Right after Ultimate released Underwurlde and introduced the ability-unlocked-gateway mechanic to 2D platformer maze games, they also put out the much more significant game they had been holding back. It featured, they said with typical modesty, “the most animated character in home computing software history to date”, representing “the first step in a new generation of computer adventure simulation developments” and “the very pinnacle of software development on the Spectrum”. Knight Lore would indeed inspire a whole new wave of games, and Ultimate would have another one ready to go quickly. That game would become the final UK #1 game released under the name Ultimate. This is the story of Knight Lore, of Alien 8, and of the reasons for Ultimate’s remarkably rapid fall from a position of great strength.
Knight Lore is another maze game with items to track down and bring together and platforms to jump between, once again starring Sabreman. The difference is that it is in 3D. In side-on games like Underwurlde, you could move in four directions: left, right, up and down. In top-down games like Sabre Wulf, you could move in four directions too. Let’s call them left, right, forwards and backwards, although the latter two are still up and down on screen. Knight Lore has an isometric 3D view, and you can move left, right, forwards and backwards, and up and down. A whole set of new possibilities come from that. Lots of them for cruel ways to trick the player with disappearing blocks and hidden traps, which it frequently revels in.
Even before exploring new possibilities, though, the experience of seeing the character in different angles in 3D is a new thrill in itself, and presumably the reason they went with the familiar Sabreman. The even more impressive thing is that far from Knight Lore’s looks being compromised compared to its 2D predecessors, it looks cleaner, more solid, more real. No wonder it got responses like “I’ve never seen graphics as good as this on any micro game” (Computer & Video Games), “the graphics have to be seen to be believed” (Home Computing Weekly) and “it is the graphics which truly astound” (Sinclair User). Knight Lore’s bouncing bubbles and star-cluster curses and clanging portcullises have a different type of life to them than two dimensions could provide.
For compromise, there is the forced decision to make every room monochrome, a variety of single colour places in green, yellow, blue, magenta. With the game’s advances though, it doesn’t feel like a compromise but instead proof of its developers’ view that “nothing breeds ingenuity like restriction”. They were able to use an approach to creating ‘masks’ for each sprite that meant they could pass in front of each other without any flickering. Using monochrome also meant, by definition, avoiding the colour bleeding issues that they couldn’t quite prevent from afflicting their previous games.
More than that, monochrome creates a stylistically distinct effect that goes with the fantasy werewolf story in Knight Lore. “I think it actually adds to the atmosphere” said Popular Computing Weekly’s reviewer, and I’m with them. “The overall effect is of a crepuscular world of claustrophobic menace”, as Chris Bourne in Sinclair User rather delightfully put it.
Knight Lore was not the first isometric 3D platformer. Ant Attack had come out a year earlier and had become a decent-sized Spectrum hit on the basis of its three-dimensional architecture as much as its giant insects. It did some pretty incredible things itself with different sets of black dots on a grey background. The reaction of Sandy White, Ant Attack’s developer, to the bigger and bolder Knight Lore is instructive, though. As he told Retro Gamer much later, “It was like the teacher had come back into the room and said “okay kids, this is how it’s done””. Other practitioners of the form recalled similar reactions. “My jaw hit the floor” said Jon Ritman, developer of a Knight Lore-style Batman game which I will talk about more when I get to 1986.
None of the charts I’m using ever had Knight Lore at #1, but that was initially down to Ultimate releasing it just after Underwurlde, and then to coming up against a singular phenomenon in the shape of Elite. Knight Lore sold better for longer than Underwurlde, and Ultimate’s plan to quickly follow it up proved a good one. In February 1985, they released Alien 8, another isometric 3D maze game. Released only on the Spectrum, it went straight to #1 in Gallup’s combined formats chart for two weeks, finally deposing the dual-format Ghostbusters.
Alien 8 is based on the same ‘Filmation’ system as Knight Lore, has many challenges and puzzles in the same style, and even uses the same sound effects. Instead of changing any of those things, Ultimate instead differentiated it through the surface aesthetics of its setting and story. You control a blocky robot, tasked with fixing things up for the deep-sleeping crew of a ship hurtling through space. Ultimate would be far from the last developer to make parallel games, one with magic, knights, and lore, and one with technology, light years and spaceships: the two genres.
The clean lines, high-tech hexagons and other basic shapes work well for giving some visual clarity, even if it’s less atmospheric than Knight Lore. The remaining inherent confusion of an isometric view is once again used to trick the player many times. Ultimate took the opportunity to make Alien 8 even more difficult than its already very difficult predecessor, with a little more emphasis on tricky puzzles and less on exploration. It has some inventions along the way for those puzzles, including remote control robots.
The reviews of Alien 8 were a little less singularly positive than most of those for Ultimate’s last few games, with its unmistakable similarities to Knight Lore the main reason. “Sabre Man in Space!” started C&VG’s review. “You’re going to think you’ve been conned by a clone when you first load it up” said Your Spectrum, and Crash mentioned that “it looks just like Knight Lore a lot of people exclaimed, feeling obscurely ripped off”. All of those were prefaces for positive reviews, but Mike Gerrard in Personal Computer News went a bit further, calling Alien 8 “simply Knight Lore II” and saying it “might not be a lemon, but it could be a resounding first raspberry for Ultimate”.
In practice, Alien 8 got many of the same signs of player enthusiasm as previous games. Crash ran their now-standard map-making competition in association with Ultimate, with its robot trophy won by future Rare employee Wil Overton. His map was attractive, detailed and clear enough that the magazine ran it across a full double page rather than making its own. Your Spectrum featured one reader’s Spectrum program which displayed an Alien 8 “comic book”, with particular emphasis on the game’s mouse-dalek character. Still, as much as people clearly did enjoy it, it’s notable that Alien 8 is the only one of Ultimate’s UK #1s to be left off 2015 compilation Rare Replay. It was also the final Ultimate map competition in Crash.
