Did you know there was an 80s computer game about Prince Harry?


In the brisk February of 1988, the Atari computer owners of Britain discovered a small, digital miracle called Henry’s House. Now, the Atari 8-bit family was, by 1988, a bit like a venerable old relative who insists on wearing a tuxedo to a backyard barbecue—charming, surprisingly capable, but everyone suspected their time was nearly up. Yet, into this sunset period stepped young Henry.

The premise of Henry’s House is one of those things that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room with a damp cloth over your eyes. It is a platform game about Prince Harry of Wales. Yes, that Prince Harry. The one who, at the time, was a toddler whose primary achievements involved being third in line to a very large throne and occasionally wearing adorable jumpers.

The reception, dear reader, was not merely positive. It was glowing. Magazines that normally reserved their highest praise for things like "slightly less flickery than last month’s offering" suddenly found themselves reaching for words previously thought extinct in the gaming press: "charming," "addictive," "surprisingly deep," and—most improbably of all—"fit for a king."

The graphics were crisp, the sound effects smoked the older Commodore 64 version, and the gameplay possessed that rare quality of being simple enough for a child yet fiendish enough to make grown adults swear at royal furniture in six different languages. Not to mention, the game was the first known cultural artifact to reference Harry's ancestral relationship to Count Dracula!

Of course, history has since moved on. Prince Harry grew up, acquired helicopters, ginger hair of legendary volume, and eventually an American wife who presumably never had to guide him past a scrolling screen of ancestral portraits (a sequel is long-overdue!). The Atari itself gently shuffled off to the great electronics graveyard in the sky. But for one glorious month in 1988, the computing public was united in the knowledge that somewhere, in a small house (or palace, depending on how much licence you were prepared to grant the programmers), a little boy named Henry was having the time of his short, royal life.

Location: United Kingdom

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