Fairlight

Written by Bo Jangeborg in Sweden, published by The Edge from Covent Garden, and reviewed by CRASH in November 1985 at £9.95 for the 48K Spectrum.

Its full title is Fairlight: A Prelude — the Light Revealed, billed as the first part of “the Chronicles of the Land of Fairlight”. You are Isvar, trapped inside Castle Avars, and the way out is to find the Book of Light.

Fast facts

Author: Bo Jangeborg. Publisher: The Edge. £9.95, 48K, machine code.
Built with: Worldmaker and Grax, Jangeborg’s own room-design tools.
Screens: 80. Skill levels: one.
Sequel: Fairlight II: A Trail of Darkness (1986).

The score, resolved

CRASH reviewed Fairlight in issue 22, November 1985, pages 26-27 — a full scored review, not the preview that appeared in issue 20 — and the rating panel reads:


Use of computer	89%
Graphics	97%
Playability	90%
Getting started	86%
Addictive qualities	91%
Value for money	92%
Overall	95%

So 95%, matching ZXDB. The 96% widely quoted for Fairlight has no source in the review; the 97% is for graphics alone, which is the likeliest origin of it.

The number is worth having right for a reason beyond pedantry: the gap between 97% for graphics and 89% for use of computer is the review’s actual argument, and it is the opposite of the usual one about this game.

Chart performance

CRASH charts, 6 appearances:

Date	Position	Chart
Dec 1985	#6	Hotline Top 30
Feb 1986	#4	Hotline Top 30
Nov 1986	#12	Adventure Top 30
Dec 1986	#6	Adventure Top 30
Jan 1987	#5	Adventure Top 30
Feb 1987	#4	Adventure Top 30

The now-familiar migration: general chart in 1985–86, Adventure chart from late 1986 — the same reclassification Lords of Midnight and Shadowfire undergo.

But note the direction of travel inside the Adventure chart. Fairlight goes #12 → #6 → #5 → #4, climbing steadily fifteen months after release. A game with a 95% behind it kept being discovered.

Objects that have mass

Fairlight is in the family Ultimate’s Knight Lore opened, and its contribution is physical objects — which CRASH described in the plainest possible terms:

each object has a mass and obeys the laws of physics. Push a chair and it will move quite a long way; push a table and it moves less far.

Isvar has five pockets. Food is light enough to carry several pieces at once; try to pick up a barrel and he has to put everything else down first. Objects can be stacked into ramps and climbed. A door you cannot reach is solved by finding something to stand on — not by finding the key that the designer decided opens it.

That is a different kind of puzzle from almost everything around it in 1985. A key-and-lock puzzle has one solution and the designer knows it. A physics puzzle has as many solutions as the objects allow, and the player gets credit for the one they found. The CRASH reviewer’s summary of the difference from Ultimate is worth keeping:

Ultimate first introduced us to realistic 3D graphics but sadly not a lot of game was bolted on to them. Now, thanks to The Edge, that gap has been filled.

Another reviewer put it less diplomatically: Fairlight “knocks Filmation and Filmation 2 into a cocked hat. And there’s a game behind the graphics too.”

Two design details worth stealing

Colour as a map. CRASH: “Each location in the castle is colour coded — which helps you keep your bearings while you explore. All the open air locations, for instance, are blue.” On a machine with attribute colour constraints you get one ink colour per character cell anyway, so a room is effectively monochrome whether you plan it or not. Jangeborg made that limitation carry information: the constraint became the navigation aid.

The frame rate is visible and honest. “If a location is filled with other moving figures, Isvar slows down a bit — but in an empty room he can really motor!” The game does not hide its own cost. It also blanks the screen for a couple of seconds between rooms while the new location is drawn, which every reviewer noticed and most forgave.

Written in Sweden

Worth restating because the 8-bit years get narrated as a national story: Fairlight is a Swedish programmer’s game, published from Covent Garden, reviewed as British, and scored by a magazine in Shropshire.

Jangeborg went home afterwards — to Sweden and his own company, Xcellent Software — but left his tools with The Edge.

The sequel, and the reaction

Fairlight II: A Trail of Darkness (1986, £9.95) used the same Worldmaker system with the playing area doubled; on a 48K machine it loaded in two parts, and on a 128K in one.

CRASH was notably cooler about it, and about the original in hindsight. One reviewer in January 1987: “Fairlight only impressed me and many other people because of its extremely detailed graphics but the game is much too hard for the basic Spectrum owner.” By April 1987 the magazine’s line was blunter still: “THE EDGE have been disappointing lately, Fairlight II was pretty but unplayable.”

Set that beside the November 1985 verdict — “a stunning game, achieved with a new programming technique” — and you have the whole arc of a technique-led studio in eighteen months.

95%, and objects that have mass