Hareraiser (The Worst Game Ever) - Stuart Ashen - Norwich Gaming Festival 2017

and today's talk will be about hair raiser which is quite possibly the worst video game ever which I will now attempt to explain using words and pictures and ethereal concepts and other stuff I've got no idea how long this talk takes by the way I've never done it before so if we don't get to the end sorry if it ends in five minutes we'll have a singsong it'll be fine as they say in the industry it'll be fine for what it is right so let us begin with an almighty question when is a video game not a video game how about when a puzzle uses the medium of video games to impart information and what if the puzzle itself possibly doesn't exist and the information is meaningless right so getting a bit existential and but don't worry this isn't one of those talks this is genuinely about possibly the worst game ever released now I've written a couple of books about some of the worst video games ever commercially sold and for my money that game as you may have guessed is hair razor released for many and I do mean many of the 8-bit computer systems popular in the UK at the time the time being the mid 80s now to understand a hair razor we have to go back to oh I forgot that slide it's pretty though let's look at it for a second mmm gold right now to understand hair razor we have to go back to 1976 and the birth of the publishing phenomenon masquerade this book that person's got it yes I think you say as anybody got it and I wasn't expecting one bit so there we are yeah I wasn't alive either that's a lie I'd just been porn but I'd literally just been born so I wasn't going to be finding the golden hair as you will discover but yeah basically an artist called kit Williams the areas looking arty had been approached by a publisher to produce a book of his paintings but he wasn't keen on the idea because people just tend to flick through out books without paying attention to them I mean you do don't you homey that's nice that's nice back on the table whereas if you're in an art gallery so oh yes mmm symbolism mmm bold use of color and shade probably she tried to look clever in front of other people but he was quite right that people do just flick through them not pay attention so his clever idea was to make a visual puzzle book that would make people look closely as paintings in order to solve the puzzle which is a very very solid idea so the result was indeed this mighty book masquerade that's the cover an illustrated story book that cryptically hid the location of a buried clay casket and inside that casket was the golden hair a beautiful five inch long pendant made of 18 karat gold and set with rubies and semi-precious stones made by Williams himself because he was quite a multi-talented man now the combination of sumptuous art and the possibility of winning an expensive item of jewelry caught the public's imagination and masquerade sold 200,000 copies in the first week alone that's a lot in 1976 it will under sell well over a million worldwide possibly close to two million even sold a load in Japan where they couldn't possibly understand it because their system of language works entirely differently so I mean that's pretty impressive in itself and it highly launched the concept of the armchair treasure hunt which is where you know you get a book or something and you can solve the puzzle in your house and then still win a tangible reward so the book was kind of the fidget spinner of its day it was very popular everybody had it sold if you want a copy they're still on Amazon for like three pence or something because it's sold so many the book itself it consists of words and pictures as you probably guess and the way it's set up is you've got some text on one side a picture on the other and around the pictures are more words and various letters of meaning and there are no actual instructions as to what to do but we'll get onto that in a moment so literally you go through looking at these extremely beautiful paintings and reading the text and going hmm what's going on here like so the text of the book tells the story of Jack hare who is tasked to carry the golden hair pendant as we saw earlier to the Sun as a token of the moon's affection he of course loses it cuz he's a twit and it was up to the reader to solve the book's puzzle and find where he's lost it and dig it up for themselves and then keep it by keep it I mean immediately sell it for a large sum of money as ever most people spent hours now is poring over the book and then wrote in a totally incorrect theory that was a politely refuted by mr. Williams so the instructions from the back mm-hmm firstly it describes the golden hair as we did earlier then says the precise location of this buried treasure may be discovered within the pages of masquerade which are themselves overflowing with riddles and puzzles the reader will delight in unmasking only one other person whose identity is known to the publisher mysterious was witness to the secret burial and as the author tantalizingly reveals the treasure is as likely to be found by a bright child of ten with an understanding of language simple method simple mathematics and astronomy as it is to be found by an Oxford dawn lies seriously there's no way a ten-year-old shaffer defenders will get onto later now who would like to know who the secret person is it was actually a celebrity and big celebrity mid 70s and kind of into the early 80s does anybody know who was present at the burial you have one guess between you go on Jimmy Savile Gang goodness know although at the time that's entirely feasible event however they wanted somebody who was known for his intelligence not Jimmy Savile and somebody who also I suppose you know could be trusted so they can say later look we had a trustworthy person and as we turns out that's very much not Jimmy Savile it was wait for it Bamber Gascoigne doot-doot doot-doot yes he used to present University Challenge which is why it says University Challenge it no it doesn't it says University College I used the wrong picture anyway that is bamberg s go invest leaves a historian and a well TV presenter really Susan known celebrity but so a very clever man so the sort of perfect person to get in on this kind of thing where in fact I can show you a picture of him about to set off in Kitts car and bury the casket keep their looking very excited blessing right now here's the thing about masquerade as I touched on earlier the puzzle was not easy to solve I mean at all as you can tell from the instructions earlier no pointers were given that so people only had the text and the paintings to go on bam bagasse going had the basis of the puzzle explained to him and even he couldn't work it out despite already knowing the location