A free, officially licensed game based on classic UK children’s TV show Knightmare is in development
The point-and-click game includes voice acting by the original cast
A game based on the classic UK children’s television show Knightmare is in development.
Knightmare ran on ITV from 1987 to 1994 and saw teams of four children trying to make their way through a hazard-filled dungeon.
One contestant would be the ‘Dungeoneer’ and would explore the dungeon, which was generated with a bluescreen and was created using a combination of CG and hand-drawn art. They were made to wear a large helmet that made it impossible to see anything, other than what was directly below them (enabling them to pick things up from a table, for example).
The other three contestants sat in a studio with the dungeon master Treguard, watching the Dungeoneer on a monitor and shouting out instructions to guide them around the dungeon.
Now a point-and-click adventure game based on the show is set to release on PC next year, as a free indie title, to mark the show’s 40th anniversary.
Developed by a team led by writer and designer Ewen Watson, the Knightmare game is officially licensed, with creator Tim Child granting the team permission to create it.
The game will contain voice acting from the original TV show’s cast, including Hugo Myatt (Treguard), Mark Knight (Lord Fear), Clifford Barry (Brother Strange), Edmund Dehn (Gumboil the Knight), Iona Kennedy (Greystagg), Paul Valentine (Motley the Jester) and Alec Westwood (Folly the Jester).
According to Watson, all the game’s graphics were hand-drawn, and there’s no use of AI whatsoever. “Everything you see and hear is made by real humans,” he says.
Changes have also been made to the show’s structure, to make it more entertaining as a game. Most notable, players no longer have a ‘life force’ which wears away if they don’t eat food. “We encourage players to take their time and explore,” Watson says.
According to Watson, the game will only be a short adventure which takes one or two hours to play, but will be entirely free. There are no plans to release it on console as a result of this.
This will actually be the third game based on Knightmare. In 1987, Activision released an adventure game on Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Atari ST, where players walked around with a joystick and typed in commands with the keyboard.
Mindscape then released another Knightmare game, also based on the show, in 1991. This was instead a first-person dungeon crawler game similar to the Dungeon Master series.
