Knight Lore

Knight Lore
Developer(s)	Ultimate Play the Game
Publisher(s)	Ultimate Play the Game
Designer(s)	Tim and Chris Stamper
Series	Sabreman
Engine	Filmation
Platform(s)	ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Famicom Disk System
Release	November 1984
Genre(s)	Action-adventure, isometric platformer
Mode(s)	Single-player

Review scores
Publication	Score
Amstrad Action	Amstrad: 95%
Amtix	Amstrad: 91%
CVG	Spectrum: 9/10
Crash	Spectrum: 94%
Eurogamer	8/10
Sinclair User	Spectrum: 9/10
Your Spectrum	Spectrum: 14/15

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. In Knight Lore, the player-character Sabreman has forty days to collect objects throughout a castle and brew a cure to his werewolf curse. Each castle room is depicted in monochrome on its own screen and consists of blocks to climb, obstacles to avoid, and puzzles to solve.

Ultimate released Knight Lore third in the Sabreman series despite having completed it first. 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. This created the illusion of depth priority, which the computer did not natively support. By delaying Knight Lore's release, Ultimate protected sales of their upcoming Sabre Wulf and created another Filmation game before other developers could copy the style. Ultimate released the original Sabreman trilogy in quick succession in 1984 for the ZX Spectrum. Knight Lore came last, in November. Ports followed for the BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, MSX, and Famicom Disk System. The game was later included in compilations including Rare's 2015 Xbox One retrospective compilation, Rare Replay.

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