you know the answer because it just been there it in if bamberg ass going doesn't know hmm you know and he was seriously worried that it was too difficult for anyone to solve and that when coming from the host of university challenge you know it's going to be pretty hard the difficulty was compounded by the huge number of false trails and red herrings that williams weaved into the book seriously there's a lot of things you can spend all day solving get to the end and literally the answer is redfish or something along those lines so for two and a half years after publication Kip Williams himself received tens of thousands of letters suggesting solutions and none of them were right and I don't just mean they didn't get the answer right I mean their methodology wasn't even close to how you actually solve it nobody was even on the right track now I'm going to give a quick explanation of how the core of the puzzle works right I'll be using a painting 14 here as an example because it's a twin page one and fits the sixteen by nine ratio better as well now the thing to remember is it was an artist and not a writer or a mathematician as a result the puzzle is almost entirely visual now the text of the book you know the actual story page is about Jack hare are totally irrelevant you may as well just rip them out of the book don't do that because the pictures are on the other side and you'll end up with no pages in the book but it's totally irrelevant it's all visual so um you will notice on this mighty picture of a swimming girl here you've got the writing on the outside I am hydrogen two over one to eight of oxygen a my crystal aquamarine that in itself as you probably guessed means absolutely nothing and four of the letters are red those are an anagram of frog and that means absolutely nothing every page has this little red herring on however there is something more subtle some of the letters have little barbs on them and for an example look at the s in crystal tiny little barbed on it if you look at those there are five of them which spell out the word stone which is another complete red herring that appears on every page and has nothing to do with anything whatsoever now wait for it the actual solution involves drawing lines from the character's eyes through their longest visible finger or toe or female whatever extremity they have these then point to certain letters around the outside yeah I know right there was a hint that you had to do this he didn't just expect you to come with this off the top of his head but it was pretty darn cryptic when read in the right orders the letters spell out the light of equinox which obviously means light of equinoxes had to miss out the eye for practical reasons to do the painting I would imagine now most people had attempted to decode the text or use maths but the key was the observation deduction shown there so the complete answer to the puzzle spells out Katherine's long finger overshadows earth buried yellow amulet midday points the hour in light of equinox look you and there's a little bit more to it because if you take the first letter of each word there it spells give live immediately but that can be quite easily interpreted as close by amp'd Hill just added a few letters in it and that confirms the location because the hare was buried in antal Park in Bedfordshire and to find the spot you had to dig where the shadow of the longest part of a monument called Sand Catherine's cross hence Catherine's long finger falls at noon on the day of an equinox of which there are two a year now if you actually had that yeah I think most people would have worked out but of course nobody came particularly close or did they blimey that keep Williams oh here he is looking devious with a rad egg on no that's um Catherine's cross there it is it is real I'm glad I added that in the last minute and forgot beautiful anyway here's Kip Williams looking devious with the rabbit now when I saw that picture I thought I've got to do a talk around this just to use that picture is fantastic so yeah he couldn't get hair that's the disappointing thing years would be longer anyway as you can imagine most people never got close to working out and instead got obsessed with their own weird theories somebody and this person wrote to both Williams and Bamber Gascoigne who didn't know the answer himself and he was convinced that the whole thing was a front and that the puzzle was actually designed by the famous crime novelist Agatha Christie who had died in January of that year and this was like some kind of final mystery last gasp of excitement from her there is nothing in the book which even vaguely points you to water Agatha Christie in any way shape or form bless him I don't know how he worked that out but yeah I'd like to see his tax returns right out finally on the 19th of February 1982 that's six years later kids Williams received the very first letter correctly identifying the location of the hair but there's always a downside in there the writer Ken Thomas had not understood the puzzle and had got there mostly by luck all right the really heartbreaking thing is that a pair of physics teachers and actually solve the puzzles fully and dug in almost the right place written to him first that must be that actually dug straighten and they'd somehow missed the casket so as you can imagine the physics teachers were completely gutted but while they may not have ended up with the golden hair they were the only people to actually solve the puzzle properly although sadly that accolade is not made of gold and set with gems and he can't sell it for several thousand pounds anyway after the hair was found Ken Thomas did the publicity rounds here he is with KITT and the books publisher now you may notice something about Ken there he's the one in the Hat turning his face away from the camera with a false moustache and a sort of weird pipe so his hand fronting his face I'm really happy to be here yeah Ken Thomas was not keen on publicity to say the least he genuinely went there under a heavy disguise and it took like a week from him actually submitting the answer and speaking to Williams on the phone to actually doing anything about it he was very very publicity sigh in fact if you look closely you can actually see the false moustache I mean it looks like he cut it off a bit of carpet or something astonishing so the answer to the puzzle was published and as with every game of this type people wrote to Williams claiming that his solution was wrong and stupid and that their patently incorrect idea was the real truth I mean I know you entirely came up with this but you're wrong I haven't wasted my time honest theory may bamberg ask oh it actually went on to write an entire book about the whole affair called the quest for the