Until late 1984 compilations were pretty much the domain of type-ins and junk BASIC games. Which means earlier games often missed out. Like Psion’s Horace series. Sure, Hungry Horace (apparently) featured on Paxman Promotions’ 6 Great Games, but that title is MIA so who knows if it even got a release. Horace and the Spiders made it onto War On Want’s WOW Games charity comp and Horace Goes Skiing was on rival charity pack Soft Aid from Quicksilva. But we were never treated to a release that brought together all of Horace’s 16k adventures into a single pack.
That is until the excellent Pixel Jockey released The Horace Collection via a Kickstarter campaign in June of 2025, more than 40 years since the last game in the trilogy hit or Spectrums.
The fully licenced games are housed in a lovely 2 piece case and are reproduced on newly designed custom cassettes. There also gave options to add a Horace Collection mug and/or three wonderful enamel pin badges. The packages are still available from the Pixel Jockey website, but at £32 I didn’t feel I could justify my purchase just yet (so many compilations to buy and only so much disposable cash!).
When looking through a pile of stuff I was planning to sell on a car boot sale I noticed two large video cassette style empty boxes and rather than bin them, I was wracking my brain for a use for them. Then it hit me, why not make my own compilation! Coincidentally, I had also just seen a set of the 3 games, plus keyrings for each, for sale for just £9.50 (including postage) on the Sinclair For Sale Facebook group, so my plan was set.
First I needed an inlay for my packaging. So I threw the 3 original covers at Microsoft’s AI chatbot Co-pilot and asked it to come up with a design. Unfortunately, despite an initial draft looking ok, the more refinement I tried to make the worse Co-pilot messed up the design. So I scrapped that idea and went to my standard fallback option, PowerPoint and did it myself. Now I know that PP is very limited for graphic design, but I have never got my head around Photoshop and the likes and PowerPoint has served me well enough for many years.
The case is oversized, so I had to make sure I got my measurements right. The whole inlay wouldn’t fit on an A4 sheet of paper so I could either print on A3, or across 2 sheets of A4. So initially I went with A4 as that meant I could print part of the cover and test the size before doing the full design. The test proved that my measurements were sound, so I printed out the full inlay ready to add the games.
However, whilst doing a bit of research online I found that there was a 4th game, Horace in the Mystical Woods. Released in 1995, the game was was exclusive to the Psion 3 Palmtop computers, but was 100% official so is therefore the true final entry in Horace’s adventures. As luck would have it, the excellent Bob Smith had converted the game to Spectrum in 2010. Even luckier was that Anthony Scarfe had produced a limited physical release of the game on his Northern Games label. So after a couple of messages with Anthony on Facebook, a copy of the game was in the post to me.
That meant a slight redesign of the packaging to add the fourth game, but rather than produce a brand new cover I simply added a ‘sticker’ element and claimed that the fourth game was an added bonus.
Now I was certainly not going to remaster a tape with the four games on and it just happened that the four games in their original cases would fit nicely into the oversized box. This means that this is technically more of a collection, or box-set rather than a compilation, but this is my site and I make the rules 😉
I haven’t yet managed to get a matching keyring for Mystic Woods, but that will come in time. The finished product looks great with the rest of my compilations collection and I think I have the bug to make more. I have one more oversized VHS case and have an idea for what to do with that, but thats for another day.