about the canonicity, but it’s on the Wikipedia page, so I trust it.

Snobs may turn up their noses at a game that looks like this releasing after the likes of Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, but I say HARUMPH. They can run along. Horace is not for them. Horace is for the people who love Horace! The people who would write a lengthy post about Horace’s history, and would proceed to overanalyze his anatomy! Wouldn’t that be wacky? Could you imagine?

Horace’s design feels like it was only ever made to be viewed in two dimensions from this angle, but that’s not gonna stop me from imagining how he would work in 3D space! Here, he appears to be totally flat, with his eyes being merely holes through his... torso? and some sort of appendage dangling down on one side. But let’s do some more research!

In the cover art for Horace and the Spiders, his eyes are white!

And in the title screen, they’re a bright turquoise! From this, I’m going to assume that Horace’s eyes are NOT hollow, but instead are capable of emitting light of varying colors.

The very first game’s sprites support the notion that Horace’s eyes are not hollow, and merely appear that way in game due to graphical limitations. Whatever that appendage is, it’s surprisingly wide, and would logically be visible through his eyes if they were just holes!

We also have some EXPLICIT confirmation on that appendage, from Alred Milgrom, designer of Horace himself! As you can see, it’s actually hair!

So with all this in mind, here is my interpretation of Horace’s overall anatomy! I’ve made his eyes turquoise as they are in the Spiders title screen, because I like turquoise.

But we’ll get more of an official concrete idea of his 3D appearance when the Horace amiibo launches alongside Horace HD Collection on Nintendo Switch!

#hungry horace

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#hungry horace