On paper, Knightmare is a terrible idea. It’s a kids’ TV show that simulates the experience of playing a computer game, as if kids wouldn’t rather just play a computer game. The bulk of each episode is comprised of three children staring at a television screen and shouting at a fourth kid, who is wearing a giant hat. They are constantly interrupted by a man dressed as a camp Hobbit. It’s a game show, but winning is almost impossible, and the penalty for failure is death.
On screen, the idea fared pretty well. Knightmare ran for eight years and 112 episodes. At the height of the program’s popularity, 5 million viewers tuned in every week. It remains one of the most fondly remembered children’s shows on British television, 25 years after the first episode was broadcast.
Overseeing the madness was actor Hugo Myatt, who played Treguard, Lord of Knightmare Castle, Master of the Dungeon of Deceit. He’s an icon for an entire generation of children, an enigmatic figure who could switch from paternal concern to portentous menace in an instant, just by making his eyes go all googly. Of course, to anyone who hasn’t seen Knightmare, he’s just some guy in a glitzy doublet who hosted a ridiculous-sounding game show. “Explaining it to people who haven’t seen it has always been a tremendous problem,” said Myatt, who spoke to me in May at a London hotel.
The program was borne out of a fantasy that has probably occupied the minds of many video game players. TV producer Tim Child loved computer games but was frustrated by the impassable barrier between the real and virtual worlds. As Myatt explained, “He was playing the computer games of that era, and he thought, ‘The trouble with this is, I want to be inside the game. I don’t want to be here, fiddling with the buttons—I want to be in it.’ That’s how he came up with the concept.
“But I don’t know how you describe Knightmare,” Myatt continued. “It’s an adventure quest—that sounds dull. It’s a game show—that’s dull. It’s a unique team effort, but it’s not a very organized team…”
The program’s opening credit sequence provided a misleading introduction into how the show actually worked. It was an animation in the style of a Saturday morning cartoon, showing a square-jawed, muscular hero galloping through a decaying landscape. The pounding electro-pop soundtrack was underscored by the hammering of horse’s hooves and the crackle of lightning. The whole thing promised action, conflict, and quick-fire thrills.
In fact, the majority of the program took place in a softly lit room, complete with a roaring fire, flickering candles, and comfy chairs. There was a big television, which was quite obviously a big television despite an excessive application of papier-mâché and constant references to “the magic mirror.” Basically, the show was set in Treguard’s lounge. It was from here that he summoned the contestants brave enough to take on his dungeon. “Enter, stranger,” Treguard declared, with the kind of gravitas only possessed by men with really serious beards. “Who challenges my dungeon?”
The answer, almost inevitably, was four weedy pre-pubescents from the Home Counties, dressed in pastel-colored polo shirts and looking like they would quite like to go home now, please. Three of the team members acted as “advisors,” sitting in front of the magic mirror and making notes on enchanted clipboards. The fourth player, or “dungeoneer,” got to enter the actual dungeon.
But first he or she had to don the “Helmet of Justice,” a comically large piece of horned headgear. It restricted the wearer’s vision to the area immediately around their feet. The rationale Treguard gave for effectively blindfolding the child he was sending into a hazard-laden labyrinth was cryptic: “Your quest through the dungeon is for truth and justice. Justice, of course, is blind. When you don this helmet, you also become blind.”
The real reason the dungeoneer could not be allowed to see the dungeon was because it did not exist. In reality, he or she was walking around a big room covered floor to ceiling in blue-screen fabric. The dungeon, as seen by the advisors and the audience at home, was comprised of computer-generated backgrounds that had been touched up with an artist’s airbrush.
The advisors had to guide the dungeoneer through these virtual reality environments, mainly by shouting at them as if teaching ballroom dancing by telegram: “Side-step to your left… STOP… Now turn to your right… Walk forward… STOP.”
This should have made for terrible television. In fact, it was mesmerizing and often heart-thumpingly exciting. This was partly down to the imaginative and diverse design of the dungeon chambers. Highlights included the rooms that housed giant, cartoon-style bombs with rapidly burning fuses. The teams would often be hilariously slow to recognize the danger, forcing Treguard to intervene by stating the obvious. (”Chamber mined! Fuse running!”) Many of the rooms contained puzzles. Often these would take the form of a riddle read out by a character such as Granitas the wall monster (or as Treguard pronounced it, Granitarse). He thundered out cryptic clues like, “It swims in water but isn’t a fish. It fells great trees but isn’t an axe. Its coat is costly but isn’t a mink. What is it, then?” (“Could be a swordfish, ’cos that cuts down trees?” was one team member’s response.)
Sometimes the puzzles were based around symbols on the ground. The advisors had to guide the dungeoneer across these the correct order. There was much potential for ineptitude here—in the very first episode, it took one team a full three minutes to unlock a door by rearranging the letters “OPNE.”