golden hair and in it he says that people are good at forming patterns and a good at self-deception which if you've ever run any sort of competition you will know that's pretty accurate so Ken Thomas now had possession of the mighty golden hair and decided to capitalize on it by creating another puzzle offering it all 30,000 pounds in cash as a prize and bear in mind at the time it wasn't thought to be worth that much so he was kind of overstating its value a bit or so people thought but this time it would be in the form of a computer game rather than a book now we get relevant he used the hair as collateral and set up hair soft yep his entire business model based around owning a bit of jewelry who released hair raiser Prelude in 1984 for all the major home computers of the time the aircon electron the Amstrad CPC the BBC micro the combi 64 the come to vic-20 the drank 32 the MSX er I got most Amazigh Beck Spectrum seriously blanket release on everything that existed at the time it was even advertised for the Tandy trs-80 and the Atari 8-bit systems which were barely even released at the time but I couldn't find any evidence that was actually you know pretty physically produced for it let's have a quick look at the tape there looks the same to the picture doesn't it but an interesting thing is it comes with its own code and a thing to go off and send off if you've got the answer look I have to register my copy you actually had to send the whole tape in to prove that you had bought it he certainly didn't want people winning it who were you know borrowing someone else's copy or something like that so hey razor Prelude was really heavily advertised in all the major computer magazines at the time let's have a look at the advert their hair raiser challenges you golden 30000 prize a presume them in 30 thousand pounds not like 30,000 ants or something it's not an arcade game it's not a boring adventure Trek it's a genuine puzzle that could be solved by you hair raiser the unique computer treasure hunt a computer puzzle of graphics and text in two parts each part contains vital clues to places or locations which will enable you to discover the whereabouts of this golden treasure it has not been buried you just have to pinpoint its location to claim this amazing prize this posed proposal puzzle little doubt here guys if you're running a company that involves entirely making a puzzles spell the word puzzle correctly only way it's been specifically designed to break away from individual arcade and adventure type games hmm and provide family involvement if you don't have a baby with you the game doesn't work a competition for all the family uses the word family more than that last trailer for the faster the furious a competition for all the family once you've collected all the clues you can work on it anywhere individually or in groups you could solve this part one prelude but I wanna part two finale ready for Christmas now that's weird there's various talk of a part two but we'll get onto that later anyway two interesting things to pick up from this is number one the price which is absolutely ridiculous for the time eight pounds 95 at a time when even the most advanced games were seven pounds 95 so it's like the cultural equivalent like 50 55 pounds now but of course no other game offered the chance to win the golden hair which was not only you know a very expensive thing but quite a famous thing in itself because of masquerade although I'm sure people that have just taken the 30,000 thousand cash and also notice it says once you've collected all the clues you can work on it anywhere so this isn't really a game as such it's more a clue delivery system and in fact the clues could have been put in another format like for instance a book or something yeah well I suspect obviously the only reason it was a computer game was because at the time you could sell those for much more money than a book and the cost of tape duplication was a lot lower than the cost of printing so what did you get for your eight pounds 95 right well we need to find that out we must now play very briefly and you'll see why hair razor prelude warning this involves fiddling around with an emulator that doesn't like going fullscreen so fires May into you no no yes away with you there we are all right now there are only four controls up-down left-right or possibly north-south east-west you can't tell because of a complete lack of any kind of feedback right over the last game I was playing a really hope I was playing hey razor Oh [Music] totally didn't like going fullscreen on a little but hey we got there now there's a feature on a laptop called mute it is a good feature you are my sunshine know you ain't mate right hair self-limited like wow this is hard to read a hair of gold and jewels that hid it lay beneath the ground a seeker solved the little clues and the beautiful treasure was found the hair again and you owner seeks one who will make history so good luck with your quest for the hair is at rest and have altered the rhyme scheme after a through two to a waste when you find the key though no hounds will you need who'd have thought you'd need a dog as always no even a steed I did think I need a horse so I got sent to find this hidden prize no Spade or pic or computer trick just a pencil paper and eyes and probably a hand to write them down with as well and probably some sort of arm to connect the hands to the body and you know you need like a nervous it's but anyway suffice to say I I'm at the game start ah here we are right so there are no instructions whatsoever I mean literally I mean hey razor that sorry masquerade the book had very very little this has nothing so you start it up and you end in slightly random screen with a load of purple trees a yellow tree a cloud the Sun and the saying the grass is like a carpet okay shall we go up down left or right down we heard down we come go down no because of course most of the controls don't work in most of the screens because hey why would they let's go up instead now that doesn't work let's go right now I think we're going left no none of them are working right let's try the spectrum curse keys there we are there's the hair it turns into a sock puppet and disappears the Sun shines out kind of shines in all directions to my knowledge but and two clouds of sun for purple trees a yellow tree let's let's let's go somewhere else the count has begun good go somewhere else help is here now that's what we call a lie because there's nothing here whatsoever search from coast to coast so you're getting the idea yet the answer is probably no because there's nothing really here oh go over here is back and this spectrum version is so far technically advanced as compared to the others you wouldn't believe I'll show