Is the cheat code fake?

According to Backdoor Cheats, 5 April 1995, there is a cheat in Knightmare:

This cheat involves the woodland section on the first level. Use the spade to help you find the five apples. Take these apples and throw them at the quest sheild that hangs on the wall, and make each character consume two rabbit pies from the inventory screen. Continue with your quest and you should find that your hit points never decreased.

Is it real?

Testing it by memory-editing in apples and rabbit pies appears to show that the cheat is completely fake. While I haven’t fully verified it yet in the game code, in the context of other research, this cheat appears to be false.

Source

Games-X magazine, 26 March to 1 April 1992, page 28, featured the earliest known version of this cheat:

Nice little tip this one from a Mr Uli Ingit from Scunthorpe who has apparently been playing the game since it was first released. The cheat involves the woodland section on the first level. Search for the spade in order to find the apples and then take five of them to the shield that hangs on the wall.

Throw all five apples into the quest shield and then make each character consume two rabbit pies from the inventory screen. Now continue with your quest and you should find that your hit points never go down!

The language used clearly shows that this is an ancestor of the popularly circulated version; e.g. “involves the woodland section on the first level”.

Given that it’s the magazine’s April 1st issue, it seems likely that this was a fake. The submitter’s name is also a clue: “Uli Ingit” is pronounced “You lying git”.

The cheat nevertheless circulated to other magazines and cheat disks. Postcard Man’s cheats list added a version of the cheat between 10 February 1992 and 16 July 1992:

This cheat involves the woodland section on the first level. Use the spade to help you find the five apples. Take these apples and throw them at the quest shield that hangs on the wall, and make each character consume two rabbit pies from the inventory screen. Continue with your quest and you should find that your hit points never decrease.

Note how it’s slightly re-worded from the Games-X version, erroneously interpreting that there are only five apples in the section.

It was re-phrased in Zero issue 34, August (1992, at best guess), page 56:

Here’s a bit of a tip to make this game less of a nightmare to play (not that it is a nightmare in the first place, you understand). Er… anyway, in the woods on the first section, use your spade to find five apples. Take the apples and hurl them at the quest shield on hanging on the wall, then make each of your group eat two rabbit pies from the inventory screen - whether they like them or not! Now your hit points won’t sap your energy levels.

The Postcard Man wording of the cheat was repeated in this form in various cheats disks and magazines, including The Ultimate Cheat Disk dated 10 June 1993; The One May 1995, page 72; and Backdoor Cheats, the latter of which added misspellings. A Discmaster search shows it repeated in various cheats compendiums between 1992 and 2001, including some repeating the misspelling “KNIGHMARE”.

The phrase “quest shield” presumably refers to the Treguard thing on the wall in the woodland area, which reads “Quest One: The Shield of Justice”. A particular quirk to all of the versions of the cheat is the claim that you have to eat from the inventory screen, but in Knightmare you eat from the main screen by equipping the food in a hand.