But let’s not be too hard on the kids. As Myatt recalled, they were invariably overwhelmed by the experience of being on the show. They were never allowed to see Treguard out of costume or character and completely believed in the world they were entering. “The odd thing is, when the kids arrived on the set, they were totally into it within about five minutes,” he said. “The suspension of disbelief stuff just happened.”
According to Myatt, this was particularly true for the contestants who had to wear the Helmet Of Justice. Being unable to see what was going on around them enabled their imaginations to paint pictures more vivid than the computer technology could create. “Initially the helmet was thought to be a problem, but it’s actually what made the game work,” he said. “Every time they tried to get rid of the idea of the blindfolded kid, the game ceased to function. It was the blind man’s buff element that made it so exciting. I think that formula—someone frightened of the dark, three people screaming at them, the people back at home shouting, ‘No, you nincompoop, it’s the other way’—that’s what made it. In a way, it was the first interactive drama.”
The fact the contestants took the whole thing so seriously—showing real fear during the hairy moments, shedding actual tears when they lost—made it easier for the viewer at home to believe in the world of Knightmare. However, what really brought it to life was the kids’ interactions with the actors inhabiting many of the dungeon’s rooms.
They played a variety of memorable characters with humor and aplomb. There was Lillith the witch, who was homicidally wicked if teams failed to present a gift which pleased her. Cedric the mad monk, always full of rage and ready with an insult (”Quail, you miserable, misbegotten remnant of a recently discarded horse dropping…”). And Folly the jester, who was just really annoying.
This is where Knightmare had the edge over the computer games it was trying to emulate. There was nothing artificial about the intelligence of those characters. They were able to communicate with and react to the dungeoneers in ways a computer never could—guiding them, mocking them, and most importantly, listening to them. But this presented a challenge for the actors, as Myatt recalls.
“The thing a lot of people do not understand is that though it was a recorded program, we did it ‘as live,’” he said. “There were no rehearsals, because you couldn’t rehearse the children, otherwise it would no longer be a contest. We did no retakes, because again, you would have been making them into actors, which they were not. The actors in the void, as we called it, had a very hard job. They knew roughly how they were going to guide the children, but they didn’t have a script. They had to improvise. That sounds fine, but remember, you have to keep those kids on track. [The production team] tried to work out every possibility the kids could come up with. But they never did. The kids always came up with something they hadn’t thought of.”
With the children endlessly testing the rules of the world they were exploring and the actors making up dialogue as they went along, the show needed a steadying, predictable presence to keep it from dissolving into chaos. Myatt was that presence. At the start of each season he received a thick script containing details of every room the kids might encounter, all of which had to be memorized. “I had to learn every single scenario,” Myatt said. “A lot of the other actors had a lot of off-stage fun. I never did, because I was constantly learning stuff.”
As they came to understand their game better, the producers found ways to ease Myatt’s load. For instance, in the show’s first season, the path chosen by the contestants determined which rooms they would encounter, forcing the writers to prepare for all the branching possibilities. “Progressively we realized, of course, this wasn’t necessary, because the kids didn’t know. Whether they turned left or right, we could use the same scenario. So then I didn’t have quite so much to cram in.”

To the contestants, however, and to the viewers at home, choosing the correct path always seemed vitally important. Walking through the wrong doorway could mean instant death. As could picking up the wrong quest object, forgetting a password, misspelling an incantation, angering someone, messing up a riddle, taking a step left instead of right, failing to find enough random pork pies lying about and therefore running out of “life force energy,” and other fatal missteps.
One of the most memorable ways to die was by getting sliced up in the Corridor Of Blades, a long hallway through which circular saws would spin at different heights. Because it reminded them of a moving walkway of the kind found in airports, the production team codenamed it Gatwick.
“You’d get real nerds who were just games players, who were, unfortunately, lousy television. So we used to throw in a few googlies,” Myatt said. “To be honest, if they put Gatwick in when they had a really dull team, they hoped it would slice their heads off. The problem is, it wouldn’t. That’s the kind of thing they were probably good at. And then things would go back to them being dull as hell afterwards.”
If attempting to kill off contestants simply because they’re boring sounds unfair, consider the fate of those teams who happened to be playing at the end of a series. Knightmare episodes were not self-contained—the show used the “straddling” technique. As explained by Gameological editor John Teti in his analysis of UK game show The Exit List, this meant that quests were allowed to continue across several episodes, rather than begin and end within the space of one show. Treguard would announce that a “temporal shift” had occurred. Bells would toll and (with the exception of Treguard himself) everything in the world of Knightmare, from the advisors poised with pens above clipboards to the flickering flames in the fireplace, would be frozen until next week.
