Way back in the early 1980’s the 8-bit home computers such as the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 ruled the roost. The other thing that was common back then, as mentioned on our advent calendars Pacman entry, was the arcade game clone. Hungry Horace was a good example of, funnily enough, a Pacman clone!

Horace was a, er, blue thing with legs and two huge eyes, who ran about a maze eating dots (since he had no obvious mouth, I’m not sure how he did this) whilst avoiding guards (giant purple heads). The game first appeared on the Spectrum, with a C64 version following soon after.


Hungry Horace sold very well though, and soon a sequel arrived in the form of Horace Goes Skiing. Whilst this was obviously a skiing game (the fairly standard vertically scrolling slalom type of skiing game), it was also a clone of another well known arcade game, Frogger. The story (if you can call it that) was that Horace had to cross the road to get to the ski shop to hire some skis, then cross the road again to go skiing. The funniest thing was when Horace got run over, and an ambulance would come on and carry him off.

Horace made one more starring appearance, this time in a odd platform style game called Horace and the Spiders. There were three levels to the game, the first of which was climbing a hill whilst jumping over spiders (so a bit of Donkey Kong there then). Next you had to swing across gaps on spider webs (shades of Pitfall perhaps?) and finally a game where you had to coax spiders into repairing holes in a web so that you could jump on them to kill them.

A fourth Horace game, Horace to the Rescue, was planned but never emerged, although Horace did have a cameo in the Spectrum version of the game Inspector Gadget and the Circus of Fear, where he was one of the enemies that the player had to avoid.

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