Richard's Online Journal
Remembering Knightmare
“I’m watching you. And I am awesome.”
Growing up as a gamer in the 80s and 90s wasn’t much fun. The games were fine, at least by the standards of the time, but the idea that you could play them without being a fat, bespectacled, largely introverted geek was pretty much alien to the wider world. What? So I’m single, wear glasses, need to lose a few pounds and write about computers and videogames for a living. Your point, please? Sob…
TV programs were the worst. Every single attempt was largely horrible, in different ways. There was Gamesmaster, featuring Dominik Diamond sleazed around a stage and Dave Perry dressing as a pirate, with a few low-grade celebrities flailing around a Mortal Kombat machine. Still, probably the best UK games show — at least it focused on the games and had a good range of titles to drool over. On ITV, Bad Influence managed to be dull and annoying with its kid reviewers and ‘worthy’ features. Sky One had Games World, which was…. well… moving swiftly on. What else? Nothing of note.
Still, all of these had one thing in their favour: being better than Craig Charles’ Cyber Zone and Heaven And Hell. Ye gods. Shows this bad should be fired into space.
But there was one shining light in the darkness. Knightmare. I loved Knightmare. I would run back from school just to catch it, and be very depressed when the series ended. Its Wall Monsters were my Daleks, for some reason filling my geeky little mind with terror I can’t even attempt to justify now. I mentioned this yesterday on Twitter, and was immediately beset by people asking “What’s Knightmare?” It’s such a part of British TV history, the idea that people might not know it hadn’t really occurred to me.
Well, I can’t fit it in 140 characters. Let’s do the nostalgia thing right here…
Magic and Technology
Simply described, Knightmare was a fantasy game show. Teams of four kids were summoned to a magic dungeon watched over by Treguard, everyone’s favourite Dungeon Master. Three acted as Advisors, sitting in Treguard’s castle and watching through not-particularly carefully disguised TV monitors. The fourth was the Dungeoneer, wearing a ridiculous horned helmet, facing death or glory in the most expensive set ever created for a kids show — whole castles, underground rivers, giant dragons, icy causeways…
…okay, that’s a lie. It was almost all done on a bluescreen stage, with a handful of simple physical sets thrown in for good measure. The Dungeoneer, blindfolded for obvious reasons and utterly reliant on their teammates, was guided step by step through the virtual world, navigating rooms, solving puzzles, collecting items, and usually being insulted on a regular basis by the dungeon’s many inhabitants — some good, most bad, all hammier than a bacon sandwich wrapped in a pig. In a good way.
I could go on, but it’s easier to show than tell, and luckily True Internet Hero Gary Guyatt has uploaded the entire series to YouTube. All eight seasons. Every episode. Many in High Quality Mode. Right here. It’s not the DVD re-release that’s been talked about for years and probably won’t ever happen, but it’ll do.
Here’s a random group from Series 4 starting their quest…
Enter, Stranger…
One of the most interesting things about the game was how much it changed over the years. The first couple of seasons are… well… somewhat embarrassing. The whole show had a phenomenal stick up its arse, with every line chewing so much virtual scenery, it’s amazing there was a dungeon left to explore. The writing was unbelievably bad (and to be honest, never improved all that much), and the acting not just bad but actively obnoxious. Even the great Treguard was barely tolerable at the start.
Seriously, just check out the first episode from 1987. It got better, I swear.
What a prick. If you got through Knightmare’s dungeon, you didn’t just deserve knighthood, but a small country of your choice. It was a serious achievement. In the eight years the show ran, in which roughly 70 teams faced the dungeon, only eight actually won — and a couple of those wins were… uh… a little generous.
What makes it even worse was that if you did win the game in these early years, your prize would be quite possibly the crappiest trophy — to share between four, remember — in the history of British gameshows. I’m embarrassed just showing a picture of it.
The ‘Silver Spurs’ of Squiredom. Most likely thrown together in a key-cutting shop near the studio to a chorus of “Oh, crap, they might actually win!”
Still, none of us cared. We were here for the fantasy, and this version of Treguard and his dungeon didn’t last long. First he became friendlier, and supportive of the teams instead of mocking them. Later, he was promoted from neutral observer to active good guy, sending his Dungeoneers against the forces of evil (The Opposition), instead of simply asking them to recover random crap from his basement of doom. By Series 4, he was firmly the gruff but lovable figure everyone remembers him as, complete with less-annoying-than-I-remember sidekick Pickle (played by David Learner, who later showed up as the demon Belial in the wonderful Realms of the Haunting).
Then Pickle was replaced with Majida the genie.
We do not speak of Majida.
These changes might sound like they led to a more serious show, but that wasn’t the case. As the years rolled by, the producers increasingly switched out serious characters like Lilith and Mogdread for straight-up comic foils and parodies, not to mention freeing the world design from simple puzzle rooms into something a bit more freeform that let the kids out of the dungeon and into the fresh air. Bluescreened fresh air, of course.
This definitely changed the vibe, but made the start of each new series that much more interesting. Every year brought fresh excitement as we waited to see just what form the ever-shifting labyrinth was going to take for the latest batch of incredibly lucky kids.