But there was no straddling between seasons, so if a team was halfway through a quest at the end of the final show, it was tough luck. “Your bold quest cannot be completed. This phase of the dungeon is over,” Treguard would announce, and the credits would roll.
It’s hard to imagine a game show being produced today where the contestants lose simply because the season is at an end. But part of what made the world of Knightmare feel real was the fact that unfair, arbitrary things happened within it. This set it apart from other game shows, as did the absence of a scoreboard or competing teams. The challenge was to stay alive. And unlike in computer games, there were no extra lives or “CONTINUE?” options. When you died in Knightmare, you really died.
(This was kids’ TV, of course, so Treguard was often at pains to point out that although contestants had “perished in the dungeon,” they had “survived in the reality you call your time.” But this was only after viewers had witnessed a terrifying animation of skin peeling off a skull, its jaw detaching and eyeballs rolling off into oblivion, to the sound of a booming death knell.)
The show was half-way through its second season before a team successfully made it through the dungeon. Only seven more teams followed suit over the course of all eight series. Out of 112 episodes, 104 ended with no one winning. That’s a bold tally for a game show. The extreme difficulty level provided a compelling reason to keep tuning in. It felt as if someone just HAD to win at some point, and whatever happened when they did was sure to be amazing. (What actually happened was the same as when a team lost, except the winners received a small trophy bearing the legend “Anglia Television.” To share between four of them.)
But of course, the real reason to watch every week was that you’d almost certainly get to see someone mortally wounded by a giant scorpion or plummet helplessly from a floating causeway. Kids love mortal danger, gothic horror, and watching other kids get punished with death for spelling things incorrectly. The show imparted some important lessons—that life isn’t fair, and that great endeavor is not always worth it in the end. For an entire generation of British children, it was the televisual equivalent of owning a terminally ill hamster.
And it was ideal viewing for nerdy kids exhausted by a hard day of bullying and P.E., desperate to escape to a world of dragons and wizards. Adventure game books were all right, but they were only books. Computer games were good fun, but in 1987, there was no such thing as photorealistic graphics, or even vaguely realistic graphics. An orc comprised of 8 pixels isn’t about to make anyone hide behind the sofa, but the real-life goblins of Knightmare, heralded by their terrifying horn, were the second scariest thing British children of the ’80s had to face (after the perpetual threat of global nuclear holocaust).
The program was also the perfect alternative to the brightly colored whizz-bangs of other, noisier game shows. In Fun House, for example, obnoxious children in red and yellow jumpsuits raced round a giant obstacle course in pursuit of dozens of prizes of varying quality. (“Zip through the tumbling tube for this spectacular sleeping bag!”) They were egged on by two blond cheerleaders and hundreds of screaming kids. With its slow pace, quiet discourse, and muted color palette, Knightmare was the opposite. It’s hard to visualize Treguard ever making his entrance on a scooter.
It’s also hard to imagine an adult sitting down to watch Fun House. But like all the best children’s entertainment, Knightmare was enjoyed by grown-ups, too. “We had a huge following in universities,” says Myatt. “Then I got invited to be the notional president of the Cheddar Gorge Dungeons & Dragons Association.” He accepted, “but I never heard another word from them. Whether they just have my picture on a plaque, I don’t know.”
Myatt’s real pop-star moment, he says, came when he agreed to do a signing at a computer games exhibition. “I got there, and what seemed to me like millions of kids—not only kids, half our audience was adults—pinned me against a wall. I was there for about three hours, signing photographs. At one point I got quite panicky, because I couldn’t see how I could ever get out of there. It was quite extraordinary. But hubris comes in here. When I got out, there were all these signed photographs on the ground that people had just chucked away. So much for that.”
Being Britain’s most famous overlord of a virtual fantasy dungeon wasn’t all good times. “I had two or three stalkers. I had one for five years, which was really dangerous. I had to change my phone number several times. I moved eventually.”
Sitting on the spectrum between crazy stalkers and the people who threw his photos away was an army of fans who believed totally in the Treguard character. Credit is due here to Myatt’s commitment to the role. A trained stage actor, he treated Knightmare as seriously as he would were he appearing in a show for adults. He walked the line between theatrical drama and straightforward pantomime with deftness, putting in a performance which was often subtle and always convincing. That’s a tough feat when your most famous catchphrase is “Ooooh, NASTY,” but he pulled it off, creating a character who always appeared to have his own motives, even if it wasn’t always clear what they were.
Myatt was never afraid to break the fourth wall, addressing the “watchers of illusion” directly at the start and end of each episode, and frequently mocking “the passive ones” for not having the guts to enter the dungeon themselves.
His character’s ambiguity was especially prominent during the first few seasons, when it was never exactly clear whose side Treguard was on. “I had to be both the menace and the guide, because they didn’t have a villain,” Myatt said. “So I came up with, ‘You can try it if you like, but you might DIE…’ and that sort of stuff, and that tended to carry on. Eventually they brought in the Lord Fear character, so I was no longer the enemy, and the part became a little bit more avuncular.”
