Leaving the piece of art that was Deus Ex Machina and praying there is no cyber-gift shop on the way out, we can only hope that our next game in the Your Sinclair Top 100 is a better effort than the previous two servings. With the publisher of Ultimate Play the Game already appearing on the label, things are looking up for No.#33 and things get even more splendid when we see that we have Knight Lore in our cassette player.
Knight Lore first appeared on the ZX Spectrum in 1984, from the elusive masters that were Tim and Chris Stamper. A 3D isometric game in which you play an adventurer that has been bitten by the Sabre Wulf, you have 40 days to remove the curse that sees you turn into a werewolf when night comes. By collecting numerous objects hidden throughout the 128 rooms you need to return them to the wizard’s cauldron – in the correct order – before the time runs out or you’ll be eternally stuck with the a bad case of hypertrichosis.
Tim and Chris Stamper created a perfect game with Knight Lore, a game so vast and technically brilliant that they actually advanced gaming, using the Filmation Engine; this tiny-little “K” RAM of a game moved the gaming world! Another piece of shocking information about Knight Lore, is that this rather excellent game was held back for a year, as the Stampers didn’t want it to impact on the Sabre Wulf sales; also in the time it was denied from existing in our homes they also created Alien 8 to get ready to release, using the same Filmation technique used within Knight Lore. The Stamper brothers were clearly gaming greats.
Knight Lore is a highly impressive game, though in truth Alien 8 is my favourite and I still have the original cardboard boxed release safely tucked away in my loft. This game however needs to be played regularly so people remember how great Ultimate Play the Game were at delivering some truly beautiful games.
