Knight Orc

• Title — Knight Orc • Developer — Level 9 • Publisher — Rainbird Software • Released — 1987 • Engine — KAOS • Genre — Interactive fiction • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, ZX Spectrum, Mac, MSX

• Illustration — NPCs go about their lives while the player tries to solve the main quest (Atari ST screenshot) After a night of heavy drinking with friends, Grindleguts the orc awakes to find himself strapped to a horse and about to joust with a human knight. His "friends" are nowhere to be seen, and he must somehow escape from his predicament and get even with them. Grindleguts must survive in a world of hostile humans while seeking revenge against his tormentors. After the first chapter, the game switches to a science fiction setting, where Grindleguts is revealed to be a malfunctioning non-player character in a futuristic massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Using his power of transitioning between fantasy and reality, he convinces several other bots to join him, and escapes from the simulated reality facility.

The game is a text adventure with limited graphics on some systems. Gameplay is similar to the later Level 9 adventure Gnome Ranger, which uses the same game engine (KAOS). The game flows in real time; each person and creature goes on about their daily lives and follows their schedule. The player must explore the settings while collecting useful items and interacting with various non-player characters to solve puzzles and problems.