The way ahead for games in 1987 was generally agreed to be on the 16 bit machines like the ST, Amiga and maybe even the IBM PC. With this thought in mind, Level 9 employed the services of John Jones-Steele to write for them a new adventure writing system for their next generation of adventures. Steele was a veteran of programming, having written many 8-bit games in the past, including the Melbourne House text adventures 'Colossal Adventure' and 'Mordon's Quest'. The brief was to devise a system that would allow for 'real' characters to inhabit the game worlds they created, and allow people to recruit them and have many characters performing the same task at once to solve certain puzzles. The game was also to allow digitised paintings for location graphics, and a host of other features.

The original idea for this system was possibly born out of their aborted attempt at setting up a multi-user phone adventure game which they were to call 'Avalon'. It was going to include a thousand computer players and allow many more people on line at once than M.U.D. It was also planned to be much faster than M.U.D, although how they expected to achieve this on networked Amigas was anyone's guess. Why this idea never appeared is not known, but the influences it had on their KAOS system are obvious.

By now, Level 9 had joined forces with Telecomsoft to have their games published under the highly regarded 'Rainbird' label. This freed Level 9 from having to worry about marketing, packaging and distribution of their new games. Whilst the new system was being written they updated their previous two trilogies and gave them pictures (in the form of the old 8 bit graphics) and in some cases, more text. The Middle Earth trilogy of 'Colossal Adventure', 'Adventure Quest' and 'Dungeon Adventure' were released as 'The Jewels of Darkness' and 'Snowball', 'Return to Eden' and 'The Worm in Paradise' were released as the 'Silicon Dreams Trilogy'. These compilation packages were released on all of the major formats, including the 8 bit machines in 1987.

The design for the first of their new style games was well under way. With so many monsters getting the raw end of the deal in adventures, Level 9 decided to let them have their revenge, and from this idea 'Knight Orc' was born. You were cast as an oppressed orc in a magical world which you just had to escape from.

'Knight Orc' was released in the July 1987 and was generally well received by the press. For the first time in a Level 9 adventure, the game was split into three separate parts. The first part (which was really an introduction to the intricacies of the new system) was called 'Loosed Orc'. Part two was 'A kind of Magic' and the final segment was 'Hordes of the Mountain King'. In the first part, you had to collect enough rope to be able to swing across a chasm to get into the next part. The rest of the game had you recruiting characters and collecting spells. The very end had you escaping through the mysterious main door and out into the real world! Moving between part two and three was uniquely devised. By wearing a visor, you moved into part three which revealed that you were really in the modern world. There were objects and puzzles that you could only take or solve by being in part three. By wearing the visor again you would re-enter the fantasy world of part two.

Only veteran Level 9 adventures realised the 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.

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 (countries) so they focused mainly on British mythology.

On a personal note, I found 'Knight Orc' to be lacking the atmosphere and puzzles of their earlier games. Once you had sussed out that you had to recruit say twenty characters at different points and get them to perform a task simultaneously, the puzzles became easily solved. Nine times out of ten you would come across a puzzle or obstacle and due to the nature of the system, the way to solve it was immediately apparent. The text wasn't very imaginatively written either. The graphics (on 16 bit) were at least a great improvement over their old 8 bit ones. They had digitised Godfrey Dowson's paintings as location graphics, and had opted out of the idea of having a picture for every location. The only aspect I didn't particularly like was the ugly border they had around each graphic. This would be used in their other 16 bit releases, with a different border for each game. You could reposition the graphic window by using the mouse and dragging the picture up the screen if you wanted to see more of the text without turning the pictures off altogether.

For their next release in September '87, Level 9 had reverted to publishing the games on their own. 'Gnome Ranger' made it's first public appearance on sale at the PCW show that year. With text specially written by Peter McBride (who had written the short novellas 'The Darkness Rises' for the 'Jewels' compilation, 'Eden Song' for the 'Silicon Dreams' compilation and 'The Sign of the Orc' which was included with 'Knight Orc') the game was their first real stab at a humorous adventure. It was based around the exploits of Ingrid, the Sloane Gnome. She was banished into the wilderness by her exasperated family and she had to find her way home again.

'Gnome Ranger' was once again written using their new system, which had now been given a name - KAOS. I'm not sure whether this was an acronym or not, but it certainly didn't reflect on the games themselves. As with 'Knight Orc', the game was split into three separate adventures which had to be played in order.

I never really made up my mind whether I liked 'Gnome Ranger' or not. The humour was a nice enough change, but it became quickly tiresome. Any word that began with the letter 'n' had a 'g' added to the front (a bit like gnome really!), so the prompt became 'What gnow?'. The graphics were again digitised paintings on 16 bit, and they were a lot more colourful than those found in the 'Knight Orc'. Unfortunately, the games design was again limited to recruiting characters and performing synchronised actions with other characters. In many ways, their new KAOS system was not very flexible at all. It churned out games with very similar puzzle elements, which made solving them rather easy. [more]