The player starts off in a mysterious room with the strange Bequest Globe-a gift of unknown provenance-before meeting two emissaries, Kether and Malchut, who represent different philosophies and outcomes. But over a decade later, with the rise of point-and-click puzzlers like Myst, Horse decided it was time to resurrect his project as a game. For most this would have spelled the natural end of an artistic prank. The diary, which went into the poet’s speculations and prophecies about the world, passed for real until Horse was revealed as its author. In 1983, Horse forged a mysterious diary supposedly written by Richard Horne, a real 19th century poet with whom he shared a name Horse had been born Richard Horne, but embraced “Horse” after someone misread his name at school and eventually adopted “Harry Horse” as a working pseudonym. The originator of Drowned God was writer and political cartoonist Harry Horse, who died under infamously tragic (and contested) circumstances in January 2007. Now it’s largely been forgotten, though it’s probably one of the most fascinating and aesthetically experimental point-and-click games of all time.
When Drowned God was first released, Williams recalls it rocketing into the top 10 videogame sales in the US. “You’d have a social media department as big as the art department and developers combined, wouldn’t you?”Īll of human history is based on lies and secrets, and humanity was actually created by ancient aliens “I would have loved to publish Drowned God now,” says Algy Williams, who produced the 1996 Inscape game that tapped into planetwide conspiracies and longstanding cultural myths. We often hear about things being ahead of their time, but ’90s cult point-and-click adventure Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages is unexpectedly prescient in the neurotic world of 2021.