It’s high summer 1987, and after a week away from your beloved Spectrum, you’re faced with the choice of which new game you play first – Ghosts ‘n Goblins or Southern Belle (see previous post). Only ever going to be one winner, especially when you’ve spent the last couple of years reading about a stunning looking arcade game where you fight your way through a graveyard to rescue a princess from The Great Demon Lord himself! 

By this point, I was into Slayer and I’d seen The Omen, An American Werewolf in London and Poltergeist, and had a good idea of where my cultural bread was going to be buttered for the rest of my life, so was always going to be attracted to something like this. Released by Elite on home computers in 1986, this devilish platformer sees your knight in monochrome armour going from the most iconic graveyard ever to a forest, a ghost town then various bits of a castle, shooting various types of pick-up-able weapons at zombies, bats, crows, skeletons, Satan and some exotic looking demons. 

In reality though, you’re jumping over gravestones and shooting skeletons and zombies for a few seconds before losing your armour and running about in your pants for a bit before dying and restarting. I think at the height of my expertise I got to the first boss, a winged demon that bounced around at you. Funny thing is I never thought about it being that difficult – which retrospectively I now know it to be notoriously so in the history of gaming! I was more than happy in that graveyard, and never even considered there being more to the game than this. (Which ironically there wasn’t much more of on the Spectrum). Just die and restart without too much frustration, which is one of the many qualities that makes this a classic of the eighties on any platform and one of the best games ever. 

The Spectrum version looked just like the arcade, minus the colour. That’s not to say it wasn’t colourful – tons of colour clash all over the place and because Arthur took on the colour of the background, you often found yourself lost in it! Unfortunately the sound didn’t translate so well, but met the usual low expectations. It played great though, and I can still feel the stiffness of the Atari joystick as it got wrenched from left to right and back again to chuck swords at enemies coming from all sides. An absolute classic, until your best friend got it on C64… Now that graveyard really is iconic!

See you next time. 

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