16-Bit Boy: Knightmare

16-Bit Boy is a regular column by resident retro-head Michael Sterrett, exploring the delights of gaming eras gone by. This time: an 80s/90s kids’ TV show that blurred the lines between television and videogames…

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:- do I wake or sleep? – John Keats

Old John boy really hit the nail on the head with his brilliant Ode to a Nightingale, and I often find myself questioning the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the conscious and the subconscious. I have, on many occasions, woken from a dream or nightmare believing it to have actually occurred, and am often reminded of a time when, as a child, I awoke from one such dream furiously convinced that a pair of brown gloves had been stolen from me.

“What type of gloves?” my confused father asked me. “Just gloves!” I raged for around half an hour, until I finally conceded that I had dreamt the whole thing. Similarly, I regularly find myself slipping into reverie thinking of a creepy, badly lit pub in which some of my most potent night terrors have occurred. And somewhere in the back of my mind I am convinced that, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, it is that awful tap room that awaits me, like something from an episode of Night Gallery.

The relevance of this hypothesising is that only the other day I had to seriously question whether or not a memory from years ago was real or simply the product of a warped, deluded brain funk. The subject of my conundrum was the ITV kids’ show Knightmare. A quick search on YouTube and it all came flooding back like a repressed memory of playing “secret games” with an skeleton-faced paedophile.

From the screeching synthesisers of the animated opening credits, to the presence of the cloaked and bearded Dungeon Keeper Treguard, everything about Knightmare is frankly mental. The show consists of three rather earnest looking youths guiding a fourth member of their team through a virtual reality netherworld in which they have to solve riddles, interact with beguiling characters and essentially just stay alive. In fact, Knightmare has an admirably lax approach to child mortality, with Treguard even stating at one point, “Will they survive? Who Knows? Who cares?” Even more cool is the graphic representation of the contestant running out of life force: a decomposing human head and the sound of a heart beat and a tolling bell. You don’t get that in Balamory, do you?

CONFUSED?
Knightmare was extremely ahead of its time on many levels, not least of which are the computer generated landscapes and interactivity that actually placed a nerdy little kid wearing a massive helmet into the game itself. This was brilliantly achieved through what appears to be a combination of blue screen and hand-drawn backdrops: strange techno purgatories through which the intrepid contestant must journey, encountering all manner of freakish goblins, wizards and mythical creatures. Said contestant’s view is obscured by a helmet so large that it looks like it could do serious damage to one’s spine in later life, meaning that upon entering a new scenario they must ask, “Where am I?” As the game progresses, becoming increasingly unnerving, this question takes on a rather existential aspect, to the extent that by the end of a programme it wouldn’t be surprising if the question became, “Where am I? When am I? Who am I? What the hell is going on?”

My love and fascination with Knightmare is probably the closest I have ever come to one of those online role-playing games that seem so popular with socially dysfunctional Tolkien fans, but thankfully, by the time the show was cancelled in 1994, I was too busy cutting the sleeves off my denim jacket, rocking out to The Scorpion’s ‘Winds of Change’ and hunting down the exact kind of bandana worn by Axl Rose to be bothered with any of that malarkey. But still, I am left with that odd sense that somehow Knightmare blurred the fabric of my reality. As Prospero says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

…We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with sleep.

By Michael Sterrett