We enter the charts of 1985 with our third Ultimate (Play the) game, and this is a big one. Bear in mind the whole history-written-by-the-victors thing, but the history they set out is quite something. Ultimate made Knight Lore, realised it was advanced enough to put their other games well in the shade, and so hung onto it for a while to give Sabre Wulf its moment in the sun. Meanwhile they also made another game in the same new style as Knight Lore, ready to be at the front of a predicted queue of the clones once it started a new trend. And they were right about it all! Within games, Ultimate’s 1984-5 era was an imperial phase on the level of 2009-10 Lady Gaga. And like her, their carefully executed plan involved starting off doing what everyone else was doing, and then moving on to a dimension beyond.
This is where my approach for this project of playing through games chronologically provides a useful perspective, because it highlights how startling an exception Knight Lore was to its contemporaries. As a child I played later games which took after it, and so even though I’m playing Knight Lore for the first time, much of what it does is not new to me. It’s only looking at it in context that it’s clear how much was new.
In short, 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. Even before using them for new challenges, the freedom to move around in new ways, the experience of seeing the main character in different angles in 3D over its comic footstep beeps, is a new thrill.
The step up is not just that Knight Lore is in three dimensions, though, and indeed it wasn’t quite the first isometric 3D platform game (we’ll meet an earlier one soon!). It’s in how well executed it is alongside that jump. Far from its looks being compromised compared to its 2D predecessors, it looks cleaner, more solid, more real. We’ll see some other revolutions in what is possible in games in the future, but generally they come facilitated by technological advances, or as the result of big compromises. In Knight Lore’s case, it didn’t come from new technology but from working out new ways to use the same technology.
As for compromise, I suppose there is the forced decision to make every room monochrome. But that doesn’t feel like a compromise. It eliminates issues such as the ugly characteristic of many 2D Spectrum games of the colours of one object bleeding into adjacent ones. More than that, monochrome creates a stylistically distinct effect that does something for the game’s atmosphere that a bunch of different colours never could. The right limitations can be a catalyst for inspiration, as an expanding genre of modern retro games testify, sometimes in monochrome. 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.
Ultimate didn’t settle for just the one big new idea, but layered an additional gimmick on top. Knight Lore’s plot is that Sabreman, having been bitten by the Sabre Wulf in Sabre Wulf, has been turned into a werewolf (or possible a sabrewulf). He’s trying to put together a cure, and in the meantime he transforms by moonlight. So there’s an onscreen diagram showing a sun or moon moving across the sky, and at the end of each brief day Sabreman gets taken out of the player’s control and goes through a painful-looking transformation process. His body goes through a series of cartoon distortions and emerges in new form. As a wolf, he can jump a little better but is subject to additional enemy attacks. Just as you were getting used to one extra dimension, you have to manage another one, time, in new ways.
There are a lot of things that are not such a departure. Knight Lore still involves a lot of precision jumping and dodging, even if it’s in 3D. It is inevitably incredibly difficult, and makes few concessions to added difficulties presented by the fact that its viewpoint means you sometimes can’t tell if an object or exit is far away or high up. If anything, it revels in the confusion at times. I am not going to stick with it until I achieve its goals, and not just because of my tight schedule. I don’t care about its plot or meeting its collection challenges. What I appreciate, though, is that it provides a sense of place, of being somewhere interesting and getting to explore it, that exceeds anything so far, even Jet Set Willy. The fact that it randomises your starting point each time you play is a nice extra bonus that not only lessens annoying repetition but gives an additional impetus to work out how all of these different places fit together. When I play it, I really want to see what each new room will be like, and to find out what other new dimensions it still has to offer.
