In 1984, Home Computing Weekly and games chart compilers ASP would split their charts into two categories: ‘arcade’ and ‘non-arcade’. Not all of the games in the arcade chart were conversions of games playable on arcade machines. Instead it had come to mean simpler, more action based games. The chart split reflected that arcade-style games were not the only thing that computer games were doing, but still one of the most important. That style had grown through various approaches to games from the arcades.

Sometimes computer game developers took someone else’s work wholesale, like Donkey King’s attempts to literally re-create Donkey Kong. Sometimes, as with Ultimate’s successful Jetpac, they came up with new game concepts which drew on what came before but couldn’t be traced back to a single source. Or they could go for something between those two, giving a new spin to a specific arcade game without pretending to be it. William Tang took that route with the character Horace, and followed it to rapid success before a sudden stop.

William Tang was the first employee of Beam Software, the Melbourne House subsidiary. As mentioned in my post on The Hobbit, Fred Milgrom and Naomi Besen set up Melbourne House, originally as a book publishing company. It was planned to help coordinate book rights across the UK and their home country Australia. In 1980, Milgrom compiled a book called 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80 1K, which sold some 6,000 copies and convinced them that microcomputers were a field worth going into. By the end of the year they set up Beam and hired Tang, who was a computing student. They didn’t have an office yet, so Tang originally started work in Milgrom’s living room. 

Tang’s earlier work at Beam included TRS-80 shooter Strike Force. He may also have been involved in the Pac-Man clone Gobble Man for the same computer, and in writing the book Machine Language Programming Made Simple for Your Sinclair ZX80 & ZX81, which has no author credits. Certainly he is credited with editing the 1982 revision, Spectrum Machine Language for the Absolute Beginner. This took readers through some programming, using as an example “The Freeway Frog Program”, obviously inspired by Konami and Sega ’s arcade game Frogger.

Melbourne House’s established relationship with Sinclair helped them to get in early on publishing that book for the Spectrum. They also came early to publishing a game for it, joining up with fellow early publishers Psion to release William Tang’s Hungry Horace in 1982. By then, Pac-Man clones were a well-established genre, with Melbourne House’s effort far from alone. Hungry Horace likewise could not exist without Pac-Man, but is not just a clone. You move around a maze (“park”) collecting dots (“plants”) and evading enemies (“park keepers”), but when you reach the edge of a screen it doesn’t loop round. Instead, you move onto another screen with a different layout, turning it into a game with a simple exploration element.

Hungry Horace (Psion/Melbourne House, ZX Spectrum, 1982)

Hungry Horace himself was not designed to resemble Pac-Man, either. Where Pac-Man is both all mouth and a circle, Horace is all eyes and legs, with no coherent shape beyond. Horace proved distinctive and multi-purpose enough to bring back outside of the context of his hunger. So later the same year, William Tang and Beam used him again for Horace Goes Skiing. That was in part a basic skiing game of the type seen before in, for example, Activision’s Skiing for the Atari 2600 in 1980. Onto that, Tang bolted a slightly evolved version of the Frogger game he had written about how to code. Horace must cross a road to hire his skis, before heading back with skis in hand. If he gets hit on the way, he has to pay a fee for the ambulance – something marking the game’s origins outside of the UK.

  • Horace Goes Skiing (Psion/Melbourne House, ZX Spectrum, 1982)
  • Horace Goes Skiing (Psion/Melbourne House, ZX Spectrum, 1982)

On a roll, Tang got to work on a third Horace game at a time when many companies were only just getting started with their first games for the Spectrum. Horace and the Spiders, released in early summer 1983, takes a similar multi-part approach to the second game, but ups things to three sections. The first is what we would now call an endless runner, except that it is very far from endless. You jump over spiders and hills and then it’s done. The second involves swinging across a chasm on spider thread vines, and is even more straightforward but more visually impressive. Then it’s onto the most substantial of the three, which is a take on Space Panic.

Space Panic (Universal, Arcade, 1980)

Space Panic was a 1980 arcade game created by Universal, which involved using ladders to climb between platforms. In this case that’s Universal the Japanese pachinko and games company, rather than Universal the American media giant that took an interest in Nintendo’s own 1980 arcade game with ladders, and its resemblance to King Kong. In Space Panic you have to climb around the screen and dig holes to trap aliens, and then destroy them before they fix the holes. In the third stage of Horace and the Spiders, you have to climb around the screen and dig holes to trap spiders, and then destroy them before they fix the holes. Doug Smith’s Lode Runner, a much more developed take on the same basic idea, also released in Summer 1983 alongside Horace and the Spiders.