you later shall you find it I'll give you a hint begins with in two letters second letters in oh oh um yeah this is all there is that is it's just a load of screens with some stuff on maybe does it matter where the trees are does it matter how many trees there are doesn't matter where the clouds are doesn't matter if the hair is there or not what do the words mean well and nobody really knows and something I should mention actually is that all the screens are the same on each different version of the game so it's not like you've got a different one there's a different answer that was at least consistent across them as you would expect from a overarching puzzle but or crashed it that's good let's go try it again to the source code nobody must know the secrets of the hair raiser mainly because it fits in about 8k and you've just paid nine pounds for it right let's get this thing back up there we go Oh No let's go back to this one I like that one right so nobody really knows anything about this whatsoever and in fact nobody ever did except Ken Thomas himself because the puzzle was never solved never solve nobody ever even had a clue how to do it there are no details or images to be studied and chewed over like in masquerade the book with hey razor Prelude all you got for your eight pounds 95 is confused but now we come on to the real joy remember right the mention of hair razor finale and Part two and this kind of stuff well that incredibly is the other half of the puzzle that you had to buy separately entered the Byrne hair soft released hair raiser finale in late 1984 it cost another 8 pound 95 and was apparently necessary if you want to actually find the location of the golden hair so that's effectively an eye-watering 17 pounds 90 in total which is what like hundred hundred and ten pounds and modern gaming terms just to enter the contest by comparison the masquerade book full of beautiful art is three pounds fifty those sold a few years prior and all you get here is a couple of tapes so as you'd expect finale is extremely rare even I can get hold of a copy because Prelude did not sell well despite all the advertising and a few people who did pay for it were not keen on giving hair soft more of their money in fact it was only released in any serious capacity of the spectrum and most computers didn't even get the second part now finale itself as I imagine you've already guessed is just another small set of crappy screens and text the only major differences other the title music has changed to Scarborough Fair yes it's still there BP and for some reason a lot of the streams are now full of spiders I don't know what relevance that has I like to think they sat in a warehouse and the spiders just crawled their way into the game's code but yeah and they've really badly drawn spiders as well I thought they were ants until yeah one of them came down and a thread so now there is obviously no technical reason whatsoever for hey arrays are being released in two halves the game code as I said is tiny it's like less than 8 K which means that both releases could fit simultaneously into the memory of even the 16 K or ik one which was like the lowest memory computer at the time hair soft themselves when asked why the flippin heck are you telling us twice one thing they're responsible to make it fun and enable competitors of all ages to participate non secretary of all-time there and in perhaps the greatest puzzle is actually how paying twice as much is more fun or how making something insanely expensive mean opens it up to a wider age demographic I think they quite wanted money anyway the magazines of the time were generally unimpressed with hair raiser Prelude viewing it as an expensive cash grab because you know they had their head screwed on if you were just supposed to note down what's on the screen then you know why does it even have to be a video game at all when finale was released they ignored it entirely there's been no magazine would even touch it editorial warriors and there was considerable backlash from people who purchased Prelude the adventure call of a popular computing weekly was full of letters from angry people saying I bought this I don't know what it is there isn't it is it a puzzle have I gone mad help me everybody and of course other people just wrote back saying we bought it as well and we feel exactly the same there was only one letter with anything positive to say about it and it's this one dear Tony after reading about hair razor in pcw I wonder who these nerds are who think this isn't any good I am one of a group of six who have had immense fun from seeking clues on this treasure hunt and furthermore it's not meant to be like the book masquerade if one seeks to win the goal to the hair the computer gives the clues the rest is down to you that is if you're intelligent enough yours mrs. jy Widdowson hands up if you believe that was actually written by a J Y Widdowson hands up if you think that was a sock puppet from hair soft yeah we have no definite proof but again PC W Magazine weren't that convinced themselves and actually refused to print anything on the subject after that now hair softy give one extra clue or they claimed to give one extra clue to the puzzle which you know isn't actually part of the software they issued a press release saying that Anneka rice the co-presenter of the television show treasure hunt at the time had given a clue of some kind during an appearance at Harrods apartment store in London and the event wasn't recorded so it was of no use to puzzle solvers unless they happen to be in Harrods at the talat there's Anneka rice oh she's given a clue hooray that didn't happen so you know absolutely no use whatsoever and there's also no proof as a result that rice said anything relevant to hair raiser at all it's all going a little bit dodgy shall we say I wonder really hoped to meet Anneka rice and a skirt did somebody slip you 10 pounds to give a clue or have you never heard of this thing whatsoever I think I know the answer but I'd like confirmation now predictably hair soft went belly up early in 1985 the company was declared bankrupt and in December 1988 the golden hair was auctioned off by the liquidators of Sotheby's now you remember Ken Thomas thought it was worth around 30,000 pounds right Sotheby's valued it somewhere between three and six thousand but this time mr. Thomas was absolutely correct because it sold for thirty one thousand nine hundred pounds to an anonymous buyer and then it just disappeared from view and nobody knew who bought it and it was gone now I know you're thinking surely it's unfair to say that hair razor prelude and finale are terrible games because they're merely part of a puzzle and I would have to be saying that the entire puzzle is terrible for