Level 9 put a mainframe game into a 16K Nascom. Adventure, the cave game that started the genre, needed hundreds of kilobytes on a university computer, and in 1982 three brothers in High Wycombe were selling their own version of it for £8, with 70 rooms added. For the next seven years the Austins, Mike, Nick and Pete, ran what CRASH called “the adventure factory”, writing some of the best-reviewed British text adventures on machines that most American publishers ignored. It was a family business in the plainest sense: when Amtix visited in 1986, Margaret Austin ran the advertising and even the brothers’ parents had “a working hand in the company”.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1981, by Mike, Nick and Pete Austin; first at 229 Hughenden Road, High Wycombe.
- First products: arcade games and utilities for the Nascom, then Colossal Adventure (1982).
- Technology: A-code, an interpreted adventure language, and text compression that fitted 200-location games into 32K.
- Series: the Middle-earth trilogy (Jewels of Darkness), the Silicon Dream trilogy (Silicon Dreams), the Time and Magik trilogy.
- Publishers: its own Level 9 label, Rainbird (1986–87), then Mandarin (1988).
- Closed: 1991.
Colossal Adventure
The company began, CRASH recorded in 1988, in 1981, and its first releases were arcade games and utilities such as Space Invasion and Extended BASIC for the Nascom, a British kit computer. Retro Gamer’s history of the company, written with Mike Austin’s help, describes what came next. Pete Austin believed a version of the original Adventure could fit into a 16K Nascom, so he designed an adventure-writing system; Mike wrote the game in his own “a-code”, an efficient interpreted language; and Pete wrote the text compression that squeezed in the descriptions. It took almost a year.
Colossal Adventure was reviewed by Computer & Video Games in August 1982. It was not a straight copy. Level 9 moved the food into the forest outside the cave and added 70 rooms at the end, in which you had to rescue elves trapped inside. That let the company claim more than 200 locations, a figure it put on almost every box afterwards. Its advertisements in Acorn User that September offered the BBC Micro version at £8 for 16K or £10 for 32K: “The classic mainframe game ‘Adventure’ with all treasures and creatures of the original. And with 70 extra rooms!” Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure followed, and the three became the Middle-earth trilogy.
Three trilogies
Level 9 wrote for the Spectrum from 1983, starting with Snowball and Lords of Time. Snowball, which CRASH gave 9/10, cast you as Kim Kimberley, a secret agent who has to stop the transport ship Snowball 9 crashing into a star. Retro Gamer says the company chose a name that could belong to a man or a woman because about a third of its players were women, a figure Pete Austin also gave CRASH in 1988. Its sequels, Return to Eden (1984) and The Worm in Paradise (1985), made up the Silicon Dream trilogy. The third trilogy grew from Lords of Time, Red Moon (1985) and The Price of Magik (1986), which CRASH gave 94%.
Return to Eden was the first with a picture for every location, on any machine with more than 32K. The pictures were built from reusable parts, rocks and trees, and some took as little as 40 bytes each. Level 9 also wrote games for other publishers: The Saga of Erik the Viking (1984), based on Terry Jones’s children’s book, and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1985), both for Mosaic Publishing.
Because every game was written once in A-code, a new machine needed only a new interpreter. By 1983 the Middle-earth trilogy ran on the Commodore 64, Oric, Atari 400/800, Camputers Lynx and RML 380Z as well as the BBC Micro, Spectrum and Nascom, and later versions reached the Amstrad CPC, MSX, Memotech machines and the Enterprise.
The house on the hill
Amtix sent a reporter to Level 9’s headquarters in August 1986. A taxi from Weston-super-Mare station dropped him on a narrow, pitted hill road above the river Avon. The house gleamed in the spring sunshine, and he could imagine the same scene on a foggy winter night and see where some of Austin’s “chilling descriptive prose” came from. Margaret Austin, “the lady responsible for Level 9’s advertising”, had come over from her office in Reading.
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. Pete Austin’s office had a heavily expanded BBC Micro running CP/M as the development machine, and a wall map a hundred squares by a hundred for Avalon, a multi-user game he hoped to run on the phone lines. More computers upstairs were used for conversions and play-testing. The Austins were confident about the competition. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “wasn’t very good”, Pete said, and the magazine doubted that Infocom, with disk drives to work with, could match Level 9 at squeezing data into small machines.
By the time CRASH visited in November 1987, the offices, workshops and homes of the three brothers were “four terraced houses in Bracknell”.
Rainbird
At the Consumer Electronics Show in April 1986, Level 9 signed with Rainbird, the full-price label of British Telecom’s Telecomsoft. Rainbird would take Level 9 to the United States, and it began by reissuing the old trilogies with pictures and a new parser. Jewels of Darkness (the Middle-earth trilogy) scored 94% in CRASH, and the Silicon Dream trilogy became Silicon Dreams.
Not everyone was won over. Amstrad Action’s adventure reviewer took Silicon Dreams apart in February 1987, starting with Rainbird’s press release and its promise of “multi-tasking”, which on the Amstrad meant only that you could type while the picture drew. The games, he wrote, were “already beginning to look long in the tooth. They are programmed according to yesterday’s rules.” Even the budget authoring tool GAC gave you multi-command sentences. His advice was to release fewer, bigger games on disk, “otherwise 1988 will be the year Level 9 goes under”.