Horace’s spider level being made of spiderwebs, ladders and all, gives it a different feel to its inspiration. It’s also designed in such a way as to limit you to specific spaces for digging. There is a tactical element to safely getting in place, before the reflex and precision challenge of finishing off a spider in time. This is made more challenging by an aspect of Horace which carries across all three games, namely that he doesn’t stop moving. In most games a character moves in the direction you press, and then stops when you stop. Not so Horace, who carries on going in the last direction you pressed. This makes it tricky not to overshoot the vulnerable spider and leave yourself with insufficient time. It’s a frustration which on balance probably adds slightly to what is otherwise a very simple game.

The climb of Horace and the Spiders to the top of the charts is one of our earliest demonstrations of the commercial value of sequels and building up name recognition. Melbourne House and Psion also went in for some particularly distinctive branding for Horace. Every other game to reach #1 in 1983 came in a box with hand-drawn or painted artwork. Horace and the Spiders doesn’t quite use an in-game screenshot, but its smiling spider is clearly computer-drawn. And then there’s Horace, there as almost exactly his in-game sprite, just as for the covers of his previous games. Horace is not a mere representation in pixels of a more complicated character. Horace just is.

Horace joint-publisher Psion were a London-based company that worked on several bits of pack-in software for early versions of the Spectrum. Their deals to be promoted by Sinclair itself helped them to sell a million software tapes by the time they released Horace and the Spiders. So it made sense that Horace Goes Skiing ended up as part of a later six-pack of software included with new Spectrums, alongside versions of Chess and Scrabble and educational software. That gained Horace an even bigger audience, but William Tang and Melbourne House didn’t release any more Horace games to capitalise. Tang did create H.U.R.G., the “High level User friendly Real time Games designer” released in 1984, an early game creation tool. Then, according to many articles on Horace, Tang suffered a collapsed lung while working on a new Horace game, Horace to the Rescue, and nothing further is known about what happened to him afterwards.

The collapsed lung story traces back to an 1987 issue of Crash magazine, from an interview with later Beam developer Steve Taylor. Notably, it doesn’t even mention Tang by name. It mentions that Taylor’s first project at Beam was Horace to the Rescue, and that it “was never completed because the project leader suffered a collapsed lung”. It’s a sensible enough leap to assume said leader was the Horace creator Tang. On the other hand, the same article manages elsewhere to mis-name the co-owner of Melbourne House as Judy, rather than Naomi, so it’s not the strongest of sources to hang the whole story from.

Taylor then worked on Rock ‘n’ Wrestle, completed in 1985, so that places the collapsed lung as that year at the latest. William Tang has several credits after that, including being responsible for the Spectrum versions of Ardok the Barbarian/Asterix and the Magic Cauldron and Mugsy’s Revenge in 1986. He also appears in another 1987 story in Crash, a news item about Melbourne House scrapping progress on Inspector Gadget and the Circus Of Fear. “It seems problems in the Spectrum program by David Moore and William Tang blew up in the software house’s face. A new Inspector Gadget will be programmed, starting from scratch.”

If the health problems were Tang’s and were responsible for putting a halt to Horace, it seems to have only temporarily stopped him working. That was a time when the world of games was changing rapidly, though, as the fact that Horace to the Rescue wasn’t another one-person operation attests. Melbourne House had a massive hit elsewhere in 1982 with The Hobbit, and another huge hit of a very different kind in 1985. By the time Tang could work on a new Horace game, perhaps, Melbourne House had decided that those simple arcade games were now too far from the current zeitgeist to return.

Melbourne House, and most likely William Tang, completed a version of Inspector Gadget and the Circus Of Fear. It got as far as being reviewed in Sinclair User, before new owners bought out Melbourne House and scrapped it once more. Rather than health issues, those forces of market capitalism seem a more likely cause for Tang’s eventual departure from games. The Sinclair User review of the Inspector Gadget game was not a positive one, and the game does not seem to have sold particularly well when eventually released in Spain. When playing it, the player character of Inspector Gadget looms large, but among the smaller enemies he has to avoid, there is another familiar figure. One which is all eyes and legs. Perhaps it was William Tang’s final farewell to Horace.

Inspector Gadget and the Circus of Fear (Melbourne House, ZX Spectrum, 1987)

UK individual formats games chart for fortnight ending 15 September 1983, Personal Computer News

Sources: