On Friday 9 November 1984 the first copies of Knight Lore reached the CRASH offices in Ludlow. Ultimate had said almost nothing about it beyond a rare press release promising a new three-dimensional technique called Filmation, and that was enough to set readers writing to the magazines in numbers. When the game arrived it did something nobody had seen on a ZX Spectrum: each room of a castle was drawn as a solid-looking scene in forced perspective, and the hero could walk behind a pillar, disappear from view, climb onto a block and jump across a gap, all without the flicker that usually came with moving graphics on the machine.
A curse and forty days
Knight Lore brings back Sabreman, the pith-helmeted explorer of Sabre Wulf, now under a curse. By day he is himself; at night he turns into a werewulf, Ultimate’s spelling. To lift the curse he must find the old wizard Melkhior somewhere in the castle and bring the ingredients for a cure to his cauldron. He has forty days and forty nights; a sun and moon at the bottom of the screen show the time passing.
Each room is a puzzle. Sinclair Programs listed what waited in them: “skittering ghosts, some taciturn soldiers, others balls of fire, huge spiked blocks, vanishing stairways, obstinate flames.” Blocks slide on their own, sink when you land on them, or vanish to reveal spikes. The change from man to beast happens whenever night falls, which, the same review pointed out, “is lethal if it occurs in the middle of some delicate manoeuvre”. As usual with Ultimate the instructions, written in rhyme, explained very little. CRASH’s players learned that the cauldron would only say what it wanted next in daytime, and that approaching it as a werewulf was fatal.
One colour per room
The trick reviewers dwelt on was how Knight Lore avoided the Spectrum’s attribute clash, the smearing of colour that happens when two coloured objects share an 8×8 character square. Every room uses a single colour, and Sabreman takes on that colour as he enters. CRASH’s reviewer noted that “each screen has its own colour”, so the game is not short of colour, and that the moving characters use masking, “so that the moving characters do not flicker at all when they pass in front of other objects”. Sinclair User described the result as “a crepuscular world of claustrophobic menace” built from careful shading. The Filmation engine entry explains how the drawing works.
What the magazines said
The reviews arrived in the new year. Sinclair Programs gave Knight Lore 99% in January 1985, above its 98% for Underwurlde, and wrote that it was “a game by which all future maze games, and most other games, will be judged”. CRASH gave it 94%; one reviewer thought it “probably the best game yet produced for the Spectrum”. Sinclair User gave it 9 out of 10. At the Computer & Video Games Golden Joystick awards in spring 1985 it was voted Game of the Year, ahead of Activision’s Ghostbusters.
Versions followed for the Amstrad CPC in 1985 and the BBC Micro, where Acorn User called it “the most challenging, inventive and addictive game of its class”, and for MSX.
Finished early, released late
In 1988 the Stamper brothers told CRASH that “Knight Lore was finished before Sabre Wulf”. The market, Tim Stamper said, was not ready for it: “if we released Knight Lore and Alien 8, which was already half-finished, we wouldn’t have sold Sabre Wulf.” So Ultimate released Sabre Wulf first, in the summer of 1984, and held Knight Lore back. “They could have had Knight Lore possibly the year earlier. We just had to sit on it because everyone else was so far behind.”
A new genre
Alien 8 reused the technique in 1985, and Nightshade and Gunfright followed. Other companies built isometric games of their own, and by 1988 CRASH could say that Knight Lore “brought about a new genre, the forced-perspective (or isometric) 3-D arcade adventure”, passing on one reader’s claim that it was “the second-most-cloned piece of software after the word processor WordStar”. Chris Stamper put it more simply when explaining Gunfright: “Everyone was copying our Knight Lore concept, so we thought we’d do one as well!” Jon Ritman was one of the programmers who took it up. He had just started on Ocean’s Batman (1986) when, as CRASH told it, “he’d seen Knight Lore and decided that this was the sort of game he wanted to write next”; his next isometric game was Head Over Heels (1987).
Sources
- CRASH, issue 12 (January 1985): p. 8, the first copies arriving on 9 November 1984; pp. 16-17, review (masking, one colour per screen, forty days and nights, Melkhior, “the best game yet produced for the Spectrum”); playing tips on the cauldron and the werewulf.
- CRASH, issue 10 (November 1984): Ultimate’s Knight Lore advertisement at £9.95.
- Sinclair Programs, January 1985: joint review of Underwurlde and Knight Lore (98% and 99%; one colour per room, the room hazards, the transformation “lethal”).
- Sinclair User, issue 35 (February 1985), p. 23: review by Chris Bourne, Gilbert Factor 9.
- Computer & Video Games, issue 44 (June 1985), p. 122: Golden Joystick awards; Knight Lore Game of the Year, runner-up Ghostbusters.
- Acorn User, issue 40 (November 1985): review of the BBC Micro version.
- Amstrad Action, issue 1 (October 1985): the Amstrad CPC version.
- CRASH, issue 38 (March 1987), p. 117: profile of Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond, Batman and Head Over Heels.
- CRASH, issue 51 (April 1988), pp. 35-38: the Filmation press release, Knight Lore as “revolutionary” and the start of a genre, the WordStar claim, Knight Lore finished before Sabre Wulf, Chris Stamper on Gunfright, and the 94% review score in CRASH’s table of Ultimate reviews.