There Is No Turning Back
Right from the start, Knightmare’s dungeon was a thing of beauty. Its painted backgrounds were so far advanced over anything we had on our computers, and you couldn’t knock the cool factor of a room with a giant bomb burning in the corner. The dungeon and its character-based encounters were different for every team, albeit with lots of the same rooms and environmental puzzles, meaning that neither the players in the studio or the audience at home knew exactly what was coming up next.
Even after years of the game, these early series’ backgrounds are arguably the best visual style the show had. Later it switched to using horribly posturized photos shot at ruined castles that looked neat until they had to do anything more advanced than hold a table, and finally some blocky, murky, tacky 3D that was actually pretty advanced for the time, but didn’t have the same oomph then, and now just looks unbelievably ugly next to the classic rooms of old. There was never any real consistency between styles though, even in individual episodes. Dungeoneers would happily walk from a photograph to a computer generated puzzle room without anyone batting an eyelid.
The Dungeon through the ages. Well, eight years, give or take.
“Ooooh, Nasty…”
With or without rose-tinted glasses, Knightmare was a phenomenally silly program. Yes, it was. No argument. Some bits worked, other bits really, really didn’t. It was also however a phenomenon, one that every kid of the era was hooked to — and a real slice of history. For me, one of the most fun things about looking at it now is comparing it to the games of the era that it aped. It shared much in common with them, not least that it was phenomenally, blisteringly harsh, with no tolerance for weakness. Fail to get all three Wall Monster riddles right? Expect death! Step slightly too close to a ledge? Death! Take the wrong door? Death! Screw up a clue? Death! Step even slightly out of place in the very last room of the game? Take too long? Death! Death! DEATH!
And worse. The terrifying cracked skull of failure that haunted our nightmares. Even now, this thing flying onto the screen genuinely gives me the willies…
As the show progressed, it became much more about being half an hour’s entertainment than an actual game. Players were allowed to live longer, usually getting to at least Level Two before being snuffed out. The long-winded introductions and riddle sequences were pruned in favour of stuff actually happening. And as mentioned, the dull characters of the original series were shipped out in favour of new ones, and more entertaining actors like Paul Valentine, who played Motley the jester and a few others, and Clifford Norgate, who voiced the dragon Smirkenoff and the raspberry-ripple haired mage Hordriss the Confuser. Only Treguard appeared in every series, and with good reason — nobody could say he was anything other than the show’s lynchpin.
Probably the most memorable of the new blood was Mark Knight, playing the deliciously sardonic Lord Fear. He only usually appeared in pre-recorded bits, cued by the Dungoneer using a magical spyglass, and very occasionally as the dungeon’s final boss (sadly, the dungeon’s incredibly easily defeated final boss) for the few teams that got that far, but was always terrific value. He was almost a parody of the traditional evil overlord, always smug and dripping evil, but constantly infuriated by the fools he was stuck leading. He also represented half of the game’s interesting clash between old and new, being a ‘techno-sorcerer’ who used modern idioms, built robots and lived in a 3D generated tower, as opposed to Treguard’s medieval castle and resolutely formal delivery. The two of them had a terrific rivalry, if a long-distance one.
(Random cultural note: Knight also played a couple of the good guys, including the geeky Rothberry the Apothecary, and rather unfortunately, the Chinese salesman… I apologise on behalf of my country… Ah Wok, comprete with sirry accent, les. This kid-friendly stereotype wasn’t unique to Knightmare. There was a BBC Micro game called Granny’s Garden — yes, that one — featuring another horribly racist figure, Ah Choo, in an educational game aged at ages 4 and up. Not the most cosmopolitan era, at least not if political correctness was getting in the way of a cheap gag…)
“Unberievabry lacist? Oooh! Me so velly solly…” (Thankfully he was only in one season before the producers saw sense)
As with games, these seasons spent much more of their time trying to tell a story than improving the basic rules and complexity of the experience for its players. There were story arcs bridging quests, involving things like Lord Fear trying to set up an alliance with the queen of the witches… Greystag, I think, although it’s been a while, or training up his superweapon, the Brollachan. Instead of just bumping into the characters for a riddle, teams would walk into full-on scripted situations, like a quarrel between two characters, or an ambush they had to be rescued from by a new ally.
The problem with this was that it largely destroyed the RPG side of the game. Only about three dungoneers in the show’s history — most famously Barry in Series 7 — really got into the spirit of things, trying to bargain with the characters, tricking people into helping them, or asking for favours. Very occasionally you’d get one who’d snap something back, like one girl who responded to a stream of insults from the wood elf Elita with “Look who’s talking”, only to have to apologise when she needed the abusive elf’s help to scare off some goblins. Most just stood stock still, blankly repeating whatever the advisors told them to say, even it was just telling someone their name.
Still, that made it all the more fun when a good team came along.
