Knight Lore is a 1984 action-adventure game known for popularising isometric graphics in video games. The player, as Sabreman, has been bitten by the Sabre Wulf and now transforms into a werewolf. He has 40 days to collect items throughout Melkhior the Wizard’s castle and brew a cure for his curse. The castle consists of a series of 128 rooms, each displayed on a single, non-scrolling screen.
About Knight Lore in brief
Knight Lore is a 1984 action-adventure game known for popularising isometric graphics in video games. The game was developed and published by Ultimate Play the Game and written by company founders Chris and Tim Stamper. The Stamper brothers withheld its release for a year to position the company advantageously in anticipation of the game’s effect on the market. Knight Lore’s novel image masking technique, Filmation, let images appear to pass atop and behind each other without their contents colliding. The player, as Sabreman, has been bitten by the Sabre Wulf and now transforms into a werewolf at nightfall. He has 40 days to collect items throughout Melkhior the Wizard’s castle and brew a cure for his curse. The castle consists of a series of 128 rooms, each displayed on a single, non-scrolling screen. Each castle room is depicted in monochrome on its own screen and consists of blocks to climb, obstacles to avoid, and puzzles to solve. To complete the game, the player must return 14 sequential objects from throughout the castle to the wizard’s cauldron room. At the end of thegame the player receives a final score based on the remaining time and amount of time left to complete the quest. It was the best-selling game of January 1985 and was named the 1984 game of the year by the Golden Joystick Awards and Popular Computing Weekly readers. It is regarded as a seminal work in British gaming history and has been included in multiple lists of top Spectrum games. Critics considered its technical solutions and isometric 3D style a harbinger of future game design.
When the isometric, flip-screen style fell out of fashion, Knight Lore’s influence persisted in computer role-playing games. Retrospective reviewers remember the game as the first to offer an exploratory \”world\” rather than a flat surface, but consider its controls outdated and frustrating in the thirty years since its release. In 2008 it was unofficially ported to Atari 8-bit computers based onThe BBC Micro version. It was later included in compilations including Rare’s 2015 Xbox One retrospective compilation, Rare Replay. The game ends if the player completes the potion or does not finish the task in forty days. The only directions are given through a poem included with a game’s cassette tape. Some of the castle’s monsters only attack Sabre man when he is a were wolf. He must navigate the 3D maze of stone blocks in each room, usually to retrieve a collectible object, whilst avoiding spikes and enemies, which kill him on contact. At the time of its release, the game was represented by its co-founding brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, though they provided some details to Crash magazine’s Crash magazine to tacitly support their development of Knight Lore. While Knight Lore was released as the third game in the third series, the Stamper Brothers had finished it first. Ultimate released Knight Lore third in theSabreman series despite having completed it first and used the extra time to prepare another Filmation engine.
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This page is based on the article Knight Lore published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
