Sunday 24 September 2017

To The Ice Palace Of Aesandre


RESTORATION OF A LOST KNIGHTMARE "GAMEBOOK" FROM 1993

ITV's Knightmare was one of the most popular childrens' TV shows of its era and I, like many gamebookers, am a huge fan. An obscure and lesser-known entry in the Knightmare canon is the interactive Knightmare adventures presented on Channel 4's now defunct TeleText service, playable through the use of the FastText function where coloured buttons corresponded to on-screen options allowing you to navigate your way through the screens. Normally, each day C4 ran a quiz called Bamboozle which used this system but, on a few rare occasions (believed to be just three times), a Knightmare adventure was offered in Bamboozle's usual place

Obviously, TeleText itself in its original form is now lost to time, but a web archive containing pages from TeleText was shared amongst the Knightmare fan community in mid-2017. The archive contained all of the original pages from 22nd December 1993, the day when one of the adventures (To The Ice Palace Of Aesandre) was made available. I'm not 100% certain how these pages came to be recovered, but the story goes that if you still have a functional analogue FastText television, should you also have a VHS recording from the era, Teletext pages can theoretically still be accessed. Anyhow, some wiz transferred the pages from VHS to html and put the archive up on the web. That's where myself and fellow gamebook fan Paul Kelly came into the equation. I waded through the entire day's archive, identifying which pages were relevant to the adventure (and literally everything from that day was there, including the TV guides, news, cinema listings, music charts, horoscopes, FTSE indexes, traffic reports, etc etc), filtered out duplicate pages and corrupted pages, and, armed now with a single set of adventure pages, I then set about mapping what seemed to be the logical paths of the adventure and working out which choices linked to which pages. At this juncture it's worth pointing out a quirk of TeleText which I remember well from the time and that is that, as analogue TV could sometimes have a less than fantastic reception, TeleText page characters could go haywire and appear as gibberish. And that was exactly the case here as several letters were corrupted so all of these also had to be identified ready for replacing with the correct letters. Once I had the whole thing figured out it was over to Paul Kelly to code the pages and hyperlink the choices to recreate the feel of the original, the only real difference now being that instead of coloured buttons, the player just clicks on their choice.

The end result is a fully-restored and playable reconstruction of Knightmare: To The Ice Palace Of Aesandre in as close a version as is possible to the original FastText experience.

Click HERE to play

16 comments:

  1. that must have been quite a job of work, Mark.


    well done to you both on such an excellent bit of restoration.

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  2. hope you put up a few more reviews before xmas.


    I still have not bought Port of Peril let alone played it.

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  3. I'm planning a new review that will hopefully be up ready for Christmas

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  4. great news, I look forward to that.

    have you already chosen a book to review ?

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    1. I was hoping to write a new review before Christmas but I've been working on the first gamebook in my forthcoming series which is occupying all my spare time at the moment so I think the next new review post will be in January instead

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    2. I can see how that would be time consuming.

      Whatever review you put up will be worth the wait.

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  5. I finally went to my bookstore to buy Port Of Peril only to find it had sold out !


    I will be starting my own FF blog soon to discuss this and other such matters.


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    1. What will your angle be on your Blog?

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    2. I'm aiming for something a little different from other FF blogs, a mixture of analysis, nostalgia and asking questions.


      Stay tuned !

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  6. my FF blog is now up and running :


    https://fightingfantastical.blogspot.ie/

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  7. Malthus, where fore art thou ?

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  8. I'm still here. There will be new posts soon...

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  9. Not sure if you've seen this snippet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-43518477/games-workshop-the-empire-that-began-in-a-west-london-flat
    Thanks for all the great work on your blog!

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    Replies
    1. Yes, saw that the other day. There's an article in today's Guardian about the new Higson book too... which I'll no doubt be pontificating about soon ;-)

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  10. looking forward to your verdict on GATES OF DEATH.


    I still have to read PORT OF PERIL.


    I've posted some snaps of my FF collection on my own blog.


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