Lifeforce Running Out
With only the occasional exception, the show felt more and more on rails. It always had been of course, but with regular RPGs getting more and more advanced, it became harder and harder to ignore the fact. If the team wasn’t explicitly told what to do, and they increasingly were, it was heavily hinted at. Spells would be taken and used almost immediately. Spyglasses showed pre-recorded segments that offered outright solutions, like passwords to get past the monsters, what an as-yet unmet character (who would inevitably show up in the next room or two) could be bribed with, or the sequence to follow on the next floor puzzle.
Probably the most dumbed down bit of the whole show was the Brollachan, which replaced the riddle-giving Wall Monsters with an incredibly bad special effect in search of knowledge. If the teams couldn’t work out that it didn’t matter what they replied since the stupid thing didn’t know the answer either, Treguard would probably tell them almost immediately. They didn’t even have to sound convincing.
“Guys, are you sure this is a mobile phone?”
This didn’t stop it being a fun show — far from it — just less of a game. The bits with characters were effectively short pre-planned skits with no scope for messing around or affecting the story. If the team had the right objects, the character would help them past. If not, well, it’d be game over a screen or so later when they didn’t have the password or the spell, or whatever else that character would have given them. Dungeoneers were there to witness the story, not influence it.
Maybe I was just getting older, maybe the novelty had worn off. I watched Knightmare right to the bitter end, but it was increasingly obvious that while the show was awesome, the actual games I had available to me were much, much better. It was always enjoyable to watch; incredibly tense and often nerve-wracking, and the excitement of a team actually winning always meant a happy day in the classroom. But it was still an interactive movie. Without the interaction, obviously.
This was fine on one hand — they were making a TV show, not a game, and the quicker pace made it much more watchable. However, it heavily detracted from the game element. Dungeoneers still died all the time, but mostly from the environmental hazards — floor puzzles over yawning chasms, chessboards with painful jabbing spikes, quicksand and so on — screwing up on the footwork, rather than the more interesting mental challenges and roleplaying. It also started to get annoying how nobody on the show ever seemed to have watched the bloody thing, or worked out that clock directions are how you tell a blindfolded person to do diagonals, not ‘left’ and ‘right’.
Restore, Restart… Oh, You Can’t
It’s tough to remember which rooms were actually dangerous. The scariest of the lot was the Corridor of Blades, in which the Dungeoneer had to avoid giant sawblades hurtling towards them, although in practice it was about the easiest encounter in the game for teams that could keep their heads metaphorically as well as literally. Frustratingly, nobody ever apparently tried just lying down and letting the blades fly safely over them. Maybe the producers told them not to. Others were puzzle based, not too tricky, but for the timelimit. Others required good footwork and a previous clue, although a couple of teams did manage to luck their way through them.
Dammit, someone invent GameFAQs…
By far the most brutal was Play Your Cards Right, where the teams not only had to get across a small ledge from a horrible viewing angle, but choose between two cards without any hint as to what the actual rules of the game were. Same suit? Same number? Same colour? Beats me. Whatever it was, with no margin for error, it was effectively a room with several 50/50 chances of instant death. Usually only a couple of rooms from the end of the game, just to add a little insult to fatal injury.
Evil, evil, evil stuff. But evil stuff that had us all on the edges of our seats. Knightmare was one of those shows where you genuinely wanted the teams to win, not just because it was such a rarity, but because it was your only way of seeing the later rooms of the game, the new traps and twists to talk about in school in the morning. Almost everyone in my class was buzzing the first time a team actually won the game, and not just the gamers. Everyone stared in bemused horror as a losing team ended up dying for the crime of not psychically knowing they should pick up a horn to avoid being trapped behind the walls of Jericho. Seriously, that was one of the dead-ends.
And of course, everyone loved Lord Fear.
Play Along At Home
Oddly, the one thing nobody cared about was the existence of Knightmare spin-off games. I had all the books, which were a mix of schlock fantasy story and Choose Your Own Adventure (literally half and half), but I never knew anyone who owned the games.
There were two of them, both of which I later played and discovered sucked. The Amiga and ST had a dismal Dungeon Master rip-off that I’m 99% sure was just a generic RPG someone decided to salvage by slapping Treguard’s face on it, yet didn’t consider the implications of having its characters starting the game stark naked, while the Spectrum and C64 had a really bad adventure game. Konami also released a series of games called Knightmare, but they’re unrelated, coming out a year before the show on the MSX.
Anyway, here’s a clip of someone playing the Amiga/ST version.
The Quest Continues…
Rubbish videogames aside, I can’t look back on all this with anything short of nostalgic love. If you’ve never seen an episode, I’d love to know your thoughts, without the rose-tinted glasses. It was a kids show from the 80s, and has to be seen in that context, but one I’m genuinely grateful I had a chance to see at the time.
Will kids still be talking about, say, Raven in 20 years? Somehow, I doubt it. And on that note, ahem. Spellcasting: C. L. I. C. H. E. D. E. N. D. I. N. G…
UPDATE: This one ran ridiculously longer than I originally planned, so here’s the URL to the online episodes once again — ignore the Batman stuff, they’re in the right-hand column. This is currently the only way to see them, although of course I’ll take it down if the DVD project gets off the ground. And probably buy the DVDs.