There's a good chance that if it weren't for James Herbert I would never have written about games, at least not in English. Well, a “good” chance may be overselling it. Stephen King was, naturally,
An amalgam of seemingly disparate elements, a mutated freak in its own right, The Rats was met with a lukewarm reception when released in late 1985, with the novel optionally included for an extra couple of quid. Critics were torn between appreciation for its novelty and confusion, the stalemate decided on a rather unfortunate technicality. The excruciating loading system, implemented to randomize the interludes’ order, allowed no restarts, meaning that, in the event of losing, one had to rewind the tape and start the long process over. In one of the most favorable reviews, Zzap! 64’s Sean Masterson described it as “a mixture of innovative successes and miserable shortcomings… [that] don’t really exist in the game, but rather around it”—a sentiment shared by Crash’s Derek Brewster, who spent roughly half his allotted word count expounding on the game’s loading woes.
Not only did those issues put off contemporary audiences, derailing the enshrinement of a potential classic, they also became the reason the game’s Commodore 64 version remained unavailable in anything but the original cassette format for more than two decades, as even sophisticated emulators were unable to handle its idiosyncratic loader. A fortnight of hectic collaborative tinkering on the forums of Lemon 64 (one of the biggest online communities for the popular computer) during the summer of 2006 ended this period of imposed obscurity by splicing together a workable digital copy, leading to at least some possibility of a reappraisal.
Yet, despite a retrospective Eurogamer review the following year pronouncing it “one of the most unique 8-bit games ever made,” Hodder & Stoughton’s first and only foray into the medium still languishes in obscurity. Like Herbert who, despite having sold more than 50 million books in the prolific decade following his debut, is seldom cited as one of the greats, the sole videogame adaptation of his work lurks in the shadows of more polished if less adventurous titles. Even still, The Rats’ DNA is splattered, barely visible, across the hallowed halls of the strategy genre.
