Christmas was a Knightmare in the UK in December 1987


Human beings are different. They care about timing. In December, they care especially about presents, overcooked turkey, and the curious phenomenon of a jolly, red-suited man defying several fundamental laws of physics. And so, somewhere between worrying about Aunt Enid’s pudding and the precise location of the batteries for a talking doll, a software house known as Activision decided the time was now. Knightmare arrived for the Commodore 64, not with the fiery majesty of a collapsing sun, but with a quiet, plastic rustle.

Now, for those unfamiliar with the labyrinthine joys of British television in the late eighties, Knightmare was not just a game. Oh no. It was, in its original televised form, an experience. A glorious, utterly bonkers spectacle involving a blindfolded child, a giant, talking disembodied head, and a series of dungeon rooms that looked suspiciously like someone's garage after a particularly ambitious theatrical clear-out. The goal? To guide the blindfolded child (or "dungeoneer" as they were so poetically known) through a perilous landscape using only the shouted instructions of their bewildered friends, who could, bafflingly, see what was happening. Utter genius, or the blueprint for a particularly cruel psychological experiment, depending on your perspective and whether you were the one wearing the Helmet of Justice.

So, when the news trickled down, through the arcane network of schoolyard whispers and the slightly damp pages of computer magazines, that a C64 version was imminent in December of '87, a ripple went through the nascent gaming collective. Would it capture the spirit? Could a humble home computer truly replicate the existential dread of being told "Side-step left! No, my left!" by a pre-teen shouting at a screen?

The answer, as with many things involving the C64, was...complicated.

Knightmare on the Commodore 64 wasn't quite the fully immersive virtual reality experience that the television show, with its then-revolutionary bluescreen technology, pretended to be. It was, rather, a slightly clunky adventure, replete with blocky graphics and a control scheme that felt like trying to defuse a bomb with oven mitts on. 

But here's the kicker: it was Knightmare. It had the essence. The music, a tinny but surprisingly evocative rendition of the show's theme, burrowed into your brain like a particularly insistent earworm. The sprites, while rudimentary, were recognisable. And the sense of creeping dread, of making one wrong move and hearing the dreaded "Oh, nasty!" as your health (or "life force" as the game grandly declared) drained away, was perfectly intact.

You, the player, can see everything. You can see the goblins. You can see the bottomless pits. You can see the wall that is about to turn into a giant mouth and eat the dungeoneer because apparently that’s a thing that walls do now. What you cannot do is move. You are essentially a disembodied voice of reason in a universe that has filed reason under “fiction” and thrown it in the bin. Thus the game becomes an exercise in long-distance telepathy, performed across the gaping chasm of a Commodore 64 joystick port. You bark instructions—“Sidestep left! LEFT! No, your OTHER left! STOP! I SAID STOP!”—while the dungeoneer stumbles about like a man trying to find the light switch in a cave full of scorpions.

The graphics, it must be said, are astonishing. Not in the sense of being beautiful, because they are blocky, garish, and frequently look like they were drawn by someone using a potato, but astonishing in that they manage to convey a dungeon so palpably evil that you half expect the cassette tape itself to start emanating brimstone. The sound is equally impressive, consisting mainly of a sort of low, ominous hum that suggests the computer is seriously considering the moral implications of what it’s doing to you. And then there are the puzzles. One particularly memorable room requires you to spell the word “LIFE” using objects scattered about the place. The objects are, in no particular order: a loaf of bread, a fish, a bone, and a goblin’s head that has been inexplicably pickled. The game considers this perfectly reasonable. You will not.

Death comes early, often, and with the cheerful indifference of a force of nature. One wrong step and your dungeoneer is devoured, bisected, evaporated, or simply informed that his “life force” has expired, at which point the screen displays a skull and the words “OOPS.” That’s it. “OOPS.” As though you’ve merely spilled tea on the carpet rather than condemned a pixelated innocent to an eternity of digital torment.

Yet, against all probability, people loved it. They lined up outside shops in the freezing December cold, clutching their £9.95, just for the privilege of having their self-esteem systematically dismantled by a machine that still thought 64K was lavish. 

Knightmare was a perfect piece of mid-80s digital ephemera: intensely complicated, vaguely educational (in the sense that it taught you about the crushing weight of existential failure), and utterly, utterly British.

And then, just as quickly as it arrived, December ended. Knightmare slipped into the annals of computer gaming history, a footnote in a decade of leg warmers and synthesizers. It served its purpose: it occupied a few thousand minds for a few dozen hours, while "mum" prepared the Christmas feast. You see, in December 1987, for the low price of a few pounds sterling, the meaning of Christmas was a small, isometric knight walking hesitantly past a brown pixelated wall.

Mostly hesitantly.

Location: London, UK

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more