The first new game for Rainbird was Knight Orc (1987), in which you play an orc, the monster every other adventure let you kill. It was written in a new system, KAOS, and its world was full of characters who went about their own business and whom you had to recruit to solve puzzles. CRASH called it “Level 9’s best to date”. Its three reviewers gave it 90%, 93% and 94%, and one found it “not so much a game, more of a book in which you can write your own ending”. The comedy Gnome Ranger followed the same year on Level 9’s own label.
The partnership ended in March 1988. ACE reported that “Level 9 have severed relations with Rainbird Software” and signed an exclusive deal with Mandarin, a new label set up by Europress, the owner of Database Software, and run by Chris Payne. Mandarin would publish Time and Magik, the third reworked trilogy, “instead of Rainbird”: the game had been “endlessly delayed under the Rainbird label”. CRASH reported the split the same month. Mandarin went on to publish Lancelot, an Arthurian adventure, and in 1990 François Lionet’s AMOS.
Pictures, and the end of the text adventure
Level 9 had used digitised paintings in Knight Orc. For Lancelot it went back to drawn pictures, which, ACE reported, the company felt “work better than digitised pictures, especially for interior locations”. The magazine was not sure they were enough: set against the rooms in Magnetic Scrolls’ The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter, “Level 9 have certainly got some catching up to do”.
In May 1989 ACE asked whether the old text adventure should “just lie down and die”. Pete Austin wrote to its adventure conference that text adventures would “keep on selling, but the real growth area is fantasy role-playing rather than ‘pure’ adventures”. Level 9’s own “animated adventure system” was almost finished, and the same issue reported that the company hoped to have a role-playing game out by the end of the summer. Its last text adventure, Scapeghost (1989), made you a murdered detective’s ghost.
The new system became HUGE, for “wHoley Universal Graphic Environment”. Champion of the Raj, a strategy game set in 19th-century India, came out through PSS in 1991 and was reviewed in The One and Amiga Format that summer. Retro Gamer tells how the rest went wrong. Level 9 converted Cinemaware’s It Came from the Desert to the PC and Atari ST, finishing by the summer of 1991, and then Cinemaware went out of business owing it what Retro Gamer called a “huge (no pun intended) amount of money”, about £100,000. Ocean cancelled another HUGE game, The Legend of Billy the Kid, just before release. With no money left, the Austins closed the company in 1991.
After Level 9
The games stayed playable through interpreters, starting with one written by Glen Summers and later maintained by David Kinder. In December 2025 Mike Austin began publishing the company’s archive on GitHub: material read from about 500 of roughly 1,000 surviving floppy disks, including the A-code compiler, specifications and the source code of many of the games.
How it was reviewed
CRASH reviewed most adventures in its Adventure Trail column, out of ten, and its main reviews as percentages, so a Level 9 score in CRASH is on one scale or the other:
| Game | Score | CRASH issue |
|---|---|---|
| Snowball | 9/10 | 6 |
| Return to Eden | 8/10 | 11 |
| The Price of Magik | 94% | 30 |
| Jewels of Darkness | 94% | 36 |
Sources
- Acorn User issue 2, September 1982: Level 9 advertisement (address; Colossal Adventure and Adventure Quest; prices; 70 extra rooms; over 200 locations).
- Computer & Video Games issue 10, August 1982: Colossal Adventure review.
- CRASH issue 14, March 1985: The Saga of Erik the Viking review (Mosaic Publishing; £9.95; Pete Austin; Terry Jones’s book).
- Amtix! issue 10, August 1986, pp. 53–55: visit to Level 9 (Weston-super-Mare; Margaret Austin; the computers; Avalon; the Rainbird deal; Infocom).
- CRASH issue 29, June 1986, p. 12: the Rainbird signing at the Consumer Electronics Show.
- Amstrad Action issue 17, February 1987, p. 78: Silicon Dreams review.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (Snowball, Return to Eden, The Worm in Paradise, Jewels of Darkness).
- CRASH issue 49, February 1988, pp. 45–47: Knight Orc review; “Level Heads” (softography; Bracknell; sales to women; the USA).
- ACE issue 6, March 1988, p. 96: “Level 9 Join Mandarin”; “Level-9-a-Lancelot” (hand-drawn pictures; Magnetic Scrolls).
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988: Level 9 leaves Rainbird for Mandarin.
- ACE issue 20, May 1989: adventure column (Infocom; Level 9’s role-playing system; Scapeghost) and adventure conference (Pete Austin’s letter).
- The One issue 34, July 1991, and Amiga Format issue 25, August 1991: Champion of the Raj reviews.
- “The Next Level”, Retro Gamer issues 6 and 7, 2004: history of Level 9, written with help from Mike Austin (the Nascom, a-code, Colossal Adventure, the trilogies, the graphics, KAOS, Mandarin, HUGE, Cinemaware, Ocean and the closure).
- “Level 9 Computing”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): closure in June 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_9_Computing
- David Kinder, Level 9 interpreter, originally written by Glen Summers (web, secondary). https://github.com/DavidKinder/Level9
- Andrew Plotkin, “Level 9 code archive is now open source”, 3 December 2025, and Mike Austin, Level9-Public repository (web, secondary). https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/12/level-9-code-archive and https://github.com/MikeTheTechie/Level9-Public