As the series became more successful, the world of Knightmare expanded. New characters were introduced, such as Pickle the elf and Majida the genie. With technological advances came better special effects and more realistic backgrounds. The production budget managed to stretch to more than one trophy per team. Myatt’s doublets got glitzier, and he grew taller (“One day I went into wardrobe and saw my costume hanging up, and a note that said, ‘Dungeon master’s boots—give lifts.’”) Most notably, as the technology used to create the dungeon environments advanced, they became more diverse and began to look more realistic.
“The technology, and the guys working with it, was incredible,” Myatt said. “If you ever watch the earlier stuff done with chroma key, there were no shadows. The great thing about Knightmare is that everybody has a shadow—nobody appears to be floating in space. If you think about the state of the art, technologically speaking, and then compare it to Titanic—we were doing stuff they were just beginning to get to grips with in the film world.”
This might seem a little overblown, looking at Knightmare today. The show has not aged well. But it’s important to consider the historical context, and how much things have changed since the series ended. “With today’s technology, we’re all too blasé,” Myatt said. “You go to a see a movie, and there are things happening in 3D, and you just think, ‘So what?’”
The last series of Knightmare was broadcast in 1994. Ten years later, Tim Child produced a pilot for a sequel titled Knightmare VR. In this show, the dungeon is entirely computer-generated, as are all the characters. Even the dungeoneer, who only has one advisor this time, is represented as an avatar. Treguard appears as a poorly animated floating head. The whole thing is dreadful.
Knightmare VR was based around a misunderstanding of the original show’s appeal. It imagined that Knightmare was fun because it simulated a computer game, which was Child’s original goal. It concluded that a better simulation would make for a better show. As the pilot illustrates, it just makes for a program that is sterile and dull.
Those technological limitations forced the production team on the original show to introduce the elements that worked so well, such as the blindfold and the live action. As Myatt put it: “Knightmare was an accidental formula that was brilliant. I’m not knocking Tim. It was his idea, and it was great because he did it. I think quite a lot of it was a happy accident.”
The end result was a hybrid of a fun computer game and a thrilling stage play. It was great not because it simulated a computer game, but because it simulated an adventure. It was the experience of exploring a real fantasy world. Oxymoronic but true. Solving puzzles, collecting treasures, talking to wizards, and facing death at every turn, spurred on all the while by your best friends and mad old uncle—now that’s a great idea for a TV show.

Words by Ellie Gibson. Illustrations by Keith Vincent.
Again, another game with which I am only familiar thanks to Spoony. It looks pretty stupid but had I been around when this was aired I probably would have been all over it.
Yeah, it’s sad to think that I spent the early-90s watching Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and the Ralph Baksshi Lord of the Rings, while the UK had a superior amalgam of the two. Just like I’m bummed that I never played Daggerfall on my Presario.
I lived in Edinburgh for six months in 1989 and this was must-watch TV for me. I was about the same age as most of the contestants, obsessed with computers and fantasy, and having a fairly unhappy time in a country that didn’t seem very accepting of me (though to be fair I wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular back home). Ellie’s right that the basic concept just seems so stupid, and frankly it was, but it worked so well. One thing which helps is that though many of the challenges were ridiculously easy (like OPNE), many of them were equally ridiculously hard. Don’t remember if I ever saw anyone win, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t.
I love pone. Yum!
Nope, peon!
Remember the golden rule: ALWAYS TURN RIGHT IN A DUNGEON!
That has got us through a number of D&D games..
This article is not complete without Knightmare’s all time most legendary epic moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciIfcYwI6Ps
God dammit, Simon.
This is great. That poor kid. I haven’t heard of this show before now, but holy shit am I in love with it.
I prefer to think that the “sidestep left” was intentional – bitter revenge born of a long-simmering and long-buried personal vendetta. The kid held back a smile as his helpless partner tumbled into the chasm. Anywho, the Welsh, amirite?
Simon should pick friends with a better sense of left and right. Between this and the Region B Blu-Ray of Suspiria, I guess I grew up on the wrong continent.
There was another review which picked up on some British people’s verbal tic of ending a sentence with “right”, right? So If you’re telling someone to go left, the last word you say really ought to be “left”, right?
I am SO JEALOUS that I’ve never seen this show! I watched tons of Double Dare and Finders Keepers because the obstacle course and house were places I wanted to explore, a game show like this would have been my favorite!
The adults in the Crystal Maze had a lot less brainpower than the average child in Knightmare and the puzzles were much easier…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U68PUwXUoQ
“Send for the child of 3!”
