Level 9

Level 9 was a family business. The games were the Austin brothers — Mike, Nick and Pete — writing text adventures that rivalled Infocom on hardware Infocom did not bother with; CRASH visited in February 1988 and described the company as “the offices, workshops and homes of the Austin brothers”, which is a fair summary of the scale of it.

Margaret Austin ran the advertising. Amtix met her on the patio in August 1986 and describes her as “the lady responsible for Level 9’s advertising”, over from Reading, where her office was; she is also the name trade listings give as Level 9’s contact.

Their compression techniques fit sophisticated games into 32K and 48K machines, while their parser understood genuinely complex sentences.

Fast facts

Founded: 1981, Berkshire, UK.
Speciality: text adventures with advanced compression.
Innovations: complex parser, multi-platform simultaneous release.
Output: approximately 20 adventure games.

How they were received

Level 9 reviewed consistently well across nine years, which few publishers of any kind managed.

Game	CRASH	Elsewhere
Snowball (1984)	9/10	Sinclair User 9/10
Emerald Isle (1985)	9/10	Sinclair Programs 90%, C&VG 8/10, Sinclair User 4/5
The Worm in Paradise (1986)	9/10	Sinclair User 5/5, Your Sinclair 9/10
Knight Orc (1988)	92%	Sinclair User 10/10

They were also a constant presence rather than an occasional one: Level 9 appears on 616 pages of the Spectrum press held in this library, more than any other adventure house.

The house

Amtix visited in August 1986 and the description is the best single account of what this company physically was. A narrow, pitted road up a hillside to a house whose gleam in spring sunlight the writer could picture as something colder on a foggy winter night — the source, he suggests, of Austin’s “chilling descriptive prose”.

Inside, “what would normally be a living room was filled with computers of all descriptions”, from an IBM PC and an Atari ST to a Commodore 128D driving a 26-inch monitor. Off it was Pete Austin’s office, with a heavily expanded BBC system on the desk used as a development machine running CP/M, and shelves of folders along one wall.

A living room of computers, an advertising office thirty miles away in Reading, and a catalogue that outsold most of the industry.

Where they worked

The press was consistently taken with the domestic scale of the operation. CRASH placed them in August 1986 in “their woodland retreat that nestles in the Mendips”; Sinclair User in February 1987 described the company as run by the Austin family “from a decaying mansion”. By February 1988 CRASH reported four Level 9 titles on sale in the United States, and the brothers worrying that Welsh and Gaelic names in their games were hard for Americans to pronounce.

Key games

Game	Year	Notes
Colossal Adventure	1983	350-point Colossal Cave port
Snowball	1983	Original space thriller
Lords of Time	1983	Time-travel adventure
The Saga of Erik the Viking	1984	Terry Jones collaboration
Knight Orc	1987	Multi-character gameplay
Lancelot	1988	Arthurian epic

Technical achievements

Text compression

Level 9’s A-code compression achieved remarkable results:

Full games in 32K or 48K
Text compression ratios rivalling or exceeding Infocom
Multiple platform support from single source

Parser sophistication

Their parser handled:

Full sentence input
Multiple commands
Pronouns and context
Complex preposition phrases

Multi-format releases

Games released simultaneously on:

ZX Spectrum (48K/128K)
BBC Micro
Commodore 64
Amstrad CPC
Later: 16-bit versions

A-Code system

Pete Austin’s A-code virtual machine:

Bytecode interpreted adventure engine
Portable across platforms
Efficient memory use
Supported graphics in later versions

Partnership with Rainbird — and the end of it

Later releases through Rainbird/Telecomsoft brought better packaging and presentation, wider distribution, and graphics in adventures like Knight Orc.

It did not last. ACE, March 1988:

Level 9 have severed relations with Rainbird Software and have tied up an exclusive distribution deal with a new label called Mandarin. The label has been established by Europress International (owners of Database Software, publishers of Mini Office) and is being run by Chris Payne, who old-timers may remember used to work for MicroPower.

