Spellbound
#3 in one chart, #21 in another
David Jones's Magic Knight adventure put pull-down menus on a 48K Spectrum at £2.99 — and its two chart positions in the same month show exactly what a budget game was up against.
The second Magic Knight game, written by David Jones and published by Mastertronic Added Dimension at £2.99 — an arcade adventure with an interface that full-price games were not attempting.
Fast facts
- Author: David Jones — not the DMA Design founder; see the disambiguation.
- Series: Finders Keepers, Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Stormbringer.
- Interface: “Windimation” — pull-down menus over a running game.
- CRASH on the system: “a delight to use”.
Chart performance
CRASH charts, 9 appearances:
| Date | Position | Chart |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 1986 | #3 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Dec 1986 | #4 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Jan 1987 | #4 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Jan 1987 | #21 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Feb 1987 | #5 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Jul 1988 | #4 | Adventure Top 10 |
⭐ The two January 1987 rows are the entry. In the same month, in the same magazine, Spellbound is #3 in the Adventure chart and #21 in the general one.
Both are true and they measure different things. Among people buying adventures it is near the top; among everyone buying anything it is barely visible. A £2.99 game with a menu system beat the other adventures and lost to the arcade releases — which is the budget tier’s position in one pair of numbers.
Note also the tail: still charting in July 1988, nearly three years after release. Budget games did not have release weeks; they had shelf lives, sitting in newsagents at pocket-money prices long after full-price titles had been cleared.
Windows on a 48K machine
Pressing a key raises pull-down menus over the game — objects to take, people to talk to, spells to cast — drawn over a moving screen, dismissed without corrupting what is underneath, and driven from the keyboard fast enough not to irritate. On a display with attribute colour constraints that make overlapping graphics expensive.
Menu-driven interaction is usually traced through the Macintosh and then SCUMM on 16-bit machines at full price. It is also here, in 1985, on a cassette that cost less than a magazine.