“On his way”
—
Lorcan Nagle
I have no idea why Patrick Moore kept showing up as a cybernetic god, but I’m glad he did. Gamesmaster was fun but respectful. In recent years more video game shows have been showing a total lack of understanding for their audience.
Knightmare was a great show wasn’t it? Shame it kept starting pretty much as school ended, so I always missed the first ten minutes.
This scared the bejesus out of me as kid, but I couldn’t resist the animated face (which served as the health bar) as it always seemed to fall apart the most inappropriate time. I also remember that there was a fantasy themed kids party place in a converted warehouse where I grew up in Coventry which was clearly riding Knightmare’s popularity.
This had a really dense atmosphere for a kid’s show! I couldn’t watch it as I found it unbearably tense
the portly pixie? yeah, that place was something else…
Sooo… has anyone played the Amiga tie-in game, Knightmare? Stupendously difficulty Dungeon Master clone by Tony Crowther (creator of CAPTIVE). Awesome game, full of diverse monster and weapons, but bloody hell it was hard.
I haven’t played the Amiga game, but I do have the Knightmare adventure gamebook.
I did! I loved it to pieces, and didn’t discover it was based on a TV show until much, much later.
Turns out the game’s theme music (by the late, great Richard Joseph) was not only a spot-on remix of the show’s theme but actually kind of an improvement.
Damn, had I grown up in England, I would have loved the holy hell out of this show. Too bad I didn’t have BBC as a kid, otherwise I could have experienced great fun. I’m glad the article and head actor of this show pointed out that just because something has the fanciest of graphics, doesn’t really make it more “real” or “immersive”, sometimes it calls for a bit more suspension of disbelief, a little stage craft, or just a little bit of that something you just can’t quite describe to make something stand out.
It was on ITV thats the other English channel and yes it was bloody good to. When I was a kid I was dead envious of the little shits that were on that show.
Definitely! No programming can totally replace human interaction.
I was so excited when Neverwinter Nights first came out, hearing that you could set up adventures and act as a DM in multiplayer mode, dropping in monsters and rewards on the fly. Then of course it was released, and I learned that, once again, I would have to learn a $*%^ing programming language just to get anything done. They didn’t even have pre-programmed shopkeeper NPCs, for cripes sake!
That’s always the big problem with creation tools or sometimes indie games…”Hey we love programming, you should too! The only reason you’re doing this is because you’ve mastered JAVA and C++ right?” It can be irritating to someone who doesn’t have 2 years of codework under their belt.
this is fucking awesome
We had some US games that were similar to this on Nickelodeon — I’m thinking of like a mash-up between Nick Arcade and Legends of the Hidden Temple.
Boy, I miss all that stuff. You’d think that the technology of today could come up with something to compete with the classics of the ’90s.
Nick Arcade was also immediately what I thought of. I didn’t have cable, so I only saw it when I was over at my grandparents’ house. I never understood what the contestants saw or how they would know when to duck, jump, etc.
I just love these themed pages.
As for Knightmare (and its ilk), reminds me of the ‘adventure’ game shows for kids I watched when I grew up in 90s Australia, in particular one called “A*Mazing”. Rather than a fantasy setting, there was a big ‘maze’ that the winning team got to play through for a chance to win… Game Boys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXML-9IzSDg#t=572s
The video game influence was not-so-subtle in the show, at one point teams versed each other in a round of (Super) Mario Kart (64).
” I just love these themed pages.”
Seriously. These special features are always a treat.
I went to that computer expo thing he mentions above, I knew the guys playing Treguard and his elf buddy were there. I spent all day working up the courage to go over and get their autographs, and by the time I did, they’d left.
It’s my Homer and Mr T moment, and it never stops hurting.
Every time I meet someone I’m a big fan of, my mind goes completely blank and my mouth won’t work. My wife and I met Penn and Teller after one of their shows in Vegas last year, and I don’t think I said a single word to them, just smiled and posed for cameraphone pics. Richard Dawkins got a “thank you very much” from me a month or two ago at a book signing, but he didn’t even respond.
Knightmare! This show was my life on Friday afternoons as a kid. There’s no doubt that, along with reading the Hobbit, this started my long dedication to fantasy, science-fiction, roleplaying and gaming in general.
The UK has an excellent track record for children’s television, gameshows in particular. I’m sure there must have been some inspiration for Knightmare from The Adventure Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_Game), which the creator specifically called out as trying to make a televised Dungeons and Dragons. It’s difficult to describe quite *why* Knightmare was so appealing. I’m sure part of it was the fact that the kids were all obvious nerds, right there on television, just like me, down to the terrible pullovers. And the game was so difficult; there was finally a reason to know a whole bunch of pointless facts you learned visiting museums, and to take careful notes, and to know your left from right. It often felt like choose your own adventure, or fighting fantasy, or an Usbourne puzzle book, all of which I was equally obsessed with.