The stated reason is a grievance about delay. Time and Magik would now go out through Mandarin “instead of Rainbird” because, as the column’s readers knew, “the product has been endlessly delayed under” the old arrangement. Lancelot followed on the new label.

So the two best-regarded British adventure houses had opposite experiences of the same publisher. Magnetic Scrolls stayed with Telecomsoft until British Telecom sold the whole operation; Level 9 walked in early 1988 and went to a magazine publisher’s software arm instead.

Where that label went next matters more than Level 9’s own remaining years. Two years after signing Level 9, Mandarin published AMOS — François Lionet’s BASIC-derived game-creation language for the Amiga, and the tool a large share of British Amiga owners learned to make games with. The imprint set up to distribute Time and Magik became the imprint that put game development in the hands of anyone who could type.

There is a neat symmetry in it. Level 9 left a publisher over delays in shipping an adventure built on Pete Austin’s in-house A-code virtual machine; the label they left for went on to sell the general-purpose equivalent to the public.

Hand-drawn, on purpose

A small technical decision worth recording, because it runs against the direction the market was moving. Where rivals were moving to digitised images, ACE reports that Level 9 stuck with hand-drawn art, on the grounds that it “works better for interior locations” — and the magazine’s own view was blunt: against Magnetic Scrolls, “there’s no denying that the company have some catching up to do”.

What the critics said when they were unkind

The score table above is uniformly excellent, and it is worth setting one dissent beside it. Amstrad Action, February 1987, reviewing the Jewels of Darkness trilogy, was unimpressed by both the graphics and Rainbird’s press release, which had promised multi-tasking:

These adventures are already beginning to look long in the tooth. They are programmed according to yesterday’s rules.

The same review is scathing about the claimed “multi-tasking” — which amounted to the picture drawing while you typed — and notes that by 1987 even GAC offered a large vocabulary and multi-command sentences. Level 9’s technical lead, real in 1984, was being caught by off-the-shelf authoring tools within three years.

Pete Austin predicts the end

The most valuable Level 9 document in this library is not a review. It is Pete Austin writing to ACE’s conference pages in May 1989, two years before his company closed, forecasting the collapse of the genre he led:

Text adventures are going to keep on selling, but the real growth area is fantasy role-playing rather than ‘pure’ adventures. Graphics are going to oust the text-only games from the market. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing — … On the larger machines, there can no longer be any conflict between text, puzzles, and graphics.

He was right on all three counts, and he was not in denial about it: the same message reports that Level 9’s “own animated adventure system [is] almost finished” and that he had “been looking at the other RPGs currently available”.

“Declining sales led to closure in 1991” is true, and passive. Level 9 saw it coming, said so publicly, and was building for it.

End of an era

Declining adventure game sales led to closure in 1991. The family had created some of Britain’s finest interactive fiction on hardware others dismissed as incapable.

The scores, and the two scales

Level 9’s CRASH record needs a caution before it can be read at all.

Game	Score	Issue	Scale
The Price of Magik	94%	30	percentage
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (Mosaic/Level 9)	90%	30	percentage
Jewels of Darkness (Rainbird compilation)	94%	36	percentage
The Worm in Paradise	9/10	5	out of ten
Snowball	9/10	6	out of ten
Return to Eden	8/10	11	out of ten

⚠ These are two different scoring systems and they are not interchangeable. CRASH rated main-review games as percentages and adventures in its Adventure Trail column out of ten. A 9/10 in the Adventure Trail is not 90%, and converting between them — in either direction — produces a number the magazine never printed.

This matters more for Level 9 than for almost any other company in the Vault, because most of its catalogue was reviewed on the ten-point scale. Any claim that Level 9 “averaged” some percentage is arithmetic performed on two incompatible units.

Legacy

Level 9 proved that:

Sophisticated adventures could run on cheap hardware
British developers could match American quality
Good compression solved “impossible” technical challenges

British interactive fiction pioneers