Behind the scenes, lots of changes were afoot at Ultimate. In contrast to the tight control over its outputs that the Stampers had taken previously, it was around this time Ultimate they picked up someone else’s games for release. They saw The Staff of Karnath, a Commodore 64 game being developed by brothers Dave and Bob Thomas, and thought highly enough of it to not just release it but sign up its makers for three sequels. As part of the agreement, the Thomases were not to reveal who had developed those games, something they kept up until 2008, so The Staff of Karnath and sequels were very much perceived as Ultimate games first and foremost.
The Staff of Karnath reached #3 in the all formats chart in December 1984, a pretty strong performance that none of its sequels repeated. Ancient Egypt-themed Entombed reached #20 in May 1985, pirate adventure Blackwyche #16 that September, and Dragonskulle missed the all formats chart altogether in January 1986, by which time the name Ultimate had been sold to U.S. Gold. Things didn’t go much better for Ultimate’s Spectrum games of the same era, the closest to their previous success being Nightshade, #3 in August 1985. That was another isometric 3D Sabreman game, but now with scrolling and more colours. Nonetheless, the same Chris Bourne in Sinclair User who had been wowed by the atmosphere of Knight Lore wrote of “a sense of déjà vu creeping into Ultimate games” and that “Ultimate may be running out of steam”.
While Ultimate was drifting, the Stampers had their focus on a whole new company, Rare, which they set up in 1985. It took until Autumn 1986 for the first Rare game to come out, when skiing game Slalom made it to Nintendo’s VS. arcade system ahead of being released on its home console. They had started working with that console, the NES, much earlier though. As they told it to Crash in a 1988 interview, they started way back in 1983. “We managed to get just about all the software available for the Nintendo then […] we spent 8 months finding everything out about this system, and then started to write on the machine.”
Ultimate/Rare decided that the NES would be a better bet internationally than the Spectrum, just as a couple of years before they had decided to jump from making arcade games as A.C.G. to making Spectrum games as Ultimate. After a process of proving themselves, Rare was eventually to be a prolific NES developer, working very closely with Nintendo. Tim Stamper’s description of this was that they would act “as Nintendo’s development team. If they feel they are lacking a product on a machine, they tell us, we develop it, and so we are sure of licensing product to them”.
The interview gives another potential insight into the reasons for their switch. When asked about 16-bit home computers, Tim Stamper replied “When we find a machine that sells extremely well to warrant us producing on it then we’ll produce for it. If a 16-bit machine is going to sell about three or four million, you can be sure we’ll be out there with product for it.” Note that Stamper says a machine, not machines plural.
When they set up Rare, there were several changes happening to the UK 8-bit market. That included the increasing prominence of budget games, which was the opposite direction Ultimate had gone in with its premium pricing from Sabre Wulf onwards. Another one, though, was the big change was that going multi-format was about to become all but essential. The end of 1984 saw Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and Ghostbusters doing massive numbers thanks to near-simultaneous Spectrum and Commodore 64 releases.
Ultimate was a company that had focused obsessively on understanding the every possibility of the Spectrum hardware. They had remarkably little interest in porting their games to other machines, and had just completely outsourced Ultimate’s presence on the Commodore 64. The potential to avoid needing to deal with multiple competing formats was surely one more attraction to the NES.
They recognised the potential that Nintendo’s console could be as dominant as the Spectrum had been in Britain in 1983, in parts of the world with considerably more potential players. Rare would fully focus on the NES and future Nintendo consoles, and it would turn out to be a good decision. In the UK, though, few enough people bought a NES that as well as saying goodbye to Ultimate in this story, I won’t be saying a proper hello to Rare for a good long while. When I eventually first encounter Rare at the top of the UK charts, it will be almost exactly a decade after Knight Lore, with no less than another revolution in platforming and 3D graphics.
Sources:
- The Best of British, Crash No. 51, April 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive and also available at Crash Online
- News – Sabreman soldiers on, Sinclair User No. 33, December 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Reviews – Knight Lore, Computer & Video Games No. 39, January 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Ventures, Peter Sweasey, Home Computing Weekly No. 94, 8-14 January 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Spectrum Software Scene – Knight Lore, Chris Bourne, Sinclair User No. 35, February 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium, Bitmap Books, 2015
- New releases – Cartoonesque, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 3 No. 47, 22-28 November 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Knight Lore: a 30-year legacy, Martyn Carroll, Retro Gamer No. 126, March 2014
- Reviews – Alien 8, Computer & Video Games No. 42, April 1985
- Alien 8, Crash No. 15, April 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Gameplay – Alien 8, Mike Gerrard, Personal Computer News No. 106, 8 April 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
- The seven treasures of Ultimate Play the Game, Martyn Carroll, Eurogamer, 2020
- Alien 8 – the map, William Overton, Crash No. 20, September 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- Frontlines – Alien mate, Your Spectrum No. 16, July 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
- The Ultimate Adventure of Sir Arthur Pendragon, Martyn Caroll, Retro Gamer No. 56, November 2008
- The Staff of Karnath, chart history from Computer Hits
- Entombed, chart history from Computer Hits
- Blackwyche, chart history from Computer Hits
- Dragonskulle, chart history from Computer Hits
- Nightshade, chart history from Computer Hits
- Spectrum Software Scene – Nightshade, Chris Bourne, Sinclair User No. 43, October 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
Michael Borcherds
Alien 8 was also released for the BBC micro