Years later, despite being older and wiser, I still became hooked on Raven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_(BBC_TV_series)) because it also had that suspension of disbelief about it. Everything was so evocative, even though the kids were obviously in harnesses or fighting each other with larp weapons. This show won awards, lasted multiple series, spun off into various specials, including one filmed in India which was just excellent viewing. I am sure that in ten years, kids that grew up watching this show will become the nerds of the future, though with far more acceptance.
I also think that acceptance and tolerance were key to giving these shows broad appeal. There were far more teams of boys than girls on Knightmare, but there were teams of girls, and they were just as nerdy and just as capable. The NPC characters featured strong-willed (and usually elven) women like Elita and Gwendoline. In Raven, they made a considerable effort to feature contestants with disabilities, and they gave them no special help. This did mean that one poor boy who only had one full arm suffered a bit on a swimming challenge, but my god he could climb a tree fast.
Anyway, I shall leave you with my favourite Knightmare moment from series 4. It’s a team that go on to win, which is no surprise when you see how their dungeoneer really *sells* that brandy in order to poison a poor monk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W7S_huO9C4
I think my favorite part of that link is the comment from one of the YouTube users (it must be a remarkable show if has such a pleasant YouTube comment board) that the dungeoneer grew up to be his high school biology teacher. You don’t generally get a sense of what pint-sized TV contestants grow up to do unless they’re celebrities or murderers.
The fansite http://www.knightmare.com has some interviews with previous contestants if I recall, but their links are kind of screwed up. I found one with a winning team member: http://knightmare.com/behind/experiences/73-series-5-team-4/1027-series-5-team-4-overview
And with “Usborne Puzzle Adventures” you’ve sent me down another nostalgic rabbit-hole to my Pre-K years in the UK. I played through the “Dinosaur Adventure” one so many times. Good gravy, no wonder I turned out such a nerd.
And now part of me is contemplating importing the Usborne puzzle adventure omnibus books…
I looked them up on Amazon recently and was pleasantly surprised to find they’re still available. I think the puzzles might be a little simple compared to the Guardian cryptic crossword though.
I kind of want to get a full set of omnibi for any of my friends with kids. Except that the few friends I have with kids have, like, toddlers. I had forgotten how cool those things are.
I loved the one Usborne Puzzle Adventures book I would always borrow from my primary school library called “Ghost in the Mirror”, even though I hardly got the puzzles right in the first go.
Yes indeed! I remember these! They were fantastic, and piqued my interest around the same time as the classic labyrinthine text Maze (which is awesomely online now: http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/holt/books/maze/).
If I’m remembering the Usborne Puzzle Adventures correctly, there was a higher difficulty series (Masters? Geniuses?) that was at least as challenging as a Professor Layton’s late-game puzzles, and I’m sorry that we don’t see more of these. I’ll bring up one other light puzzle book series, though, which is also getting a reprint (or online treatment): Lone Wolf. Choose Your Own Adventure + pen/paper combat and skill advancement . . . take *THAT*, Fallout!
The Adventure Game was awesome at the time. It had inspired weirdness like how the alien leader chose mainly to appear as a house plant.
There are many full episodes of The Adventure Show on Youtube. I got slightly addicted a few weeks back.
—
Lorcan Nagle
Yes, I loved the Adventure Game too. A hybrid of surrealism, sci-fi and simple logic puzzles. A backwards talking Australian, green cheese rolls, “Gronda! Gronda!” The fact that we’d already seen the puzzles in previous episodes meant we knew the solutions whereas the teams didn’t, adding to the “shout at the telly” factor. And in one series, deviously enough, in each episode one of the contestants was actually a mole trying to hinder the rest of the team.
And almost all the nomenclature was anagrams of ‘dragon’
Indeed. No relation though.
There’s a tabletop gaming convention in Belfast that did live-action Knightmare a few years ago. They set up a bunch of rooms with green screen, blindfold one player who had to go through and get advice from three other players.
there’s a not-great video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCe01tJL59A
There was also an amazing live-action show done at the Brick’s Video Game Theater Festival two years ago called “Brain Explode,” in which members of the audience attempted to instruct the main character in how to properly defeat his nemesis and disarm the bomb in his brain before the timer ran out. I know I’m a sucker for interactive/participatory theater, but it was a damn good production, too.
This is an awesome write-up. For ages, this show only existed in my mind as a sort of half-memory – I’m pretty sure I only saw a single episode on UK TV around age 4 before moving to the States, but I remember being enraptured by it, and it obviously left enough of an impression that I remember it 25 years later after such a brief encounter. It’s great to have that vague, partial recollection of a shouting beard superimposed over a CG dungeon, while a pulsing heartbeat accompanied a rapidly deteriorating skull, fleshed out and contextualized.
How many people pawed uselessly at their monitor with a cloth, believing it to be very dusty?