it to count well yes that's exactly what I'm saying in fact I'm going to do it now the whole puzzle is terrible there we are that's got rid of any worry about that and I shall now attempt to show why I think that using information and reasoning you know just the way they don't in political discourse anymore so as a backdrop to this piece I will be sharing the title screen from the Acorn electron version of hair razor I call it migraine nightmare I don't know if you've ever been really feverish and woken up in the middle of the night in your half asleep and you can sort of see colors because you're in so much pain that's what that is right so let's go back to Ken Thomas the chap who won the golden hair and started hair soft and had a bit of carpet on his lip pretending it was a massage like none of Baldrick's ruses from blog ever write it transpires it has something in common with Sherlock Holmes and it's not that they're both great detectives it's that they're both fictional Ken Thomas does not exist and has of course never existed it was a pseudonym of a man called doubled Thompson and hence all the disguised nonsense when the casket was dug up and not wanting any publicity and taking a long time to get back as he was trying to plan how to not show his real name now duggle Thompson was the business partner of another man called John Gard and John Gard lived with a lady called Veronica Robertson who was KITT Williams girlfriend at the time he thought up The Masquerade puzzle can you see where this is going according to a 1988 article from the London Times she didn't know the precise location but was short and was sure it has been buried at amp'd Hill correctly of course Thompson then arranged 7 separate metal detector searches in the hopes of finding it no success because it's actually quite a small amount of metals in a clay caskets underground KITT Williams thought of that and of course the reason Thompson's answer was so incomplete is because they had effectively cheated it seems that Veronica Robertson had been manipulated into giving up what she knew by promises that the hair would be sold and the money given to animal rights groups because he wasn't particularly interested in money but she was quite Pro animal rights as we know of course the money was actually used as collateral to set up hair soft so no winners there now when approached about this duplicity John garde the doubled business partner denied knowing Thompson at all until he was shown company documents featuring both their names then he changed his story entirely and he said oh no I never went looking for the golden hair no so then they showed him showed him a newspaper clipping of him telling the newspaper that he was searching for the hair he knew where the hair was he would be the one to find it he had also offered the metal detector experts they've gotten an awful lot of money to publicly claim that they found the hair if they did find it which they declined and certainly the whole affair was a mass of lies and deception and Kip Williams himself admitted that he had been conned here he is looking sad now the real sting in the tail is for some of physics teachers that I mentioned earlier remember them led by Mike Barker here they are now you remember that they were the only ones to properly solve the puzzle well turns out that they had been digging the day before double Thompson went out on one of his searches and he spotted the earth they had dug up and thought hang on that can't be coincidental so then he wrote to Kip Williams with that location and by that amount of time that gone kid just thought oh my goodness thank the Lord somebody just found it this will do this will do I don't care if the answers incomplete tens I should have cared and worse still the casket was found in a pile of previously turned over earth meaning that they had either a somehow dug it up and missed it or be Khitan Bamber had buried it in slightly the wrong place we don't know which one of those two options is true but it's an outcome nearly as bad as their haircuts okay so back to hair razor itself for the background here I shall be using different versions of the hair from different versions of the games that expect them on the left of course then you've got a kind of alien chicken from the Commodore 64 version I like the way it's not yellow the Gildan hair yeah I'm going to do it gray then there's a robot dog maybe - no Chinese dragon I'm not sure what the last one is I'm guessing some kind of cup holder no no idea anyway so what can we make of hair raiser well the common belief which I personally share is that the hair raiser puzzle is either meaningless or the method of obtaining the answer is so willfully obscure as to make it effectively impossible that way there need never be a winner at all I mean remember that hair softs entire business model revolved around owning the golden hair so they wouldn't be too keen on giving it up but in the event of a legal challenge they could claim some arbitrary answer is correct and it exists and hey we're all aboveboard honest guys I mean if this is true then the whole hair raiser puzzle effectively has no solution and is indeed monumentally terrible I mean of course it's also possible the puzzle is just extremely difficult or badly designed but I think given the background of dishonesty from the company's founder it's difficult not to assume there was some deceit present in the sub-project somewhere to say the least but whatever the truth it is tragic that a puzzle is beautifully constructed and presented as masquerade led to the creation of something is grasping and empty as hair razor the 17 pounds 90 you got a few lines of basic code where a few years previously you could pay far less for a book full of beautiful art but what happened to the golden hair itself well it transpires that the anonymous purchaser lives in Egypt and still owns the pendant to this day apparently they wear it for Christmas dinner every year from the world they kindly allowed it to be sent back to England for the 30th anniversary of masquerade publishing where it was reunited with Kate Williams there he is looking happy along with old bamberg ass go in there it was also displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2012 as part of a retrospective on British design so while hair raised our main been a huge bust the golden hair itself does live on so in these days of dubious pre-order bonuses and parts of games being held back for DLC do take some solace in the fact that you are at least getting a game and not receiving well for want of a better description some random bunch of tree pictures as part of an if you get rich quick scam from a bunch of cheaters and that is why I think that hey razor is the worst game ever the end you

