Popular games for collection Horace

Horace to the Rescue is a cancelled game for the ZX Spectrum.

“Hungry Horace” offered gameplay based of the popular arcade game “Pac-Man”, it was celebrated as the first arcade game for the Spectrum. It was one of the few Spectrum games that were also available in ROM format. It formed part of the “Horace” series, which included “Horace Goes Skiing” and “Horace and the Spiders” and the unpublished “Horace to the Rescue”. Horace is apurple blob with arms and legs, who wanders around a maze, eating everything and avoiding the park guards, who are out to capture him. He is able to momentarily scare the guards, making them vulnerable, by ringing a bell in the maze. Once Horace is able to escape capture and leave the maze, he moves to the next, more challenging level. “Hungry Horace” was programmed by William Tang, but Alfred Milgrom was responsible for the design of the inimitable Horace an artful creation of character using minimum grid available . Through Melbourne House’s relationship with Sinclair, the “Horace” games would come boxed with the ZX Spectrum, making them often the first games that many people played on their home computers.

In 1982 Tang also produced Horace Goes Skiing. In it, Horace must cross a dangerous road teeming with traffic to rent out a pair of skis, à la Frogger, get back over the road and successfully navigate a ski course. This title is not a true sequel, as it does not follow on from an original story and is only similar in that it features the same character. Like Hungry Horace, this title was available on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Dragon 32. As before, Sinclair distributed the Spectrum version, Melbourne House the Commodore 64 and Dragon 32 versions.

In 1983, Tang produced the third title in the series, Horace and the Spiders. This was primarily a platform game with the Horace sprite retained from the first two games. The first level sees Horace climbing a hill while jumping over spiders. The second level involves crossing a bridge by swinging on spider threads. The third level is the final confrontation with the spiders – he must create holes in the web, luring the spiders into the holes to fix them and consequently jumping on them. Unlike the earlier two titles, this game was only released for the ZX Spectrum. The first stage of this game shared similarities with both Pitfall and the Colecovision game Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, whilst the third platform stage is essentially a Space Panic clone.