David Jones (Magic Knight)
Windows and pull-down menus, on a 48K Spectrum
Author of the Magic Knight games for Mastertronic — four budget-priced arcade adventures whose 'Windimation' interface put pull-down menus on a 48K Spectrum in 1985.
Not to be confused with Dave Jones of DMA Design, who made Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto. Your Sinclair ran a competition on the confusion in 1986; see below.
David Jones wrote the four Magic Knight games — Finders Keepers, Spellbound, Knight Tyme and Stormbringer — for Mastertronic and its Added Dimension label between 1985 and 1987. They sold at £1.99 and £2.99, and they contain an interface that full-price games of the period did not attempt.
Fast facts
- The series: Finders Keepers (1985, Mastertronic, £1.99, 85% in CRASH), Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Stormbringer (M.A.D., £2.99).
- CRASH describes Stormbringer as the fourth Magic Knight game, naming the three before it.
- The interface: “Windimation” — pull-down menus, activated by a keypress, over a running arcade adventure.
Windimation
The Magic Knight games are arcade adventures: rooms, an inventory, characters to interact with, puzzles that need notes and a map. What makes them unusual is how you play them.
Instead of typed commands or a fixed set of keys, pressing a key brings up pull-down menus over the game — objects to take or drop, people to talk to, spells to cast, actions to try. Jones called it Windimation, and the British press liked it: CRASH’s reviewers called the system “a delight to use”.
This is 1985, on a machine with 48 kilobytes and no mouse. A windowed, menu-driven interface has to be drawn over a moving game, dismissed without corrupting what is underneath, and driven from the keyboard fast enough not to be irritating — on a display with attribute colour constraints that make overlapping graphics expensive.
The wider point is where it appeared. Menu-driven interaction is usually traced through the Macintosh, then SCUMM and the point-and-click adventures at full price on 16-bit machines. It also turns up here, first, on a £2.99 Spectrum cassette.
“Will The Real David Jones Please Stand Up”
Your Sinclair issue 12, 1986, records the name collision — with a third David Jones.
The magazine reports that “David ‘Spellbound/Knight Tyme’ Jones” had handed out Magic Knight T-shirts at the PCW Show and offered ten more to YS readers. To win one, you had to answer: “Which David Jones is now a Thin White Duke?” Entries went to the Will The Real David Jones Please Stand Up Compo.
The answer is David Bowie, born David Jones. The joke is a useful reminder that this problem is not an artefact of modern indexing — the confusion was live at the time, and the magazines played with it.
Why he matters
Two reasons.
The technical one: an ambitious interface, executed well, on the cheapest tier of the market, years before the industry treated menus as the normal way to run an adventure.
The archival one: his credits are routinely absorbed into those of Dave Jones, the DMA Design founder, who shares the name and nothing else. A name is not an identifier. Where a credit is the only evidence, the honest options are to disambiguate explicitly or to leave the link out — never to guess.