“Where am I?”
“You’re in some kind of comment thread… er… there’s a load of British people in their 20s and 30s fitting their tits off in some sort of wild Nostalgiagasm”
“Beware, Team! You must move quickly if you wish to escape a wasted afternoon”
To this day, whenever someone has call to ask ‘Where am I?” (it comes up surprisingly often in gaming), the immediate response from my friends is “You’re in a room!”
Spellcasting: C O M M E N T C A T
(Also I would dispute the characterisation of an afternoon spent watching Knightmare clips on YouTube as “wasted”.)
Great article, by the way. Interesting aside- at the same time as this was on, one of my first introductions to the world of Computer Science was the language Logo. Logo was about moving a robot equipped with a pen around a sheet of paper, and there’s a number of connections between it and Knightmare in my mind.
Firstly, where Logo let me move an actual robot by typing something into a computer, Knightmare was a computer game made real. I remember that both seemed like things that had fallen out of the future.
And secondly, both were mainly used to say “Take a step to the left. Take another step to the left. Take another step to the left. OK, now go forward”*
*technically the idea of ‘stepping left’ doesn’t exit Logo, as the robot can only rotate, move forward, and move backward. ‘Left’, ‘Right’, and ‘Forward’ are also all primitive commands, so you could never write “Step Left” and a direction without the computer showing an error. You’d have to write something like:
to stepLeft
left 90
forward 10
right 90
end
repeat 3 [stepLeft]
foward 10
…and I never had enough access to the Logo computer at the time to work out how to write that. I maintain that the above joke can still be proved part of the ‘funny’ set.
Reminds me of the edutainment game Logic Quest, made by the same company as the Reader Rabbit and Super Solvers games. It was all about wandering through a medieval-themed building flipping switches in the correct order to collect pieces of a humanoid robot, who you would then have to program (i.e. go forward, turn left, etc.) to pick up a key and use it to unlock a door. Pretty damn hard for kids, but you had to admire the ambition of it, using early 3-D graphics and teaching basic logic and programming.
Ah, Super Solvers. The best one had you exploring several abandoned temples, dodging enemies while also solving environmental mirror puzzles and learning how to flip switches to open doors and change conveyor belt directions. There were also the math-based ones where you had to navigate submarines while solving equations, or defeat robots that had locked up the school by “hacking” their basic math. All great edutainment, and I really don’t understand where these games have gone.
Sadly, I don’t remember Logic Quest. That would’ve been the one more up my alley, I think. Ah, well. There were plenty of other games out there.
Well, that sent me straight to Wikipedia. The temple game you’re referring to is “Challenge of the Ancient Empires,” which I’d genuinely never heard of, despite having played every other Super Solvers game obsessively as a kid. The submarine one is “Operation Neptune,” which is actually a standalone game, not Super Solvers-related. The robot ones are really two games, “Midnight Rescue” (the one set in a school, which was reading-based) and “OutNumbered!” (the math-based one set in a TV station). You actually defeated the robots by zapping them with a camera or remote control, and the puzzles were to open doors and find clues. Fun games all.
The reason they’re not around anymore outside of bargain-bin Wii ports and compilation discs is that the company was bought several times over and is now a subsidiary of Houghton-Mifflin. Nowadays it looks like they focus on making Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail variations and some licensed stuff. The rest fell by the wayside. Alas Morty Maxwell, Master of Mischief, we hardly knew ye.
@His_Space_Holiness:disqus Isn’t it great that we have a forum like this to reminisce about games like these? Including ones we’ve never heard of? If you’re going to keep releasing Carmen Sandiego or Oregon Trail properties, especially in the IOS era, it seems silly not to dust off some of your other properties, especially if all you have to do is port ’em. (If they really do exist as Wii compilations, why not just add ’em to the shop? Can’t be that hard….)
And thanks for setting me straight — I was conflating “Midnight Rescue” and “OutNumbered!” in my mind, and if “Operation Neptune” wasn’t one of theirs, well, it sure felt like it! “Challenge of the Ancient Empires,” though — that’s gold.
I spent countless hours in school playing edutainment games. For some reason the teachers thought it was good that I spent every lunchtime sitting in the computer room playing on the old Acorns.
I can’t remember many of the names of the games sadly, but favourites included the Crystal Rainforest (that had some damned hard geometry), a series where you did archaeology and time-travelled to find out about the objects, a game where you had to find the kraken, and of course the Crystal Maze.
It would be nice to have a feature on those sorts of games actually. They would always get packaged with family computer purchases, and I’m sure they must have been big business at the time.
