Today is August 30th, and the delivery date of my child is due in 5 days… the bag for the hospital is ready, and a changing table notably appeared in my “retrogaming man cave”. Irrespective of how things happen, and how you’ll likely lose your personal space to a small human, it’s time to take a look at this side of the tape 5.
Enjoy the trip to Tape 5, Side B!
- Sport of kings, Mastertronic, 1986
- Colony, Mastertronic, 1987
- Spellbound, Mastertronic, 1985
- Hero of the Golden Talisman, Mr Chip Software, 1986
- Knight Tyme, David Jones, 1986
- Energy Warrior, Mastertronic, 1987
- Molecule Man, Mastertronic, 1986
I want to dedicate this post to the Magic Knight series since two of the games are in this tape. The series remarkably has a Wikipedia page, a fact that demonstrates that the games left a trace (although not too big) into gaming history.
Magic Knight is a computer game character created by freelance programmer David Jones for the 1985 game Finders Keepers on the Mastertronic budget label. Finders Keepers is a flip-screen platform game released on the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Commodore 64. The game spawned three additional sequels (also starring Magic Knight) on the Mastertronic Added Dimension budget label: Spellbound (1985), Knight Tyme (1986) and Stormbringer (1987). The three sequels are far less action-orientated, being effectively graphic adventure games that use a basic menu system (dubbed “Windimation”) for Magic Knight to interact with characters and items instead of typed commands.
When I played these games in the eighties I was a child. I never went too far. I tried again these days, and I must admit that I enjoyed the games, being some of the best adventures I found in the Amstrad CPC games I know. The mix of platform and puzzle, with a splash of character management, makes everything quite interesting and challenging. Nonetheless, the games are still quite complicated and far from being straightforward. I assume that beta-testing and user experience were not top priorities of budget game developers in the eighties.
The author of the games is Mr David Jones. I looked for him and I found out that he has a Facebook page which is not very active, dedicated to his famous character. The page was active between 2016 and 2020, with some updates and projects (including a beautiful t-shirt on eBay). A blog was also “under construction”, but it’s not moving forward as of 2022.
The Magic Knight games were released on cassette for numerous home computers including the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, and Commodore 64. Many of these games were published by Mastertronic, who were known for publishing high-quality games at budget prices. David said “I received royalties of 10p per cassette sold, which doesn’t sound a lot today – but when you sold 300,000 copies of a game, that’s quite a lot of money.”
In 2019 David Jones donated his old TRS-80 computer used to develop the games to the Centre for Computing History, in the UK. David’s TRS-80 computer also came with many floppy disks and a 15-megabyte hard disk that contained the original source code and assets for many of his games.
I went through the material he donated to the museum, and I found incredibly interesting material, like handmade maps, sprites, and manuals. I also have the same copy of Prince of Persia for Amstrad CPC. This is the complete list:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56197/The-David-Jones-Collection/
The work of preservation of these people is incredible, I will definitely visit the museum sooner or later when I’m in the UK.
Too Old For That 