Knight Orc - Memories

The way ahead for computer games in 1987 was generally agreed to be on the 16-bit ST, Amiga and possibly the IBM PC. With this thought in mind, Level 9 began work on a new in-house adventure authoring system. It eventually became known as KAOS (a slightly jumbled up acronym for "Knight Orc Adventure System").

John Jones-Steele was a veteran adventure game programmer, having written many 8 bit games in the past, including the Melbourne House text adventures Colossal Adventure and Mordon's Quest. After seeing Mordon's Quest, Level 9 offered John Jones-Steele the job of writing KAOS for the Apple Macintosh using the programming language 'C'. The day-to-day coding was done in his back bedroom at home, with regular phone calls to and from Level 9.

The brief for the new system was to allow 'real' characters to inhabit the game and allow people to recruit them. With the right commands, many characters could perform the same task at once to solve certain puzzles. The system also allowed digitised illustrations on disc based computers, and a host of other features.

The original idea for KAOS was probably born from Level 9's aborted attempt at setting up a multi-user phone adventure game called Avalon. This was going to include a thousand computer players and allow many more people on line at once than M.U.D. (the Multi-User Dungeon on-line adventure game that had been running for many years). Avalon was also planned to be much faster than M.U.D, even though it was going to be run on nothing more than networked Amigas! Perhaps not surprisingly, Avalon never appeared, but it obviously had a big influence on the KAOS system.

Pete Austin did a sizeable amount of research into making the magic system and other elements of folk lore consistent in Knight Orc. A deliberate decision was made not to mix and match lore and myths from different sources (i.e. countries) so they focused mainly on British mythology.

Only veteran Level 9 adventures realised there was a link between Knight Orc and the earlier Silicon Dreams trilogy. At the end of Knight Orc' you were told that no more were you a mere orc slave in Reveline's lifesize adventure game. Reveline's dreams and the visors were an integral part of the 'Silicon Dreams' trilogy, but the link was never obvious unless you had played their previous games.

Once the player had sussed out that you had to recruit characters and ask them to perform a task simultaneously, the puzzles became easily solved. Nine times out of ten, the player would come across a puzzle or obstacle and due to the nature of the system, the way to solve it was immediately apparent.

The graphics (on 16 bit) were an improvement over the previous 8-bit games, but the digitised Godfrey Dowson's paintings still looked very rough when compared to the location illustrations in any of the Magentic Scrolls adventures. Some of Level 9's earlier illustrated games had boasted a graphic for every location (thanks to their 'identi-kit' approach to building the pictures), but 'Knight Orc' (and subsequent KAOS based Level 9 games) opted for illustrating only a few.

As Knight Orc was being developed, Telecomsoft and Level 9 began to fall out over a number of issues. From what I was told (admittedly after the fact), Level 9 were unhappy at playing second fiddle to Magentic Scrolls at Rainbird. Telecomsoft were in turn unhappy with the amount of bugs that delayed Knight Orc during its development.

Ultimately, the two companies parted ways. Rainbird originally intended publishing Time and Magik (another compilation of three old but updated Level 9 adventures), but due to the split, Mandarin ended up publishing that title a year later. By the time I started working for Telecomsoft in May 1988, all ties with Level 9 had already been cut.

Thanks to John-Jones Steele for some of the above recollections.