Channel: Norwich Games Festival

Views: 618,305

Rating: 4.915875 out of 5

Keywords: Ashens, Norwich Gaming Festival, Gaming, Norwich

Id: ouvi-fwrfIY

Length: 36min 19sec (2179 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Infinite_Bananas]

Reminder you can still pledge to Ashen's latest terrible old games book

[u/QuaintYoungMale]

I didn't know Norwich had a gaming convention- how was it? I saw the Norwich art school game design BA show last year and it had some nice stuff in it.

[u/Progenitorivox]

Thanks for the link, man. This was one of the most entertaining videos I've watched in a while. You should try posting this on r/documentaries.

[u/DIA13OLICAL]

Ashens! If you've never herd of him before he's best known for doing reviews of tat and bad food on his Youtube channel, which I suggest you check out. He dips into games and vintage tech sometimes and he's written two books in the past titled "Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of".

[u/Sniffnoy]

If you don't want to watch a half-hour video but would prefer to read about Hareraiser, there's a good article on the Digital Antiquarian which discusses Hareraiser (among other things; it's more generally discussing the aftermath of Kit Williams's "Masquerade" treasure hunt).

[u/NotQuiteSolidSnake]

Wow, dont expect to see Norwich on reddit often. If I'd of known this was happening I'd love to have gone.