Not to be confused with Dave Jones of DMA Design, who made Lemmings and ran the studio behind Grand Theft Auto: two British programmers of the same name, working in the same decade.
“Even if it were priced around the ten pound mark I’d still recommend it as a bargain, but for £2.99 you’d be MAD not to buy it!” That was CRASH’s verdict on Spellbound at Christmas 1985, and the joke was on the label: Mastertronic had just launched Mastertronic Added Dimension, or MAD, for its dearer budget games. David Jones wrote four games about the same small armoured hero, Magic Knight, and three of them came out on that label. They sold for the price of a couple of magazines, and they did something that most full-price adventures of the time did not: instead of typing commands, you opened a window of options over the game and chose one, and the other characters did, or refused to do, what you told them.
Fast facts
- Finders Keepers (Mastertronic, £1.99): reviewed by CRASH in February 1985, 85%.
- Spellbound (MAD, £2.99): CRASH Smash, 95%, Christmas 1985.
- Knight Tyme (MAD, £2.99): 94% in CRASH, June 1986, the first Smash for a Spectrum 128 game.
- Stormbringer (MAD, £2.99): 86% in CRASH, July 1987.
- Machines: the Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, where the last three were sold as a trilogy, and the Commodore 64.
Finders Keepers
Magic Knight’s first game was a platform and maze game in which he collects and trades objects to please a king and a princess. CRASH reviewed it in February 1985 and thought Mastertronic could “easily sell it at £5.95. Yes, it is that good.” It noticed that objects could be combined to make other things, and that the game asked for “50% thinking and 50% playing, yet it is an arcade game”. Its general rating was “excellent value at the price”.
Spellbound and its menus
Spellbound sent Magic Knight into a castle with seven other characters, trapped there by a summoning spell cast by his tutor, Gimbal the Wizard, who had been after a better-tasting rice pudding. The castle is seven floors of seven or eight screens each, joined by a lift, and Magic Knight has 48 hours to send everyone home.
It looks like a platform game until you press fire. That opens a menu over the game; a pointer picks an option and fire opens a sub-menu on top of it, and every option also has its own key “for people who’re a bit kack-handed when it comes to using the pointer”, CRASH wrote. Through the menus Magic Knight examines objects (weight, magic power, whether they can be read or dropped) and people (strength, happiness, stamina, spell power, food). Once he has the wand of command he can order the others to eat, drink, sleep or go away, and he has to: they are dazed, they sulk if unhappy, they die if neglected, and the objects he needs are in their pockets. “Command a character to go to sleep and anything they have can be easily pilfered.”
The magazines could not agree on a name for the system. CRASH called it Windowvision in its Spellbound review and Windowmation six months later; ZZAP!64 called it Windovision; Your Sinclair and Sinclair User called it Windimation. They agreed on the effect. CRASH thought the menus “about the best selection method for using and interacting with objects and characters I’ve seen yet”, and said they made two full-price games of 1985, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Beyond’s icon-driven Shadowfire, “seem awkward and outdated”. It made Spellbound a Smash at 95%. ZZAP!64, reviewing the Commodore 64 version in June 1986, was surprised to see “a game of this quality appearing on a budget label”.
Knight Tyme and Stormbringer
Knight Tyme followed in 1986 and was written first for the new 128K Spectrum. A miscast spell puts Magic Knight aboard a 25th-century starship, the USS Pisces, where the human crew ignore him until he makes himself an identity card with a camera and some film, and he has to rebuild a time machine before the Paradox Police arrive. The menus came back improved, and on the 128 a tune played throughout. One CRASH reviewer called it “the first ‘proper’ game on the 128”; another, “the most outstanding piece of cheap software I’ve seen since I started reviewing for CRASH”. It scored 94%. The 48K version had 25 screens to the 128’s 50, and Your Sinclair told 48K owners to buy it anyway but “get jealous of all those who can run the full version”.
Stormbringer (1987) closed the series. A faulty time machine has split Magic Knight in two, and to become whole he has to find his evil half, the Off-White Knight, who hides in a thundercloud throwing lightning. It had 56 locations on the 48K Spectrum and 64 on the 128, where the background tune was by David Whittaker. CRASH gave it 86%: two reviewers scored it above 90, while the third thought it added little to the last game. Readers stayed loyal. In CRASH‘s readers’ adventure chart for September 1987, Spellbound was number 1, Knight Tyme number 3 and Stormbringer number 6. The same issue marked down another budget game for looking too much like “David Jones’s Magic Knight games in the pull-down menu systems”.
On the Amstrad CPC, Spellbound, Knight Tyme and Stormbringer were sold together as the Magic Knight Trilogy, still at £2.99 each; Amstrad Action called them “amazing value for money”.
The Your Sinclair competition
Jones was a visible figure at the time. At the 1986 PCW Show he gave everyone at Your Sinclair a Magic Knight T-shirt, and in its December 1986 issue the magazine offered ten more to readers. The question was a joke on his name: “Which David Jones is now a Thin White Duke?” The answer was David Bowie, born David Jones, whose stage character in the mid-1970s was the Thin White Duke. Entries went to the “Will The Real David Jones Please Stand Up Compo”.
Later
In June 2019 Jones gave the Tandy TRS-80 Model III computer on which he had made his games to the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, with floppy disks and a 15-megabyte hard disk holding the source code and assets of many of them. The museum described him as “a former freelance computer game programmer who was prolific in the mid-to-late 1980s”, and reported that Mastertronic had paid him 10p for every cassette sold.
Sources
- CRASH issue 13, February 1985: Finders Keepers review. CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (Finders Keepers 85%, issue 13).
- CRASH issue 24, Christmas Special 1985: Spellbound review (Mastertronic, MAD range, £2.99, author David Jones; Windowvision; Frankie and Shadowfire; 95%).
- ZZAP!64 issue 14, June 1986: Spellbound review (C64).
- CRASH issue 29, June 1986, pp. 18–19: Knight Tyme review (£2.99; the first “proper” 128 game; Windowmation; 50 screens, 25 on 48K; 94%).
- Your Sinclair issue 8, August 1986: Knight Tyme 48K version.
- Your Sinclair issue 12, December 1986, p. 6: Frontlines (David “Spellbound/Knight Tyme” Jones, the T-shirts and the competition).
- CRASH issue 42, July 1987, p. 16: Stormbringer review (M.A.D., £2.99, author David Jones; 56 and 64 locations; 128K tune by David Whittaker; the series’ earlier CRASH reviews and Smashes; 86%).
- Your Sinclair issue 19, July 1987: Stormbringer review (“the fourth ‘Windimation’ arcade adventure from Mastertronic Added Dimension Games”). Sinclair User issue 65, August 1987: Stormbringer 128K version (Windimation).
- CRASH issue 44, September 1987: readers’ Adventure Top 20; Streaker review (the comparison with the Magic Knight games).
- Amstrad Action issue 31, April 1988: Magic Knight Trilogy (Mastertronic (MAD), £2.99 each cassette).
- Centre for Computing History, “Magic Knight Computer Preserved at Museum”, 29 June 2019 (web, secondary): the TRS-80 Model III, disks and source code; 10p per cassette. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/news/53917/Magic-Knight-Computer-Preserved-at-Museum/