Wait, Logo was a turtle icon, wasn’t it? This was the first programming language I used — and pretty much the only — back when computer labs were first coming to elementary schools. I was more interested in Mario Teaches Typing and Mavis Beacon, since that was something I was so clearly able to excel at. Now that auto-dictate software is becoming popular, I’m regretting not investing more fully in the logic-based scripting of computer programming. Though I suppose it’s never too late for me to go back and learn, since I have the fundamentals of nested-for loops down cold.
Oh. And for your step left example, don’t forget to use the “pen up”/”pen down” command, lest your cursor draw the path you’re taking!
I LOLed so hard at this I snorted. This sounds like a quintessentially British program.
Excellent write up – it’s one of these shows that stays with you well in to adulthood (I’m 32 now)
“TRUTH ACCEPTED”
FALSEHOOD
Amazing feature, thanks Ellie! I always thought someone should bring Hugo Myatt back as a character in some sort of TV adventure game, there’d be four million viewers and a talking point instantly.
I always like to bring this up at relevant junctures, Tim Child was good enough to do an interview with me for the show’s 20th anniversary five years ago. He was entertainingly candid:
http://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?page_id=193
“I don’t like wasting good adventures on poor teams, and the cast felt the same. ‘Kill them Tim’, they’d say to me in the corridor. ‘This lot are pathetic.’” Brilliant stuff, BB.
He was memorably invited onto Dick & Dom in da Bungalow (it’s better than it sounds for those who’ve not seen it) to sit in a cage all day until saying “Oooh, nasty!” at the end.
“Come on team, you’ll be DAMMED if you don’t get this one.” Hee hee. Great article, and how have so many of us never heard of this?!
Me and three friends got through the audition process for this and were one of the ten teams for the first season. We had to go up to Manchester for a second audition which involved playing a mock up of the game.
Finally, a team won it and took up 4 or 5 episodes so a couple of teams, including ours, were bumped. And then for the next season, we were over the age limit they had. Boo hoo.
We got the first audition on the basis of a letter I wrote in, talking about our love for dungeons and dragons. D&D was a big deal in the UK at that time and the show was a good bet.
Bravo, shame you never made it!
I am entirely jealous of you for living in a country where loving Dungeons and Dragons was considered an asset, not a liability. Damn fundamentalists are ruining the USA.
Uh… I’m pretty sure that @andy_best:disqus was not viewed all that positively by most of his English peers for being a big ol’ geek. Knowing all your Magic cards would do you well at the local Nerdcon in the US, but it would still get you wedgied all to hell at school.
When the satanic panic thing hit in the 80s, D&D was largely unaffected by it in the UK. When they brought out the demon free 2nd Edition, we were non-plussed and ignored it.
Dammit! A great comment and I’ve already used my Comment Cat spell. Oh well, I’ll just go out this door on the right. [goes out through door on left]
Don’t worry, you’ll be able to use the spell again next week.
Oh, er…
I loved Knightmare as a kid. I have fond memories of racing home after school to watch it. This sketch brilliantly sums up what the show was like –
http://youtu.be/ERLLUoZn0mM
I always found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1GTv03bCbA to be the most amusing spoof. “Public school filth!”
Haha! “Turn to the left, take a step forward, and KICK! Now swing your right arm!”
No no! TO THE RIGHT, TO THE RIGHT!
Limmy was obviously a big fan of Knightmare, Adventure Call and Falconhoof own it a big debt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKD5pKzzXvU
I’ve nothing more to add, other than that this an excellent read.
Loving your work at Eurogamer, Gibson
Great write up – sounds very interesting. I’m sure I would have been into it if it was in the States when I was a kid.
Here is a great clip…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9JlJkkM56M
Your health is low. Do you have any potions, or food?
I still have some episodes on videotape – they were useful for finishing up the odd 25 minutes. For the last couple of seasons the backgrounds, rather than being drawn, were filmed at Great British Landmarks (mainly the Weald and Downland Museum) and put through filters to get a fluorescent effect. Lost on the contestants, but adding a new educational dimension for the viewers.
Loved Knightmare, just remembered The Adventure Game that predates everything made in 1980 and used the BBC Micro for its graphics. Just as nuts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi0RPiAbs_w
I loved this programme so much when I was 8. I would rush home to see the next episode of Knightmare. The tension was built fantastically with 80’s electronica, actors and sets getting more intense as the quest progressed. Great article!
Anyone know how long it would take to film one team? Was it done in one long take then broken up into shows? Or did the contestants travel back-and-forth for each week’s shoot?
This is why I love Dark Souls.
CITV this Saturday and Sunday at 14:00
Time for a trip down memory lane…
We didn’t have much in the way of video games back then! I did hate it as a kid though.
Brilliant artical. You make so many valid points, growing up watching this makes me wish they would bring it back.
There are, in fact, plans to run a Knightmare Convention in the original Knightmare studios. Attendees will apparently even be able to play a room of the original dungeon. Check it out:
http://igg.me/at/knightmare-convention/x/5572237
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